Random Thoughts

June 6, 2006 at 5:51 AM

I am a paradox.

This is my 17th year of school. It will take me 20 to finish school.

I scored higher on my verbal than my math for my GREs. The grad school equivalent of the SAT. So I’m an engineer who knows a little something about words but can’t do math.

Oh yes, my thesis is all math. More math than any other student in my department, actually. With lots of computer programming and statistics tossed in to keep life amusing.

I officially moved into Dante’s Inferno nine months ago when I passed my thesis proposal. The lease expires in three years.

My family is proud that I earned my M.S. degree. My colleagues in med school and grad school are more impressed by the 4.0. All I care about is that I made it through fifteen calculus courses.

I work hard for my accomplishments, but I don’t particularly care about being recognized for them. Recognition bores me. I care more about looking at myself in the mirror later on and being able to say that I did the best job I could. My family thinks I have a few screws loose in my head. All that work, they say, and you don’t want people to know?

Come on, when’s the last time the news was about how engineers make the world run?

The secret of my teaching success? It’s the blue jeans. I can teach the exact same material to my undergrads, repeat the same lecture delivered to them by the professor, and they will understand perfectly. Really. It’s all about the blue jeans.

The science of obtaining the Ph.D. is the art of making everything that was once comprehensible impossibly obscure.

I was an excellent teaching assistant. My undergrads loved me. The other grad students thought I was insane, that I would spend so much time teaching. My advisor reprimanded me for being too dedicated. My undergrads are now being paid quite well in industry. That’s right, who will I look to in 3 years when I need a job?

3.7 GPA during the undergrad years. A warm and fuzzy 4.0 in grad. "Summa cum laude” is an honor reserved for the undergrads. Someone had it backwards...

That's right, yours truly. Certainly not the college admin.

Pressure brings out the occasional genius in me. Whenever I don’t have deadlines, my work stagnates. When they surround me from all sides, I am capable of doing wonderful work. But I usually collapse after the third all-nighter. In spades.

I am the only student in my department who will see a baby deer, then spend twenty minutes driving to/from home to get my camera, and return to take a picture of it. My peers live in the world of machines, chemicals, and occasionally drinking games. No room in there for nature appreciation. Or for playing a wonderful instrument in the violin.

Yes, I am quite different from my colleagues. I celebrate my uniqueness. I am me. What a thoroughly philosophical statement from a philosopher-in-training.

It is now 2:30 AM. I’m seriously considering driving back to my empty lab to practice Bach’s Partita III. For the third time in the past week.

Um, wait. I have a meeting with my advisor in about seven hours. And my MIT undergrad probably needs me to show up as well.

Preferably awake.

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