Kid: What’s that thing on your throat?
Me: It’s a scar.
Kid: You have a scar on your throat?
Me: Yeah, when I was really little I got sick and I couldn’t breathe very well, so they had to make a hole in my throat so that I could still breathe.
Kid: Ewwww.
*brief silence*
Kid: Did it hurt?
Me: Not really. I was really small, so I don’t remember it, and they put you to sleep first.
Kid: *sounding vaguely disappointed* Oh.
Me: I’m sure there was blood involved somewhere. I mean, they’re cutting a hole. In your throat.
Kid: *perking up* Oh!
Me: And you can’t talk when you have it in, too – *claps hand over throat* you have to stop it up with your hand if you’re trying to say something, or *removes hand from throat, mouths wordlessly, then places hand back over throat* …hear anything.
Kid: Ewwwwww!
*interlude as Kid pantomimes talking with a hole in their throat*
Kid: (in awe) And so you’re walking! Around! With a hole in your throat!
Me: They put a little tube in it, and when they take the tube out you have to wear a band-aid over the hole.
Kid: Can you put stuff in the hole?
Me: You… theoretically could, but you probably shouldn’t…
Kid: And when you swallow stuff, would it come out?
Me: I don’t remember that part, actually. I don’t know where the epiglottis is on the trachea in comparison to-
Kid: (utterly ignoring me by this point) …and if you were in a food fight could you, like, point your throat towards someone, and eat your food and go BLAAAAHHH! and shoot it out the hole in your throat at them? (this part is accompanied with vigorous miming)
Me: Well, the muscles in your throat probably don’t…
*you can see the gears in their little heads turning by this point.*
Kid: And if you didn’t like to eat vegetables could you just put them in the hole so they’d go in your stomach anyway?
Me: Uh-
Kid: Or, like, eat them, and then spit them out through your throat when they’re not looking? *mimes* BLAAAHH!
Me: I’m not sure that’s what a tracheotomy is intended for.
Kid: EWWWW! THAT’S SO COOL! I WANT ONE!
Me: No, trust me, you really don’t.
Kid: *running around pretending to shoot stuff out an imaginary throat-tube at people* BLAAAHHHH! BLAAAAAAH! BLAAAAAAH!
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I’ve fallen in love with a book again.
If I only changed the software, why is the phone on fire? is Sherlock Holmes for geeks and should be required bedtime reading for students in POE (the Olin class that says “here, a microcontroller; go build something mechatronic”). It’s a collection of tales involving electrical engineers at a fictional consulting company trying to figure out embedded bugs (the bugs are based on real-life fiascos).
There are occasional code snippets and prompts telling the reader to stop and take a glance to see what they can figure out before proceeding with the story, but instead of making the book feel hokey, they actually make you stop and appreciate it more (and grimace at some of the code; Lisa Simone has included some realistically icky pieces of C in order to demonstrate how good and bad code “feels” – thankfully, that particular chapter involves refactoring the ugly mess.)
My favorite character is Li Mei, the bright-but-hesitant team newbie who’s fresh out of school. She knows stuff by the book but is less versed in the unwritten tricks of the trade, and contributes (not always correct) guesses in a combination of timidity and enthusiasm that reminds me a lot of… well… myself. She’s eventually taken under the wing of Josie, the cool, experienced engineer who serves as the right hand (wo)man of Oscar, a blunt and efficient ace debugger who’s just been promoted and is still getting the hang of managing people rather than components. A young, quick, but just a mite too independent hardware hacker named Ravi is the last member of the quartet. Eduardo from testing (formerly a programmer) makes occasional appearances and shows just how far you can get in debugging without having to look at code.
Some comments:
(1) Holy cow female electrical engineers that aren’t token minority inclusions. Josie and Li Mei actually think, talk, and act like female SparkEs I know – in particular, Li Mei’s hesitation (I’m not the only one that worries about wasting my coworkers’ time and overcompensates with perfectionism?) and Josie’s slightly protective, gentle approach to mentoring (she asks Li Mei how she’s doing which gives her “permission” to respond – in contrast, Oscar assumes Ravi will speak up with the inevitable questions about what he doesn’t know how to do). It’s not
that different from how male SparkEs act, but I appreciate that the two characters aren’t just male engineers with larger breasts and higher voices.
(2) Engineers are people too. The ones in this book get frustrated, cheer each other up; their work is affected by how they’re feeling, they get angry at each other, they rejoice together, they socialize over dinner and beer at the pub down the street, they make mistakes, miscommunicate, get cranky when they’re tired, their eyes light up in realization right when they’re on the verge of fixing a tricky bug. It’s a neat view of life in an engineering department. If you haven’t gone out for an engineering internship yet, read this book first. I sure wish I’d had it before my stint in Continuum.
(3) Neat pedagogical tricks for hacks you usually don’t find in textbooks. Instead of throwing an explanation of PWM in the appendix, we see Josie explaining it to Li Mei during a site visit where a temperature sensor’s gone awry (complete with diagrams and Li Mei asking those questions you always wanted to but felt stupid to say out loud). Instead of a dry footnote about checking processor speeds when porting to different hardware, we see Oscar showing Ravi an old Pong game he’d written in 1993 and how it’s been rendered unplayable by the orders-of-magnitude-faster CPU of a new computer. By following Li Mei through drawing a flowchart, we learn how to make one ourselves. By watching over Oscar’s shoulder as he tiles “DEADBEEF” into flash to check where a program is storing its data, we learn about memory fill patterns.
(4) Code and problems that look real. They’re messy. Sometimes they’re ugly. They’re confusing. Sometimes they’ not thoroughly tested or well documented. Customers are irate. Emails are written in caps. Variables don’t get initialized. Long strings of if statements show up where switch statements should be. Off-by-one errors pop up in array indexes. Receivers don’t receive what the transmitters say they’ve transmitted. Equipment needs to be debugged on the factory floor, not by dissecting the intermittently failing machine (which is still in operation) but by talking to the non-technically-trained foreman, whose answers need to be translated into engineerspeak. At least these have nicely explained answers at the end for those who want a sanity check on how they did.
(5) It’s fun to read. This above all – it’s well written and actually keeps you up all night turning the pages. It may be slightly unfair for me to say this, since I tend to get more absorbed in books than most, but oh! Would that other writers of electrical engineering textbooks could take a cue from Randall – with some intro tutorials and a ramp-up series geared towards raw beginners (Oscar teaches his twin middle-schoolers about the AVR Butterfly?) this might be the kind of thing we need to get more kids interested in electrical engineering. I wish there was a regular column of these coming out – I’d totally subscribe.
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I don’t usually do blog posts full o’ links, but these made me chortle (and humor is something I need massive doses of at the moment). Actual original content coming next.
From: Six videogame gimmicks that need to die
Game villains must have no interest in ever leaving their various lairs and/or hideouts, because the sheer number of spinning blades, falling blocks and other torture devices crammed into every conceivable corner renders them all horrible deathtraps. It’s a wonder Bowser can find his way past the Whomps and rotary knives to go to the bathroom, let alone oversee his military operations outside the castle (not to mention having to deal with the multitudes of work-related injury claims from his Koopa staff).
Maybe the reason why I’m terrible at gaming is that I learned physics before I learned video games.
Even better: 5 things hollywood thinks computers can do.
Beyond #5 (“You Can Blow Up Shit At Will – With Hacking”) there are gems like… (From “A Computer Might Become Self-Aware At Any Moment”)
The microwave-sized IMSAI 8080 computer the hero [Matthew Broderick's character in Wargames] used to take over the nation’s nuclear missile fleet had 64KB of memory. That means if it tried to open this article as a Word document, it’d get about half way through before it ran out.
(From “Computers can talk to *#%*@ UFOs”)
The Earth is under attack by a race of vastly advanced aliens, so Jeff Goldblum creates a virus from his PowerBook that disables the entire apparently Macintosh-compatible fleet of ships… But of course, there is exactly one reason why the aliens were defeated by a PowerBook in Independence Day: because Apple paid for it as part of the product placement. Yes, my friends, the entire plot culminated in an advertisement, and one you paid to see.
Then there’s the “Bad grammar makes me [sic]” shirt, which I would totally have gotten for my editors at Frankly Speaking years ago, if I’d seen it then.
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I wonder how many posters nowadays start out as cool random things people run across on the internet. The 20 Guiding Principles of Computing (now hanging in abridged format next to the 1cc printer) is one of them. Here’s the short version, with my commentary – I do recommend going back to read the original link, though.
1. Brooks’ Law: Adding More Programmers to a Late Project will make it later.
Usually, but not always. If you have a good project manager who’s able to focus solely on handing compartmentalized, completely independent, non-vital (but still helpful – what Dave Barrett would call “#2’s*”) tasks to enthusiastic volunteers, you may be able to make your project not get later. In fact, you might hit on some really good helpers and get it done earlier. This does sink the time of one of your good project managers, but it’s the kind of time-sinking that needs to be done especially in open-source projects where programmers will try to add themselves to a late project anyway.
Nothing new here that folks like Mike Fletcher haven’t already pointed out. But yeah, if you’re in a panic and think you need MORE MANPOWER NOW!!! you’re wrong, because you’re in the wrong state of mind to utilize that (hu)manpower.
*How Dave describes the scope of SCOPE projects to the Olin engineering seniors who tackle consulting problems for companies every year: #1’s are mission critical, live or die problems for the company. We don’t want those. #3’s are problems nobody cares about; their solution won’t matter to the company. We don’t want those either. #2’s are potentially cool/beneficial things that aren’t bad if they don’t get solved – stuff on the “cool to do, but not spending our limited resources on right now” list. Those are what we want (as SCOPE projects). And these are the things we should be handing out to volunteers (on open-source projects).
2. Choose the Middle Way: bad ideas are just good ideas carried to extremes.
Note: this doesn’t mean always doing the mundane thing. There are 3 ways to make an extreme idea middling. The first is to cut down the extremity – do the mundane. But you can also cut the number of people involved; a small number of people with permission to run wild is called a skunkworks and can have startling success for minimal risk. You can also cut the timescale – in fact, “everyone go nuts for an hour!” is usually called a “brainstorm” in corporate circles, and can be rather refreshing.
3. Conservation of Complexity: Simplicity is Complicated
I wholeheartedly agree and will defer to John Maeda on this one.
4. First law of logic: logic doesn’t always work. Embrace Contradiction.
“The opposite of a Profound Truth is another Profound Truth.” Years ago, I hated this quote. Now I’ve grown to love it. Mostly because of the next item on this list:
5. Gould’s Spandrel: Things are the Way They are because They got that Way.
Why? Because. Some things just are, without any plan or reason (or for a reason that’s long since ceased to exist).
It’s the kind of answer that’s annoying when you know there’s an answer that they’re just not telling you, but wonderful when you realize there really isn’t an answer, because you can loosen the furrowed brow of intellectual consternation and really just… wonder.
6. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when taking into account Hofstadter’s Law.
This makes me think of two things: (1) Hofstadter’s law is a strange loop, and (2) I wonder if Zen philosophies might be a good coping mechanism for folks with ADHD – we tend to have a hard time with this scheduling/planning stuff, so why not just live in the moment since we’re only present in the present anyway?
7. Occam’s Razor, a.k.a. K(eep) I(t) S(imple) S(illy/tupid).
Yes, but remember – simplicity is complicated. See Dan Ward’s simplicity cycle.
8. Lubarsky’s Law of Cybernetic Entomology: There’s Always One More Bug.
Also known as “stop being a perfectionist already” – or take the Linus Torvalds approach and get others to help (Linus’ Law: Given Enough Eyeballs, All Bugs Are Shallow).
9. There are Many Ways to the Mountaintop
…so make up your own mind which you want to take. You know those product FAQs where you ask “which will I like best, is best for me?” and they reply with the frustratingly circular “ultimately, it’s about which is best for you – which one will you like best?”
Well, they’re right.
Also, it’s a lot easier to tell people the wrong routes up the mountaintop. Mostly because it’s impossible to tell them the right ones. (You can, however, tell them the ones that have worked for you and many others – but it’s no guarantee it’ll work for them.)
10. Moore’s Law: Computing Power Doubles every 18 Months
And that’s why I’m not worried the XO now costs $188. People, stop calling it the “$100 laptop” and fussing about how it’s not. That name was just a catchy meme, plus there’s this lovely thing called economics that talks about things like inflation and currency fluctuations and yada yada yada – basically, prices are to some extent arbitrary, and Moore’s Law says whatever prices* are now, they’re going to get cheaper later on anyway.
*for the majority of electronic devices in the medium-term foreseeable future. Obviously, this does not apply to things like signed memorabilia, stocks, or bottles of fine wine.
11. Murphy’s Law: Anything that can Go Wrong, Will.
And then there’s O’Niel’s Law: “Murphy was an optimist.” Far from sending you into a sinking depression at the hopelessness of your project, this should instead inspire a joyous sense of fearlessness – things are going to go wrong! We don’t know what they are and we’re going to have to figure it out along the way – it’s going to be an adventure!
12. No Silver Bullet
Along the lines of there being many ways to the mountain and blah blah blah – there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to your problems. Yeah, stuff is hard, but just think for yourself and have fun, and you’ll probably be all right.
13. Pareto Principle: The 80/20 Rule
80% of your gains comes from 20% of your expenditures (and vice versa).
But remember Joel Spolsky’s Caveat: Although 80% of people use only 20% of the features. “Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20 percent. Everybody uses a DIFFERENT set of features.”
Does that mean you should leave everything at 100% expenditure anyway? No. It means there’s no silver bullet for deciding which 80% to cut. You’ll have to make up your own mind.
14. Parkinson’s Law: Work Expands to Fill the Time Allotted
Fortunately, this is true – for as many have pointed out, the natural corollary to this is that Work Is Compressible. Witness Ben Fisher’s impressive half-hour hacks, and his prelude to such:
This blog is the result of a paradox. I am more productive when under constraints. A busy schedule keeps me driven to do more with my time. I live my life on the run. If you had all the resources you wanted, and any amount of time or money available for a project, realistically, you would spend years creating a bloated, over-complicated application, possibly never even finishing.
And then look at the kind of stuff he’s been able to pull off in 30 minutes – yes, Ben is amazing (I think our first conversation alternated between Ben typing on his laptop and me saying “oh my god!” every 15 seconds or so) but he also understands that his mad skillz are occasionally better in concentrated form.
15. Patrick’s Population Principle: Individuals are Individual.
You can view communities as a super-organism, or a bunch of Individuals, or as a Swarm.
We all belong to groups, but we are not the groups we belong to.
16. Shapiro’s Observation: Technology Changes. Economic Laws do not.
This has also been expressed as the Law of Disruption: “Social systems change incrementally, technology exponentially.” Also see David Shenk’s Second Law of Data Smog: “Silicon circuits evolve much more quickly than human genes.”
And this is why it’s so important for engineers to understand the people they’re making things for, why sometimes the best solution is not a technological one, and why education is one of the most powerful technologies (in the sense of tools-able-to-change-things) ever created*.
*This is not necessarily a good thing. John Holt has some choice words on why the power of an education system is dangerous and potentially harmful to learning.
17. Slingerland’s Law of Fools: No System’s Foolproof, because there’s Always a Bigger Fool
Basically, Murphy’s Law applied to users. Yes, there’s plenty of repetition in this 20-item list, but they all sound so snappy and good! (Although if I practiced Pareto, I should slash this list to 4 “fundamental” principles and be done with it.)
18. There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
…but you can finagle things so that you’re doing work you enjoy in order to pay for yours.
19. Everything is Connected to Everything Else
Culture + New Technology YIELDS New Culture
And this is the reason I am going to study education and sociology before going to graduate school for electrical engineering.
20. Veblen’s Principle: All changes help some people and hurt others.
Personally, I would have ended on a more inspiring note. But yes, no free lunch. This doesn’t mean life is a zero-sum game, though; the magnitude of the hurt may be more or less than the magnitude of the help (depending on what scale you’re using – there’s no absolute rating for “goodness”).
The good you do may end up having not-so-good consequences you should watch for, and try to alleviate and understand, and ultimately accept. It’s part of the job of trying to do good. You can only ever do good to some people, and from a certain point of view.
Again, you get to decide. Which is a terrifying – and liberating – charge to have.
Thursday, September 20th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
As tangentially mentioned in a previous post, a family friend tried out his new pilots’ license by taking us up in his 4-seater Cessna. It was loud as all heck – I soon ripped off the headphones and just stared slack-jawed out the window at the view (the bay! the bridge! the horrendously expensive homes!)
I’ve wanted to learn to fly since I was in second or third grade, so the prevalence of radio communications worried me – I couldn’t understand a word the control tower was saying. Asked around afterwards and it turns out, thankfully, that I can still
become a pilot. With some limitations, of course – I won’t be able to make flights requiring the use of radio, which is the auditory equivalent of being required to drive with your glasses on. But. Someday, when I can afford lessons, I
can learn how to fly. Good to know.
Also, my aunt sent me a link to
this guy’s book – hearing loss worse than mine, also lives in the hearing world, flew out to Africa for 2 years in the Peace Corps. Meh, I reckoned. Another memoir. But then I read the excerpts and his blog and thought, “whoa, there’s someone out there that experiences and copes with it the same way I do!”
7:20: wash hands.7:25: pour wine, drink.7:30:
cut piece of bread, eat it. Someone flips a fish. Why is my apron
yellow while everyone else’s is white? Someone’s talking to me — nod.7:35: drink. 7:40:
look at skyline from window. Try to figure out which route Spiderman
could take to get to a baby trapped on a fire escape on 86th street.7:45: is this fish for me? Thank you. Wow, delicious. Drink.7:50: what’s everyone talking about? I’ll laugh now in a friendly manner.7:55: that knife has to cost $70 bucks easy. How come they don’t have those ginsu commercials on TV anymore? 8:00: drink.
Yeah, that’s roughly what life’s like in a large group of people where you can’t always read lips. Dah dah dah dah dah fake it fake it dah dah dah wonder if they can tell dah dah dah dah everyone else is laughing so I should too.
Also, the kinds of things that go into latex glove manufacturing are totally cool. Imagine a long row of ceramic (I think) hands on a conveyor belt, dipping down into a smelly pool of latex, coming up dripping just short of the elbow; a little roller that brushes around the forearm to make the lip at the end of the glove, a puff of air (and powder, perhaps) shooting from within the hand to blast the glove into a stack – paCHING! the amazing shooting hand. Gloves lined up on nozzles, like translucent blue udders, bulging with water to check for leaks. Gloves!
Monday, September 17th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
(Apologies in advance to any readers and to hell with the rest of the productivity I was supposed to have tonight. It’s going to be a rant, or I’m going to explode.)
It is 11:54 pm. I’m sitting on the toilet seat of a hotel room in Mountain View with my laptop on my knees. Every few minutes I reach up to turn the timer that keeps the light (and fan) on so it won’t cut me off in the dark mid-sentence. I’m trying to work. It won’t matter after 2.5 hours because that’s how much longer my battery lasts, and there aren’t any outlets in here. It won’t matter after another day, because my mom’s going to join us in this hotel room, and then I won’t be able to sneak away to work in the bathroom.
I’m tired. I’m grouchy. I’m terrified of the amount of catching-up I have to do. I’m struggling to find a way to simultaneously be a good daughter and a happy, productive person. I’m trying to partition my life again – here are the things I’m supposed to do, to be “Good Girl” (that’s actually the translation of my Chinese name) during the day, and Mel during the night when everyone’s sleeping. Spending my own time late at night has been my solution around the demands of others for years; I started sneaking into the bathroom while my parents slept so I could read math books when I was 11. It’s how I became an insomniac. It’s the reason I pull allnighters. The night is mine, so I take it, because it’s often all I’ve got. (The bathroom timer shuts off. I turn the light on again.)
According to a book by Howard Gardner (whose title I’ve forgotten) that was on my aunt’s shelf, the Chinese way of thinking about teaching is not huge on experimentation. The point of education isn’t to learn how to figure out things. The point of education is to learn how to do it perfectly, where “perfectly” is defined as “whatever your elders handed down.” Match this standard. Match this standard. Match this standard, you punk, don’t try to make your own. it got hammered into my head hard in ways I’ve just barely begun to realize.
In retrospect, the only reason I’ve been able to do amazing things in the past is because I was fast enough at doing all the things other people wanted me to do (like algebra homework or watching kids) that I had free time in the margins to fit in things I wanted to do, like read math books that had no relation to what we were studying in class. I wonder how many other kids could have had fun reading math books, but had to spend too much time doing their algebra homework and ran out of time for reading. I wonder how many people could do wonderful things if they weren’t forced to meet a lot of other obligations, play a lot of other roles.
I had a great childhood. Lots of opportunities. A fantastic, close extended family network. Good schools. Concerned parents who really wanted me to do well. All the same, I was (and still am) jealous of the kids who didn’t have to cram things secretly into the margins. Had parents who didn’t define “do well” as rigidly. Who let them bike more than a block away, cross the street alone at 16, left them to their own devices. I disagree with my parents on this – doing things like that is not a mark of not caring about your kids. In America, it’s the way you help them grow up. You’re raising a little cowboy. They’re supposed to go venturing out into the unknown on their own account.
In college when the things other people asked me to do took up enough time that I didn’t have free margins, I learned (a little, but not very well) how to make other people want me to do the things I wanted to do, and it was great. Not perfect. I almost flunked out because I didn’t learn how to do it well enough. But better, much better, than anything else I’d ever had before; nobody had ever asked me what I’d wanted to do before, and I remember being utterly astonished by it – “you want me to tell you what I want to do? You mean I can do it? I’m supposed to?” It took me about two years to believe it.
At the beginning of this summer – glorious summer! – I owned all my time for the first time in my life. It was the most fulfilling and productive period I’ve ever had. I was working on something of my choosing at all times. Nobody had a sword to hold over my head. And then the slow creep began; I was out from under the protective title of “student,” which had given me freedom for the past 7 years. Back then, I could sweep random projects under the “but I’m pursuing X degree and this is how we do it!” rug. Now I’m being treated according to “adult child with no real job” protocol, which means I’m back to having to play a role set by someone else, live a schedule set by someone else, ask permission (not forgiveness) for everything. I want to decide what I eat, when I sleep, whether I answer the phone. I’ve gotten “too Americanized,” says the Asian family I’m struggling to fit back into. It’s tough to simultaneously be an American adult and a good Asian child. I’m really, really bad at being a good Chinese kid.
I read a book about Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, living in a crummy little apartment the year after she graduated from college, starting a movement she cared about, and it made me want to cry. I want an unstable life in a lousy apartment working inane hours for a cause I’m passionate about. (The bathroom timer shuts off again. I turn the light on. Again.) I had that a little at the start of summer and I want it again; I want to grab a 10-gallon hat and blaze new trails roughly instead of following old ones perfectly. I want to move without eons of history and the voices of a collective family tree dragging behind me. I want a “get out of filial piety free” card because I can’t bring myself to just up and run.
I don’t want to play a role. I want the person I’m supposed to be to be the same as the one I want to be. I want to be able to stop thinking and fussing and making entirely too big a deal about this, and I want to stop feeling torn, want to stop having to steal my nights for being myself. I want to love – not resent – my family, appreciate them, honor them, make them happy… while disagreeing with a decent portion of the things their culture has carried into my life. I want to be one person and have everyone be okay with the person I end up being. I should stop complaining about being two people, and start being one, and doing what I want to do – but how much of my happiness is tied to my family’s happiness? How much is who I am being part of that group, its heritage and traditions and values – and how much is… well, what else is there?
Enough. I’m going to fall asleep with happy things in mind. The twisted white trees in Monterrey are among the most lovely things I’ve ever seen, and a simple floured and pan-fried fish filet is hot and delicious, tasting faintly like the sea. A jovial old man who produces theatre and builds sets in a tiny town for the love of it; lurching through the air in the back of a 4-person Cessna dreaming of when I’ll be able to get my own pilot’s license, noodle soup too scorching to sip without vigorous fanning of each spoonful. It’s been a good trip. It’s been a good trip. It’s been a good trip.
Saturday, September 15th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Stumbled upon this today while looking for something else. I wrote this a year and a half ago to a friend who was having a hard time figuring out what to do after engineering school, and I’m posting it (anonymous-ified) now because I needed someone – even my 19-year-old self – to tell me this now. I think I’ve just conclusively proved to myself that I was actually wiser at 19.
…it’s not that getting an engineering degree limits you, but it changes your perceptions of the options you can pick from (mostly because it looks like it’ll change other people’s perceptions of you). Graduates from an engineering program, especially one like Olin, and particularly because you’re the first class, are expected to do “well.” By normal terms. Which means an upwardly-mobile corporate job, a highly-regarded grad school, or at the very least a spunky little startup. Anything “beneath” that is a waste of talent, or training, or intellect, or opportunity, or…
Cognitively, we realize this. Emotionally, it’s harder to reconcile, especially with lots of neighbors and friends and relatives and their combined expectations. It’s like applying to Olin in the first place. I’m pretty sure all of us, at some point, got incredulous stares and a “What do you mean, you don’t want to go to MIT/Stanford/? What’s this… Olin place? Have you gone bonkers?”
I think you should… do whatever you think will make you a better human being. Because ultimately that’s what life is about – it’s not about being a CEO, or even a really good engineer; it’s about being a good person, and whatever that means to you – if it’s being a CEO, that’s cool; if it’s having wild experiences, that’s cool too – if it’s being a good mother, or a musician, or getting involved in local politics, or recycling everything, or knitting… there’s a lot to life, and it’s your life, so should do what you want to do. In the end, you’ll be left with lots of memories, so there’s no sense looking back with regret.
You don’t “lose a year” any more than anyone else; years go by regardless of what you’re doing. There is actually no such thing as “falling behind.” It’s just a different way of deciding how to spend your years. And those that recognize that and are able to control it and be happy with it are the lucky ones.
Also, these “quirky experiences,” or whatever you want to call the off-the-successful-engineer-beaten-path stuff, will make you a better CEO (or designer, or whatever) in the future. Lots of “successful” people can’t help those that aren’t “succesful” because they’ve never been there. They don’t understand the world outside the one they live and work in. I think it’s great that you want to go beyond that. I think this is one of the few chances you’d have to do so, the space between graduation and your first job; you’re still fresh into the world, you’re still impressionable, you’re still open-minded and able to learn. And while you’ll still be open-minded and thirsty for knowledge later in life, there’s something especially nice about a blank slate. No preconceptions.
I’m planning on taking at least a year to do something different (current plan: roadtrip hopping from school to school and writing a book about american k-12 education – or – teaching english/math/science/design in some non-US country, probably China.) I want to understand a different kind of life, one without privelege, assumptions of education, internet access, piano lessons, and consistently clean running water. I’m also planning on working in the corporate world and going to grad school at some point so I can be an Olin prof for some period of my life.
I figure they won’t think less of me for spending a year living in the back of my car, as long as I get as much (or more) from the experience as I would have in . Doesn’t have to be the same thing, but needs to be worthwhile, by whatever standards you judge worth. I reckon if I think I’m a better person to hire a year down that road than I was before, and they don’t think so because it’s “not normal,” then I probably don’t want to work for that company in the first place. Wherever I go, I want to go off the beaten path, so they need to be ok with me veering off in the first place.
You’re not alone.
Yeah, but I sure feel like it now. I want to go back to Bossssston. And be surrounded by haaaaaackers. And live as an individualistic Amerrrrrican instead of a family-bound Chineeeeeeese. ; Not really. I need to learn how to cope with this part of my world again. I’ve been relatively free from it for 7 years, being away at school, but I’ve got to learn how to live within the culture of my family again instead of running away from it.
Friday, September 14th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Update: AHA! Found the port that allows me to send email from my new laptop consistently. Now I no longer have to carry the broken one around… assuming I transfer over the hard drive stuff before the taxi comes in 3 hours. Boy do I rely on electronics for communication. Stable email! Stable IRC! Stable cellphone with text messaging! That’s all I’m asking – but that’s a lot of infrastructure to need.
I enjoy living interrupt to interrupt – I’m working on a ton of projects with a ton of people and responding when they ping me – but I need to learn how to close processes cleanly so I don’t leave any dangling obligations when I rush to the next thing. It’s very humbling to finally not have anyone (mostly) telling you what to do after 21 years – finally get what you’ve been fighting for for a long time, and then finding out you don’t know what to do with it. I’m starting my unschooling journey as a young adult, but I’m still a very immature learner.
Finally, my travel schedule, in case people want to meet up, do something, and so on.
Sep 11-18 –
San Fransisco, CA (Palo Alto, Berkeley, etc. – mostly booked but can meet people Wednesday the 12th, email-available.)
Sep 19-30 – Chicago, IL (Glenview, Evanston, Aurora, etc. – relatively open schedule, very email-available.)
Oct 1 – Nov 17 – Manila, Philippines (relatively open schedule after Oct 10, can travel within the Philippines for short trips, intermittently email-available.)
Nov 18 – Dec 23 – Shanghai, China (relatively open schedule and intermittently email-available after Nov 28, also traveling within China, destinations unknown… yes, I know it’s a big country, it’s going to be a sort of spontaneous thing here.)
Dec 24 – Jan 8? – Manila, Philippines (not so much the traveling here; Christmas with the family, so I’m booked, mostly email-available.)
Jan 8? – Jan 15? 2008 – Chicago, IL (give or take a few days – I’m booked doing an intersession at IMSA, very email-available)
Jan 15? – May 31 2008 – Boston, MA (okay, Somerville. At least that’s the game plan so far. Relatively open schedule… so far. Will be going to NYC at least once; I need to visit my uncle in New Jersey, but can extend the trip to see other people and places as well. Very email-available.)
June 1 – August 30 2008 – America. No, really. I’m biking across the United States with Chris Carrick on an appropriate technology tour. Not sure about the email part for this one.
Finally, I thought
this was fittting…
Possessions meant little to Erdős; most of his belongings would fit in
a suitcase, as dictated by his itinerant lifestyle. Awards and other
earnings were in general donated to people in need and various worthy causes. He spent most of his life as a vagabond,
travelling between scientific conferences and the homes of colleagues
all over the world. He would typically show up at a colleague’s
doorstep and announce “my brain is open”, staying long enough to
collaborate on a few papers before moving on a few days later. In many
cases, he would ask the current collaborator about whom he (Erdős)
should visit next. His working style has been humorously compared to
traversing a linked list.
I can’t decide whether feeling like I’m “pulling an Erdos” somewhat is a good thing or not (oh, I’m not really doing it now, but I could be moving in that direction). I need to learn how to embroider so that I can stitch “My brain is open” onto my travel pack. And then… what? I can’t write math papers at every house. (Heck, I don’t know how to write math papers. I don’t think I could help with one in a few days. But I could be wrong.) Maybe I could learn how to code well enough that I could do something like Ben Fisher’s half hour hacks with people. Or broadening that thought, maybe I could do a teaching/learning swap of lessons in exchange for housing and food for a week. And if they have time, I’d ask them to teach me something too. As I went along, I’d presumably know how to teach more things, but I’m polymath enough to give mini-intro-classes on a number of subjects right now.
I wonder if people would actually go for that, if I could do it for – say, if I could do it for a month? Four weeks, four people, four lesson swaps. It’d be a fantastic way to learn about learning. A really amazing way to do some of my education research (…okay, not technically – I’m supposed to be focusing on undergraduate engineering education, and this is more general self-directed learning outside of institutions). A pretty hardcore way to learn how to teach.
Hmm. Not going to try to plan firm stuff more than 3 months into the future for the most part, but… hmm.
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
