portfolio

Time for possibly my last post ever on this blog. When I started, I thought this was going to be the easiest thing ever. I tend to write... a lot. What I learned was that I do a lot of creative writing, when I feel like it, and that sticking to a topic and making a point week after week, even when I didn't have any particular witty stories to accompany my post was a lot different than the type of writing I normally do. Writing this blog was incredibly hard some weeks. I was slowly learning to write without relying on my standard style of slick stories and instead trying to actually develop coherent arguments. Anyway... here's some of my favorite posts from the semester, or at least ones where I tried to do something new.

My first choice was actually the second post I wrote, and it exemplifies my early writing style well. Lots of stories. Perhaps not as smooth as all of my writing, but a lot of meta-blogging about why it wasn't. The other thing I liked about this post was it was the first time I mentioned the "systems" approach which remained a big deal for me throughout the semester. I'm definitely a "big picture" sort of girl.

A couple weeks later I wrote about truth. I think this is the first time I start talking about the struggles I sometimes had writing, at least the sort of writing that isn't purely creative. I promised here that I was going to try to include both sides of an argument a little more, and while I perhaps didn't always hit that goal, it did provide focus and structure to a lot of my later writing.

The third thing I'm including was my favorite post of the semester, one I didn't write for a prompt or a specific week, but in response to one of our class sessions. I was explicit here, about writing from two sides, while also remaining the creativity and story-telling style that I think lets me produce my best work. This post ended up being referenced by a lot of my fellow students, and (I hope?) let us understand each other a little better.

Finally, the last post I'm including is one I wrote about my learning, and how I know when it's actually occurring. One of the reasons I particularly enjoyed this post was that I felt it tied a few of my other thoughts and ideas together, and gave a little more substance and reasoning behind some of my thoughts expressed both in this blog and in class discussions.

Choosing it also allows me a neat way to end this post: Did I learn anything in this course? Well... I've certainly changed how I write a bit! And that's something that will follow me as I continue on, past graduation and to my first job.

So long for now, blog.

truly personal mastery

I didn't like myself in high school.

I was thirteen when I started realizing it, realizing that the image I had of myself in my head perhaps wasn't reality. I grew up a perfectionist at heart, taking after my dad, and striving every day to never screw up. I remember in third grade, taking a test down to the principal's office because I'd been given a 99 on it. I thought I deserved a perfect score, and more than that, I thought I needed a perfect score. I wasn't sure what happened when I came home with a grade less than perfect, but I wasn't about to find out.

i’ve regurgitated i’m sorry
more than enough for all of us
spit it out every time
that i wasn’t quite the genius
perfect, infallible, golden girl
that everyone was expecting

It was at thirteen that I realized that not only was I not perfect, I was in fact never going to be perfect. This had the demoralizing effect of shattering my heart into a million pieces that I thought could never be put back together again. A little tiny part of it was that perfection is unobtainable. The larger part of it, for me, at the time, was the fact that in my single-minded pursuit of academic excellence, I had approximately one-half of a friend. Straight A's, no friends, not exactly perfect.

So I got depressed. And wallowed in my "imperfections". It was funny though, the sadder I got about my life, the more I drove people away. Those were probably the hardest years of my life to date.

but the i’m sorrys went wasted
nobody wanted to hear them
“the self-deprecating nonsense
isn’t becoming on you”
no one has time to listen to
insistences that i’m not enough
because in fact i’m too much
too much dissatisfaction
and discontentment with a life
half a shade off of perfect

It took a few years, but I slowly started snapping out of it. These people were right, after all. I was still smart. There were other good things about me, if I took a second to stop the wallowing. It wasn't easy. (Some days it still isn't...) But it was made harder by the years of wallowing, believe it or not. Because now I had all this guilt, for all the people I'd burdened with being a crazy girl and whining for years about why, oh why could I just not get everything together and be perfect. So I stayed depressed. As I've said, I didn't really like myself in high school.

my i’m sorrys aren't really for
anyone but myself by this time
i’m sorry for being so smart
but unbelievably blind, deaf, mute
for swallowing those around me
without learning what they knew
for thinking i was so smart
about to reach the summit
of that insurmountable mountain
thinking happiness was hiding
in the sunrise at the top
all these broken metaphors
showing off my college vocab
i think i’m really something else
but i’m not the first
and won’t be the last
to write depressing poetry
about just how much i suck

It was my senior year that I was able to decide that enough was enough, that this wasn't who I wanted to be. It's been five years since then, five years where my personal goals have remained, while not always the identical, consistent in theme and tone.

When we were talking about personal mastery in class, this was what I was thinking about. The one journey in my life that I am not only currently incredibly motivated towards and invested in, but that I have been so and remained so for such a long period of time. Many things in my life have been fleeting. Goals lasted months, days, a year tops. I came to college firmly decided on a career of genetics research, which didn't even make it through two semesters.

Partly that's just who I am... I like looking for the next great adventure. Partly it's because I've always had a struggle with intrinsic motivation, and external factors don't tend to stay consistent. But my journey towards... personal mastery (as in, mastery over my person) has always been internally fueled. (I'm not sure that self-discovery and improvement could be anything but.) It's the one thing I've always wanted (if we shorten the scope of always to the last five years). It's the thing I've put before everything else. It's the one topic that I think I can safely say that I've always learned about or tried something new for on a weekly basis.

I'm not sure if this was at all what Senge was talking about. But I can't even compare it to anything else I've done in my life. When discussions about motivation come up, I have a million examples of extrinsic motivators in my life. All things that have led me to do things and try things and later drop them. I have one thing, just one, that I don't want to drop, that's always interesting, that's always hard, but always worth it, that I rarely get any concrete awards or praise from pursuing.

I know we've talked some about the effects of external motivators and whether they actually kill opportunities for growth, learning, and creativity. That's still not an question I have an answer to. I can say though, that, for me, personally, (enough commas?) the thing I have the greatest passion for has been it's own reward.

And for me, that's what Senge's personal mastery is about. A passion so great that is only further fueled by taking each step down the path.

(Poetry courtesy of Kim @ 16)

beauty | function

The final version! (I think...)

Now with music.

Beauty | Function

View more presentations from kvlcek2.

multimedia sneak peek

I've selected my images (and my music, but haven't done anything with it yet) and started putting the whole thing together... it's not done yet, and this version of the upload messed up a bit of my formatting... but here's a quick glimpse of my multimedia project coming together:

Beauty | Function

Let me know what you think!

book review version 3.0

A major reworking of most of it. Completely re-edited with a focus on flow, tweaked/added transitions and moved a few things around to that end. The introduction was rewritten again. I tried to be sharper on the idea that Gladwell seemed to be stepping out of his journalism shoes and pretending to be a scientist, but wasn't actually providing evidence like a scientist needed to. Somewhat clarified my paragraph on Nate as a Maven. Lots and lots of editing grammar, sentence structure, and picking better words. Overall... I'm a lot happier with this.

--

There exists an academic definition of smart. It indicates that an individual has a good grasp of studied concepts and is able to correctly answer questions about those concepts. Institutions measure this idea through the use of evaluations such as tests or grades. This is a simple, objective way to measure 'intelligence.' Those who score well are deemed 'smart,' and smart individuals are subject to different treatment. I qualified as one of these students growing up. I was placed in honors classes and still got straight A's in all of my classes. I was a good student. I did very well as far as my school was concerned. This did not, however, mean I was a good person or otherwise 'good' in a general sense. In particular, I had problems with people.

People did not take to me naturally. I was a loner. I wasn't a leader of any groups nor was I otherwise considered popular. I was definitively not a "people person." From elementary school through even high school, there was rarely more than a couple people that I actually considered friends. This was not from a lack of people in my environment, nor because I was particularly uninteresting or awkward. I just didn't really stick to any of the people, and they didn't stick to me.

The concept of me being so without friends would be downright laughable to my current friends. Not only is working with people part of my job, it’s also something I do easily and willingly. I am also no longer a straight-A student. I sometimes get C’s in classes these days, but I’m a leader in a number of student organizations. I’d still consider myself successful at school, but I’ve lost a lot of the traditional markings of being an academically “smart” kid. For a different definition of the word though, I’m a lot smarter than I ever was growing up. Smart isn’t a one-dimensional concept. Smart, as it turns out, can also refer to being smart at people and understanding relationships and dynamics that can’t be tested in the traditional sense.

The large change in my life probably came from coming to college. And it came quickly, though not a lot else seemed to change. I became subtly more interesting, gained a tiny more experience in dealing with people, and was exposed to a few more people than I had been most of the time in previous years. I grew less concerned with grades and more concerned with experiences. There were no giant life-changing moment, but nevertheless I transformed very significantly.

A similar process is the premise of Malcom Gladwell’s bestselling book, The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell argues that many large phenomena can be explained by a few small factors. He weaves a story about the science of change around anecdotes, witty titles, a smattering of science, and incredibly persuasive writing. Gladwell names three rules in his book: “The Law of the Few,” “The Stickiness Factor,” and “The Power of Context,” and he claims that they are all that is needed to understand how social epidemics start and spread. For the most part, the Law of the Few talks about the “who”s of epidemics, The Stickiness Factor talks about the “what” of epidemics, and the “Power of Context” talks about the “where” of epidemics, including a healthy dose of how the people in those environments impact them. Gladwell makes a case for being incredibly "people smart," and his book certainly reads so, but at the same time it comes off as entirely dumb in the “traditional” sense.

Being a “people person” myself, it is people that fascinate me, and Gladwell’s chapters on people and their role in these epidemic phenomena that I found both most interesting and troubling. This is particularly true in the second and fifth chapters, on “The Law of the Few” and the second half of “The Power of Context,” respectively. Both of these chapters have a large focus on people, special people and people in groups, if I’m being specific, but I mostly just picked them because they were the two I related to most when reading the book. Each of these chapters, besides being interesting, does a good job of highlighting the general themes of Gladwell’s writing that I feel a need to comment on.

As a side note on Gladwell's writing in and of itself, I should establish that The Tipping Point wasn’t the first of Gladwell’s books that I read. It was the second, and I was incredibly excited when I picked it up, because I had loved the first. Gladwell is an incredibly entertaining journalist. The science is transparent to a non-technical audience, and the anecdotes shared are always intriguing and sometimes something more – Gladwell does a great job of telling a story that his audience will care about even without a personal connection. If he were to write a fiction novel, it would probably go on my must-read list.

But here’s my problem with Gladwell. A lot of the time it seems that he’s not writing anything more than fiction. I said that his stories were interesting, and I stand by that statement. However, sometimes they seem to be little more than padding around a supposedly important point that he doesn’t have enough evidence to actually establish. I also said that his science was transparent. I feel that too often his science is transparent because it’s incredibly flimsy. As an engineer, I respect data, and a lot of the time, Gladwell just doesn’t have it. If the context of his pieces was journalism, I wouldn’t critique. But it feels like he’s attempting to pass them off as science. Science that has hasn’t bothered to fully understand before writing about. He makes compelling observations, yes, but even observing the same thing five times in a row doesn’t make it a fact. Obviously, the study of human behavior is not the exact science that physics is, but I feel as though Gladwell takes too many liberties. That said, I finished the book with interest, and can’t help but see the themes that Gladwell points out in my own life.

Returning to the themes in the book itself, Chapter Two of Gladwell’s book, “The Law of the Few”, is a section detailing a few special people that Gladwell calls Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. There’s a few people in my life who I think illustrate these categories beautifully. Each of these people have affected my life in various ways, but past my own life, I see the traits that Gladwell identifies as impacting many other people too. Let’s tour Gladwell's main points through talking about these special people: the Connectors Laura and Peter, Maven Nate, and the great Salesman Anthony.

Peter really became apparent as a Connector shortly after I moved out to Seattle for a summer internship. A couple of my newfound friends took me out for a night on the town. We met up with some of their friends from back at school, and when I was introduced, I was met with, “Oh, you go to the University of Illinois? Do you know Peter?” In fact I did know Peter, and I wasn’t particularly surprised that these random strangers did also. I had a similar experience at school when I went to visit my boyfriend at his dorm one night and found a bunch of my friends from high school there. They were hanging out with Laura who I’d met the first week of classes. Gladwell introduces Connectors as people with incredibly large social networks, people who are masters of something he terms “the weak tie,” an ability to remain acquaintances with an incredibly large number of people across time and space. These people, Gladwell claims, are incredibly important to a social epidemic, because they have they contact with an incredibly large number of people, the number of people necessary for an idea to gain enough spread quick enough to take hold.

Of course, even if an idea reaches the critical number of people, it doesn’t go anywhere if someone doesn’t collect and process the associated information. Gladwell coins another term for the type of people who hoard information constantly, passing it out as necessary. He calls them Mavens. Upon reading his description, I couldn’t think of anyone else but my friend Nate. Nate is the guy I call pretty much anytime I have a question or one of my friends has a question, or someone poses a question online and I don’t know the answer. It doesn’t matter what it happens to be about, I’ve gotten good advice about technology, design, business, and law to name a few topics. Nate has an opinion about everything, and he can back it up with at least two distinct references. He’s also happy to go to dinner with anyone to talk about any issue more thoroughly. In fact, I can’t really imagine making any major decision these days without consulting Nate. I know that, whatever my original opinion, I’m going to receive a lot of good information to think about. People like Nate, claim Gladwell, are what gives an idea enough weight to actually mean something and succeed.

That isn't to say that Nate is always someone I agree with even after consuming his wealth of knowledge. But Anthony is. I met Anthony late one Wednesday night, after a meeting for an organization that I had just joined. He asked if I would be interested in taking on some responsibilities in the organization. I tentatively said yes. Less than twenty-four hours later, not only had my responsibilities quadrupled, I was ecstatic about it, and hoping for more. This is what Anthony did to people. He was contagious, and he could convince you of just about anything. Gladwell calls people like my friend Anthony “Salesmen” and I couldn’t agree more. For an epidemic to stick, you need more than just the spread of an issue, and more than just information about that issue. You need the issue to matter, and that is what Anthony did. He made me care about something that I had been completely unaware of an hour before and care in a way that it suddenly became the center of my life.

I can’t deny the effect that all of these people have had on my life. Have they gotten me involved in social “epidemics” because of their presence? This I’m not sure about. Certainly, Anthony was able to get me into something that I didn’t care about before, but it was mostly for his benefit (the work I was doing was, in reality, his work that he had delegated). Nate is definitely my go-to source for information, and I’m sure that I’ve learned things from him that I wouldn’t otherwise. And I know perfectly well that Laura and Peter have touched many, many more lives than I probably ever will. And yet, I can’t think of a single epidemic that I have been a part of because of their direct effects on my life. Maybe these people aren’t perfect examples of Gladwell’s special “Few,” but I guess I sense motivation issues behind the whole question. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen certainly could start a social epidemic – if they were so inclined. Are these just the type of people that are always motivated?

Even though I generally agree with Gladwell on his subject matter, I also have a few critiques of Gladwell and some of his methods. My issue is that I see these people in my life after the topic is on my mind seemingly only because I've been reading about them. Would I otherwise? Additionally, most of the chapter is anecdotes about a few people. While stories are a very nice place to start, I feel that after introducing them, Gladwell generally doesn't switch to hard data, he just makes his conclusions off of his stories. I'm not trying to say that these three types of people are not essential in causing epidemics (after all, they have had noted effects on my life), but I feel like I could probably make up a fourth or fifth individual and get readers to agree that these people also exist in social epidemics. Journalism certainly has different standards for evidence than science, but again, I don’t feel like Gladwell is attempting to pass himself off as a journalist. I don't disagree with Gladwell, but I also don't tend to assume that we have the whole picture about a scientific concept, even a social science concept, from seven or eight data points.

There are topics I support and recognize outside of the context of the book though. Gladwell spends a later chapter of his book talking about the "Rule of 150." This was something I was familiar with before reading the book and have seen in a number of other contexts. In particular, it's one of the main topics that came up at an interview I did last year with a University alumnus who now works at a data visualization company out in California. It feels less like a cool concept that Gladwell used buzzwords to describe and more like an actually verifiable finding with data behind it.

While I liked the topic, I did have a problem with Gladwell’s placement of the chapter. He calls it part II of a study of context. He claims it is an example of how environment impacts ideas. And yes, the number of people in an environment is definitely a factor. The chapter still felt like a stretch. Group size is an incredibly well-studied phenomenon, and it definitely affects the relationships between those in said group. But I’d call it a study on group dynamics rather than environment. This maybe a subtle distinction, but it seems to be lost in Gladwell’s drive to make his ideas neat, pretty, and easy to turn into soundbites. People are messy sometimes. Ideas are messy. A book about them has to be a little messy if it wants to be correct.

Side notes aside, I totally believe that the Rule of 150 is valid. When I interviewed my alumnus friend, he talked about how his company had changed as it grew. He joined the company in its start-up phase as one of its early employees. The company has since grown to over that magic 150 number. My friend mentioned how weird the day was when he walked past someone in the hall that he didn’t know. He had always been an extroverted person and had connections all across the company. And yet, when they hit 150 employees, he just couldn’t know everyone. It was actually a bit of a minor crisis for him to realize that he was now pouring his life into a company along with some complete strangers. My friend was book-smart, people-smart, extraverted and out-going, but he couldn’t keep up with an endlessly growing social network.

Gladwell talks about this 150 number, and the effect it has on social networks. Study after study, Gladwell tells us, has shown that we, as human beings, are just not capable of maintaining social connections of the same level with a group beyond this number. They start breaking down beyond that as my friend had experienced. Gladwell talks about the effects that the breakdown and lack of communication have on a group. They are no longer cohesive; they can no longer act as a unit with unified purpose. In order to start an epidemic, Gladwell claims, groups of this 150 size are essential. Too much bigger and suddenly they’re not all talking about the same thing, the groups splinter, and the momentum dies. In another sense, groups of 150 people or less can be smart. Past that, they start getting dumber.

My own social network, depending on what source you ask, is either eight people or around one hundred twenty or almost six hundred. Even in this isolated incident, Gladwell's claims are true. I do believe that within the first two groups, I could identify the Salesmen, Mavens, and Connectors, and I could accomplish a mission. Our social ties are strong. But not the 600 person network. It’s too big and too fractured. It’s not a real social network; it’s a representation of a bunch of networks that I belong to, and the common ties are just too weak.

It’s been a number of months since I read “The Tipping Point,” and I still find that there are days when I’m thinking or talking about Gladwell’s ideas. I loved a lot of what Gladwell had to say about people. I don’t know if I loved it because it was “true” or “smart” or “correct,” but I was generally able to agree and relate it to the people in my life. A lot of what he said I was even able to relate to myself. I don’t know if it’s because I spend a lot of time studying myself or because my social network, at this point, is pretty big. At the same time, the book bothered me because it wasn’t traditional “smart” – it doesn’t follow a rigorous scientific method at pretty much any point, but it tries really hard to pretend it’s good science.

But just like people can be different types of “smart”, so can this book. Without proving most of what it says, it manages to produce ideas that generally ring true to identify types of people that we all know. Huge groups don’t work; we know that. Some people are better at people than other people. Connectors can keep properly sized groups cohesive, Mavens can spread information between them, and Salesman can get them to act. So if Gladwell’s book isn’t the straight-A student, it’s probably that kid in the back who is maybe goofing off a little, but has got real and profitable ideas. That kid is worth talking to, and overall, this book is worth reading, but only if you've got someone to sit down and think critically through it with you.

first thoughts on the multimedia project

I've been thinking about the multimedia project over break. I had a couple ideas, but the one I'm having the most fun with is about the clash that I sometimes see between designers and engineers. Here's a rough draft / early sneak preview of the captions that I see going along with my video:

certain people design
to make things better
more aesthetically pleasing
by abstract standards
certain people build
to make better things
more functional
by technical standards
two sides
different perspectives
abstracts cant be documented
beauty is in the eye of the beholder
functionality isn't always pretty
what function does "pretty" have
meaning is lost
confusion created
frustration abounds
everyone speaks
in different languages
translation requires patience
compromise is possible
designers convince engineers
that beauty has a function
engineers convince designers
there is beauty in function

--

Speaking of writing projects... Halfway through a new draft of the book review, finally. Will be posted tomorrow. Edit: I meant later tonight!

discovery

It took me until my sophomore year to really start hanging out in the big office that takes up three rooms on the first floor of the computer science building. I'd seen people there before, and stopped in a couple of times, but I wasn't quite sure if I belonged. After all, I was only a computer science minor, not a computer science major.

Luckily, I got pulled into a club that met in the office through my actual major towards the end of my freshman year, and actually started finding myself in this office for more and more hours of each week. It was the office for the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM for the rest of this piece, because gosh, that's a long name), and beginning to hang out there was one of the best decisions of my life.

One evening, as my bioinformatics club meeting was wrapping up, another meeting was ramping up. This meeting was for something that everyone just called "conference" and I was sort of interested, having been dragged to said "conference" the year before by some friends for a few of the talks. There was a guy in chrage who I'll call Anthony, because that's his real name and I forget the fake one that I gave him in my book review, and he encouraged me to stay for the meeting.

(I wrote about this a bit in my book review (which I still need to polish up a bit). It's frequently something that comes up, because it was probably the turning point for me, both college-wise and career-wise.)

Anyway, he got me involved in conference staff, which further pulled me into ACM, which got me being vice chair of the group, and conference chair, and corporate chair, and soon I was spending enough time in the ACM office that if they were even paying me minimum wage, I'd be making pretty good bank.

Anthony helped me find what I was good at. It was a lot of the same stuff that he was good at: talking to people, negotiating, organizing people and events. Later he started talking to be about careers and the future and what I'd maybe be interested in. Even later he pointed me in the direction of the recruiters for the company I work at, and made a personal recommendation on my behalf.

I can't honestly say that I would have found this job that I love so much, or even known the type of work that I was going to love this much, had it not been for Anthony and the guidance I found at ACM. In turn, I know that I've provided the same sort of mentoring to other kids in similar positions, at least ones with similar skillsets and passions to my own. So... is it available? Yes, I have to say that it is. The question is more whether students are capable of finding it. I feel incredibly lucky to this day for the series of events that led me to meeting Anthony and getting involved with ACM.

I know a number of CS majors that have gotten lucky in similar ways, a number of people I've watched grow from annoying freshmen to juniors and seniors getting incredible job and internship offers, and I've watched them grow up because of the people they've met in ACM. I also know a lot of people that have never really stopped inside the office, and a number of people that have graduated feeling lost, or not really finding their passion.

That's one of the reasons that I think the part of the class project I'm involved in could be so helpful. There is a wealth of information on this campus, and a wealth of students who want to share it. With such a large campus, there's probably always someone, somewhere, that's already answered the exact same questions that any freshman might be coming across.

The problem, as I see it, is not a lack of mentoring programs, or of information. It's a lack of communication and information transfer problem. We are attempting to design a system that lets information flow a little more freely and find the right people. I wish I could talk to everyone who was feeling as lost as I was freshman year, particularly those students lost in the same ways that I was, not sure how to connect their passions with a valid career. I would probably be up for talking to and informally mentoring each and every one of them. I just don't have any idea who they are.

she's crazy

Disclaimer: Lots of assumptions and generalizations in this post, it's just a few quick thoughts I wanted to get down before break.

When I first started dating my fiancé, I called him on the phone. A lot. I also emailed him. A lot. And IM'd him. A lot. I tried to get in touch with him every time I thought about him, and sometimes just because it seemed like it had been awhile since we talked. I would get on the phone and have nothing much more to say than, "Hi! I was thinking about you! How are you? I loooooooove you!"

Sometimes, he seemed less than thrilled about receiving my phone calls, and he rarely replied to my (multiple) emails a day. Looking back, it's probably because I was creepily obsessive, but at the time, I didn't really understand. That was how I wanted to be communicated with. Constantly. With fervor. I loved hearing every time someone thought about me. (As I said, creepy.) And if that was what I wanted, why didn't he work the same way?

This is something I've been thinking about a lot, the differences between people and situations, and how one person, who thinks they're making total sense looks like a nutcase to someone else. We saw it with Felicity and Rebecca, I've seen it in my own relationship... in fact, I see it everywhere.

I think there's a lot of "me-centric" thinking in the world, and assumptions that everybody acts the same way. I think one of the greatest benefits of the "systems perspective" that we've talked about is that it forces us a little more outside of our own personal view and into a wider world view, where maybe it becomes easier to start thinking about the sorts of factors that make us seem "crazy" to everyone else.

There is, always, a wider perspective. And yes, sometimes we need to drill down and concentrate on the details. But sometimes forcing ourselves to think broader also helps us recognize that what we want likely isn't what everyone else wants. And maybe shouldn't be what they want. Because maybe sometimes our motivations and values and backgrounds are so different, that when we can't understand why another person wants something different, it's not because they're wrong. It's because we all have different versions of right.

being practical

I've been asked what my favorite classes during college were a couple of times, and depending on the audience, I've got a couple of different answers. Like, I loved my second computer theory class, where all of the homeworks just seemed like a couple hours of puzzle solving.

But I think the most honest answer about my favorite classes were the two Bioengineering senior design classes I took last year. They started out as normal lectures, though the topics weren't the stuff we usually covered in my engineering classes. Instead, we learned about Gantt charts and Six Sigma. But the new material wasn't why they became my favorite classes. They became my favorite classes when we got out of the classroom, stopped having lectures and tests, and started having to actually apply what we'd learned to a six-month long project.

For me, learning isn't real until I've applied it. And until I've applied it, I can't tell you if anything I've learned has actually stuck. It doesn't matter the content or type of the material. Did I learn anything from that book on meditation? I don't know, how are my stress levels doing these days? Was I able to take what I'd read and make some concrete changes? Did I learn anything from that Bible Study I led a few weeks back? I don't know, have I thought about it since? Have I reacted differently because of it? Did I learn anything in that biology lab on Monday? I don't know, put me in a new lab, give me an objective, and see if I stand there blankly or can take what I've supposed learned and put it into practice.

I don't know how many times I've been studying for a test, looking over material, skimming class notes, going "Yup, makes sense, got this." Then I got to the test, pulled out my pencil, found a slightly different application of the same material that I'd been nodding along to a couple of hours ago and stopped in my tracks. Earlier, my brain had been telling me that it recognized the general concepts that I'd bee reviewing. Now it was telling me that I hadn't actually learning them; it didn't have a deep enough understanding of the material to really apply it. For me at least, recognition of something isn't the same as learning. It's one reason that I can ace multiple choice tests on material that I would have never told you that I understood and won't remember a lick of come next month. I have a decent memory, can cram with the best of the them, and my grades aren't bad. I have hardly learned anything in a good chunk of my classes because they let me pass without ever asking me to actually do anything with all that stuff they'd been teaching me.

Earlier in one of our class discussions, I mentioned Bloom's Taxonomy. I don't remember the context now, but once again it seems appropriate. Bloom's Taxonomy is a system for classifying levels of intellectual behavior involved in learning. I was first introduced to it in third grade as part of Discovery, our gifted education curriculum. I can't imagine why I'd remember it so well all these years later, except that we'd been encouraged to continually apply it in my four years of the program. It wasn't just introduced once, something for us to memorize and answer a couple of multiple choice questions on. Our four years of Discovery were constantly asking to remember the higher levels of learning (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) and pushing us to apply them in all our lessons.

Because of Discovery, I can tell you a lot about physics as it applies to toothpick bridges and socio/political/economics systems as they apply to medieval Europe, but I can also talk at length about these subjects outside of their original specific context. They made us take our book learning and make it real. Made us analyze, synthesize, and evaluate every piece of information we came across before storing it in our brains.

To this day, I find my learning a lot more "real" if it forces me into those higher levels. That's why I loved Senior Design so much. It felt real and it felt worthwhile and I actually felt like I was learning something for once. I had to learn something for once, because I couldn't get a decent grade my walking into a test and picking out some answers that seemed semi-likely. The way to get a decent grade was to actually understand the project in a deeper way, and use that knowledge to create something new.

For me at least, it's obvious if I've actually learned something in a class. Ask me to apply that knowledge. Ask me to do something with it that isn't a pencil and paper test. Make me a "real-world" situation where I need this knowledge, and see if I fail. If I can't successfully use my supposed learning in the real world, then I haven't learned anything at all, because I can't imagine too many situations in life where it's going to be important for me to pass tests on information in a closed room with a set time limit.

Does it put a larger burden on the professor? Yes, probably. Is it worth it? In my mind, yes, but I'm not a professor. Furthermore, it gives me an idea of how I might answer last week's prompt. Should we remove courses from a curriculum? Yes, if a professor isn't able to give a real-world situation with their teaching as the main focus. I've taken a few too many courses where it seems like all the "learning" could have been replaced with a well-indexed manual. And that's showed in the exams that were pretty much just testing how well we'd memorized what we'd been told to. There's "learning" in that, but I'm not sure that it really belongs at the college level.

(Disclaimer: I know that for most professions, there's probably a set of knowledge that really should be memorized, because it's needed so frequently and there's just not time to need to look it up constantly. I'm not suggesting that no one should ever have to memorize anything, but I would posit that most of the material that does fall into this category could still be tested in a practical setting, because it's usually the sort of knowledge and skills that further learning relies on.)

better?

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about two fictional students in our class, Rebecca and Felicity. I got a lot of feedback from that post; a ton of you guys reference my post in your own posts. I had a couple more thoughts since that post, and a couple of responses to things people had written. So here's Rebecca and Felicity Part II.

One of my favorite bloggers has written a series of posts about some of the distinctions he's seen between people. The one I find most applicable to this situation is a post on something he called Incrementalists & Completionists. It argues that people have two different ways of getting things done: some just want something done, and others want to make sure that that the things that gets done, whatever it is, is done right, and done right the first time.

The strikes me as basically the fundamental difference between Felicity and Rebecca. Felicity ready to jump in and do something, even without complete knowledge, while Rebecca views that as a dangerous approach and really wants to understand the situation. One of the posts that a classmate wrote mentioned that they saw the difference between Felicity and Rebecca as the fact that Felicity was a "doer" and Rebecca was, well... not. I feel like that paints Felicity in a positive light and Rebecca is the negative, which was never my intent, for a couple of reasons.

First off, I think that they're both "doers," they just "do" in very different ways. Felicity's an incrementalist. Rebecca probably thinks Felicity is reckless and isn't really "doing" anything but making a mess. Rebecca a completionist. It's not that she's not doing anything, it's that her "doing" involves a lot more prep work first. Rebecca views that as part of the "doing," not separate.

(As an aside, with the number of times I put "do"and "doing" in that paragraph, I feel a little bit like someone's going to think I'm talking about something else entirely...)

The second reason that, despite being a Felicity, I'm not so quick to put her in a fantastic light is that I'm seeing right now, firsthand, some of the negative consequences of Incrementalist type behavior. I first starting feeling sick maybe four weeks ago. I took it easy for a couple of days, but there were things to do, and I didn't want to leave them off, and I was busy. I was much sicker the next week, and I again took a few days off of classes. But then I didn't want to get too behind, so I went back at it, and relapsed again.

I've been so focused on not getting behind in the short-term that long-term, things are slipping a lot and I have now been sick for four weeks. Perhaps, in this instance, letting myself get completely well and only falling behind once would have been preferable.

problems aren't solutions

I'm a bioengineering major. The bioengineering program was only in its second year when I entered as a freshman, and as a result, our requirements for graduation were not particularly stable. Every semester, as it came time to enroll for new classes, we'd invariably get an email from our department advisor, telling us about new requirements that were being added, or old requirements that were being changed.

So it was that some semesters I was taking mechanical engineering classes, and then a couple in chemistry, and then the semester where we took our classes with electrical engineers and pre-med students. We all understood the intent. They wanted us to be as well-rounded as possible, and bioengineering was a huge field.

For some of us, that knowledge was enough. They were trying their best. Some of us, however, felt lost and confused. I picked my concentration of bioinformatics shortly after I got to college. I'd been debating between the bioengineering major and computer science since I first started applying to colleges, so picking the concentration that was a blend of the two seemed only natural.

Completing my concentration required five courses outside of the bioengineering core, two of them background math to help with the higher level courses, one a programming class for the same reason. I only actually had to take two bioinformatics courses, despite it being my concentration, what I'd claimed I wanted to base my life around.

I had to take three difference chemistry courses, and four in the mechanical engineering core. My course requirements stated that, for all that I'd declared by concentration to be in bioinformatics, I was going to take more classes two other different colleges than I was in bioinformatics at all.

I wasn't a particularly special case. Pretty much everyone had similar complains. The ones who wanted to be material scientists wondered why they were dissecting rabbits and the biomechanics people wanted to know why they were required to be able to build and EEG and know the theory behind it (four seperate courses taught this material.)

We did it, because we didn't have a choice, but I don't think very many of us were happy about it.

I know, Bioengineering is somewhat of a special case, but it highlighted for me a couple of problems that I think a lot of college curriculums face.

First of all, I really did take three different chemistry classes. The material in them, however, probably could have been covered in less than two semesters. We had a lot of overlap. I learned how to build an EEG from scratch twice, and a lot of the rules of physics we got again and again too. I had to take differential equations my freshman year, but by the time we got to the classes that used them (sophomore, junior, and senior years) our professors had (perhaps rightfully) decided that we'd forgotten what we'd learned in that class, and spent a couple of weeks just catching us up on the math.

There is a lot of repetition in a lot of course requirements. And it makes sense, in terms of hammering basic, essential skills into a student's head. But I'm a bioinformaticist. I program computers in my spare time. A lot fo the stuff that my curriculum spent a couple of years hammering into my head is not, and will never be, an essnetial basic skill for me. Am I happy for the exposure? Yes. It was interesting the first time. Was I happy to learn it twice more? No. Why did I need to learn this so badly again?

My other "big issue" cropped up when I decided to take a second major. All of my previously "free electives" were filled up trying to fit a second set of degree requirements. I took four or five classes from one of two technical cores every semester. Opportunities popped up. Did I want to take this cool project course? How about this one on design? How about an indepedent study on leadership? Intuitive user interfaces? I did, in fact. I had the prerequisites. I'd learned enough at this point to know that leadership, project management, design, and user interfaces were going to be key to my success in the professional world.

Did I take any of them? No. I was too busy taking my thrid chemistry class, thermodynamics for the second time, and an "advanced" computer architecture course, even though I never cared about the innards workings of the computer in the first place. It was, to say the least, incredibly frustrating.

None of this suggests a solution.

I don't think the solution is cutting classes across the board. Maybe differntial equations and three chem classes weren't useful for me, but they were for someone else. In my ideal world, the "solution" is an extremely heavy emphasis on personalized curriculum, and dedicated academic advisors that make sure the personalizations make sense and offer great advice. The problem with this being that that's incredibly unrealistic and next to impossible to scale.

I think, in the end, as much as I don't want to say this, that the colleges are trying to do the best they can, and probably succeeding. I don't like it, and I'm frustrated a lot, but the entire University doesn't revolve around me. In the real world, there are limited resources. In the real world, everything isn't fair and perfect.

I've gotten what I needed out of college by supplmenting my curriculum with extracurriculars and the two electives I was able to take. It's not ideal, but it worked, and I learned a lot. I still think there's a problem, but lacking a solution, I'm not sure that it's fair for me to demand that something changes.

complete rough draft

Subtitled, "The difference between smart and smart"

Intro and conclusion changed, and the section on the Rule of 150 actually finished. New theme of the idea of "people-smart" and how Gladwell's book is "people-smart" but not the traditional academic sense of smart. It's still rough, most of the middle section needs to be revised, but it's actually complete.

--

There’s a traditional definition of “smart” in the academic sense. It means that you’ve got a thorough grasp of the content that you’re studying, that you’re capable of answering questions correctly. We frequently measure this concept of “smart” by looking at grades and test scores. We put the kids that score highly enough in special programs and honors classes. It’s an easy, objective way to measure intelligence. Give a bunch of people the same questions, and you can pick out the “smartest” ones easily – they answered the most questions correctly. I was one of the smart kids, picked for the honors classes, and getting straight A’s in all my classes. I was good at school. But that didn’t make me “good” in a general sense. People didn’t really take to me. I was very much a loner. I wasn’t popular. I wasn’t overly friendly, and I wasn’t really a leader in groups. I wasn’t would you would call a “people person.” Through elementary, middle, and even high school, it was rare for me to have more than a couple of people that I actually considered friends. I wasn’t particularly uninteresting or awkward, and there were certainly a lot of people that intersected my world, but I didn’t really stick to many of them and they didn’t really stick to me.

The people who know me now will laugh at the girl that I used to be, because not only is working with people part of my job, it’s also something I do easily and willingly. I’m also not a straight-A student, and the only reason that I’m still in honors programs is because reputation sticks around. I get C’s in my classes, but I am a leader in a number of student organizations. I’d still consider myself “good” at school – a different definition of school, where I know that I’m getting a lot out of it. And I’ve lost a lot of the traditional markings of being a “smart” kid, but in a lot of ways, I’m a lot smarter than I ever was growing up. Smart isn’t a one-dimensional thing, and there’s the concept of being smart at people, at understanding relationships and dynamics that can’t be tested in the traditional sense.

Something changed in my life, that tipped me from the traditionally smart category into something more akin to “people smart.” The tipping point for my life, one might say, was coming to college. I became subtly more interesting, gained a tiny more experience in dealing with people, and was exposed to a few more people than I had been most of the time in previous years. I grew less concerned with grades and more concerned with experiences. There were no life-changing moments, but something changed (in my life, at least) pretty significantly.

This is the premise of Malcom’s Gladwell’s bestselling book, The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell argues that a couple of simple rules are all that in takes to explain a number of huge phenomena. He weaves a story around anecdotes, witty titles, a smattering of science, and incredibly persuasive writing. Gladwell calls his three rules “The Law of the Few,” “The Stickiness Factor,” and “The Power of Context” and claims that they are all that is needed to understand how epidemics start and spread. For the most part, the Law of the Few talks about the “who”s of epidemics, The Stickiness Factor talks about the “what” of epidemics, and the “Power of Context” talks about the “where” of epidemics, with a healthy dose of how the people in those environments impact them. Gladwell comes off as incredibly peoplesmart. And his book, to me, came off as incredibly peoplesmart. But entirely traditional-dumb.

Being a “people person” it is people that fascinate me, and Gladwell’s chapters on people and their role in this epidemic phenomena that I found both most interesting and troubling. Particularly the second and fifth chapters, on “The Law of the Few” and the second half of “The Power of Context,” respectively. Both of these chapters have a large focus on people, special people and people in groups, if I’m being specific, but I mostly picked them because they were the two I related to most when reading the book. Each of these chapters, besides being interesting, does a good job of highlighting the general themes of Gladwell’s writing that I feel a need to comment on.

The Tipping Point wasn’t the first of Gladwell’s books that I read. It was the second, and I was incredibly excited when I picked it up, because I had loved the first. Gladwell is an incredibly entertaining writer, and after picking up one of his books, I find them hard to put down. The science is transparent to a non-technical audience, the anecdotes shared are always intriguing and sometimes something more – Gladwell does a great job of telling a story that his audience will care about, even without knowing any of the players in the story. If he were to write a fiction novel, it would probably go on my must-read list.

But here’s my problem with Gladwell. A lot of the time it seems that he’s not writing anything more than fiction. I said that his stories were interesting, and that’s not something that I want to take back. However, sometimes they seem to be little more than padding around a supposedly important point that he doesn’t have enough evidence to actually back up. I also said that his science was transparent. I feel that too often, his science is transparent because it’s incredibly flimsy. As an engineer, I respect data, and a lot of the time, Gladwell just doesn’t have it. Compelling observations yes, but even observing the same thing five times in a row doesn’t make it a fact. Obviously, the study of human behavior is not the exact science that physics is, but I still feel as though Gladwell takes too many liberties. That said, I finished the book with interest, and can’t help but see the themes that Gladwell points out in my own life.

Chapter Two of Gladwell’s book “The Law of the Few” is a section detailing a few special people that Gladwell calls Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. There’s a few people in my life who I think best fit these categories. Each of these people have affected my life in various ways, but past my own life, I see the traits that Gladwell identifies as impacting many of the people around me too. I plan on summarizing Gladwell's main points through talking about each of these people. I'm not entirely sure that I feel like actually identifying them, so for anonymity's sake... I think my friends Laura and Peter are Connectors, I think Nate is a Maven, and I'd say Adam is a Salesmen. All of them have had incredibly success at school, but, with the exception of Nate, their grades have all sucked. They also all have great jobs.

Shortly after I moved out to Seattle for a summer internship, a couple of my newfound friends took me out for a night on the town. We met up with some of their friends from back at school, and when I was introduced, I was met with, “Oh, you go to the University of Illinois? Do you know Peter?” In fact I did know Peter, and I wasn’t particularly surprised that these random strangers did either. Just like I wasn’t particularly surprised when I went to visit my boyfriend at his dorm one night, and found a bunch of my friends from high school there, hanging out with girl named Laura that I’d met the first week of classes. Gladwell introduces Connectors as people with incredibly large social networks, people who are masters of something he terms “the weak tie,” an ability to remain acquaintances with an incredibly large number of people across time and space. These people, Gladwell claims, are incredibly important to an epidemic, because they have they contact with an incredibly large number of people, the number of people necessary for an idea to gain enough spread quick enough to take hold. Laura and Peter are people smart.

Of course, even if an idea reaches the critical number of people, it doesn’t go anywhere if someone doesn’t collect and process said information. Gladwell coins another term for the type of people who hoard information constantly, passing it out as necessary. He calls them Mavens, and reading his description, I couldn’t think of anyone else but my friend Nate. Nate is the guy I call pretty much anytime I have a question, it doesn’t matter what it happens to be about, I’ve gotten good advice about technology, design, business, and law. Nate has an opinion about everything, and he can back it up with at least two distinct references. He’s also happy to go to dinner to talk about any issue more thoroughly. In fact, I can’t really imagine making any major decision these days without consulting Nate. I know that even if he disagrees with me, I’m going to receive a lot of good information to think about. People like Nate, claim Gladwell, are what gives an idea enough weight to actually mean something.

Nate isn’t always someone I agree with, even after consuming his wealth of knowledge. But Adam is. I met Adam late one Wednesday night, after a meeting for an organization that I had just joined. He asked if I would be interested in taking on some responsibilities in the organization. I tentatively said yes. Less than twenty-four hours later, not only had my responsibilities quadrupled, I was ecstatic about it, and hoping for more. This is what Adam did to people. He was contagious, and he could convince you of just about anything. Gladwell calls people like my friend Adam “Salesmen” and I couldn’t agree more. For an epidemic to stick, you need more than just the spread of an issue, and more than just information about that issue. You need the issue to matter, and that is what Adam did. He made me care about something that I had been completely unaware of an hour before, and care in a way that it suddenly became the center of my life. Adam is incredibly peoplesmart.

I can’t deny the effect that each of these people have had on my life, and I don’t want to. Have they gotten me involved in social “epidemics” because of their presence? This I’m not sure about. Certainly, Adam was able to get me into something that I didn’t care about before, but it was mostly for his benefit (the work I was doing was, in reality, his work that he had delegated). Nate is, definitely, my go-to source for information, and I’m sure that I’ve learned things from him that I wouldn’t otherwise. And I know perfectly well that Laura and Peter have touched many, many more lives than I probably ever will. And yet, I can’t think of a single epidemic that I have been a part of because of their effect on my life. Maybe these people aren’t perfect examples of Gladwell’s special “Few,” but I guess I sense motivation issues behind the whole question. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen certainly could start an epidemic – if they were so inclined.

In this section I also have a few critiques of Gladwell and some of his methods. I guess my issue is that I see these people in my life, after the topic is on my mind because I've been reading about them. Would I otherwise? Most of the chapter is anecdotes about a few people, and while stories are a very nice place to start, I feel that after introducing them, Gladwell generally doesn't switch to hard data, he just makes his conclusions off of his stories. I'm not sure that these three types of people aren't superimportant in causing epidemics (after all, they have had noted effects on my life), but I feel like I could probably make up a fourth or fifth and get people nodding along with me that these people exist and have an important role in epidemics. I don't disagree with Gladwell, but I also don't tend to assume that we have the whole picture from seven or eight datapoints.

Gladwell spends a later chapter of his book talking about the "Rule of 150." This is something I feel a little safer getting behind. Despite Maxwell's prevalent writing style of story after story, this was something I was familiar with before reading the book, that I've seen in a number of contexts. Personally, it's one of the main topics that came up at an interview I did last year with a University alumni who now works at a data visualization company out in California. It feels less like a cool concept that Gladwell popped some pretty names on and more like an actually verifiable finding with data behind it.

While I liked the topic, I did have a problem with Gladwell’s placement of the chapter. He calls it part II of a study of context, that it’s an example of how environment impacts ideas. And yes, the number of people in an environment are definitely a factor. The chapter still felt like a stretch. Group size is an incredibly well-studied phenomenon, and it definitely affects the relationships between those in said group. But I’d call it a study on group dynamics rather than environment. Maybe a subtle distinction, but it seems to be a subtle tell to the fact that Gladwell is trying to make his ideas neat, pretty, and easy to turn into soundbites. People are messy sometimes. Ideas are messy. A book about them has to be a little messy if it wants to be honest.

Sidenotes aside, I totally believe that the Rule of 150 is valid. When I interviewed my alumni friend, he talked about how his company had changed as it grew. He joined the company in its start-up phase, as one of its early employees. The company has since grown to over that magic 150 number. My friend mentioned how weird the day was when he walked past someone in the hall that he didn’t know. He had always been an extroverted person, and had connections across the company’s various divisions. And yet, when they hit 150 employees, he just couldn’t keep tabs on everyone. It was actually a bit of a minor crisis for him, to realize that he was now pouring his life into a company along with some complete strangers. My friend was smart. People-smart, extraverted and out-going, but he couldn’t keep up with an endlessly growing social network.

Gladwell talks about this 150 number, and the effect it has on social networks. It was through no failing of my friend. Study after study, Gladwell tells us, has shown that we, as human beings, are just not capable of maintaining social connections with a group beyond this number. They start breaking down. Gladwell talks about the effects that the breakdown and lack of communication have on a group. They’re no longer cohesive, they can no longer act as a unit with unified purpose. In order to start an epidemic, Gladwell claims, groups of this 150 size are essential. Too much bigger and suddenly they’re not all talking about the same thing, the groups splinter, and the momentum dies. In another sense, groups of 150 people or less can be smart. Past that, they start getting dumber.

My own social network, depending on what site you ask, is either eight people or around one hundred twenty or almost six hundred. And it’s true, what Gladwell talks about. The first two groups of people, with the people skills I’ve developed, with the types of people I’ve identified in each of those groups, my own Salesmen, Mavens, and Connectors, I think that, if I had a mission, I could, for the most part, get those groups to adopt and take it to heart. But not the 600 person one. It’s too big, too fractured. It’s not a real social network, it’s a representation of a bunch of networks that I belong to.

It’s been a number of months since I read “The Tipping Point,” and I still find that there are days when I’m thinking or talking about Gladwell’s ideas. I loved a lot of what Gladwell had to say about people. I don’t know if I loved it because it was “true” or “smart” or “correct” – but I was generally able to agree, and relate it to the people in my life. Heck, a lot of what he said I was able to relate to myself. I don’t know if it’s because I spend a lot of time studying myself or because my social network at this point is pretty big. The book bugged the hell out of me because it wasn’t traditional “smart” – it doesn’t follow a rigorous scientific method at pretty much any point, though it tries really hard to pretend it’s good science.

But just like people can be different types of smart, so can this book. Without proving most of what it says, it manages to produce ideas that generally ring true, to identify people that we all know. Huge groups don’t work, we know that. Some people are better at people than other people. Connectors can keep groups cohesive, Mavens can spread information between them, and Salesman can get them to act (of course, as long as the groups not too big). So if Gladwell’s book isn’t the straight-A student, it’s probably that kid in the back who is maybe goofing off a little, but has got ideas and his club just raised $1000 off of one of them. And sometimes, it’s not so bad being that kid. Overall, I'd recommend the book, because it's a fun read, but only if you've got someone to sit down and think critically through it with you (maybe one of those traditionally smart kids.)

rebecca + felicity

I'm not sure what happened in class yesterday, but I have some thoughts. A lot of thoughts actually. And I know that they're not everyone's opinions. The following two pieces are about yesterday's class session, where we starting trying to put together a class project. They're from the perspective of two fictional students in our class. I'm sure that it's pretty obvious who I'd tend to side with, but writing the other side (which I did first) didn't feel particularly ridiculous, and it made writing the second half a lot harder. Turns out that when you spend some amount of time disagreeing with yourself, it's hard to completely agree with yourself.

So, here you go...

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Rebecca sat down excitedly, pulling out her notebook and a pen. Of course, no one could tell that she was any more excited than usual, she wasn't the type to let that spill out. School was serious business. It always had been, and Rebecca had always taken that to heart. It was the only opportunity she'd have in her life to devote her sole attention for years to soaking up knowledge that would serve her later.

Last week's class sessions had been great. A couple of students had been missing, especially one of the louder ones, who always seemed to jump on every question before it had been fully asked. Rebecca didn't really understand that. Sometimes she liked to berate herself for not thinking on her feet, but in later years, she'd come to peace with the fact that she was methodical in her thinking. In fact, she was proud of it, and it was a skill she'd cultivated. Still, that didn't make it easy to jump into discussions that were moving by leaps and bounds when she was still considering the original question, turning it over in her head a couple of times, looking at it from all possible angles.

Today they were going to start talking about the class project. Rebecca had been waiting for awhile for the chance to start tying all the threads they'd talked about together. It was a huge project to tackle, with a lot of angles that had to be considered. And it wasn't just stuff from previous class sessions, there was the information from the professor's posts, and from critically thinking about the interviews.

The professor started out the class with one of the topics from his recent blog posts that they hadn't gotten a chance to discuss yet. Rebecca had actually spent a lot of time thinking about it when it was posted, and the professor brought up a lot of good points. These were questions that we needed to keep in mind when formulating our final class project. Things to consider to keep the project in the realm of reality instead of careening off into an "ideal" world.

There were other students who clearly didn't get it. The loud one from last week kept asking what the point was of this discussion. "Wouldn't the details matter more after there was a clear view of the project?" No, thought Rebecca. Well, that wasn't strictly true. Yes, the details were going to matter after they were deeper into the project. But talking about them now - and they weren't even details - they were... snapshots to consider - made sure that they were basing the project on what they knew of successful and unsuccessful models. It gave the class more angles to consider so they didn't all rush in blindly from one side and forget some important aspect that made their chosen avenue impossible.

Halfway through the class, the loud ones got their way. Rebecca was dismayed. What was happening now was a mockery of the education process. There was clearly a reason that the professor had been leading the class session as he was. And even if it wasn't clear to them, didn't they at least have enough respect for the professor to let him continue? He hadn't asked for help, in fact, he kept telling the students that their concerns were heard, that they'd be circled back to later. What was wrong with these people?

The class ended. The last half hour had been a whirlwind. There were some concrete project ideas, sure, but the students were scattered across the room and not talking to each other anymore. Were the ideas coherent? Had all the loose ends been tied up? Not at all. And Rebecca felt pretty lost. Was getting to this messy state so quickly worth throwing away another couple hours of discussion that would have also led to concrete project ideas with a lot clearer focus? Rebecca didn't think so. But the loud ones always won.

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Felicity dropped her bag on the floor and propped up her feet on the desk. She'd been excited for this day since she first read the class description on the CHP website many, many months ago. She'd loved school when she was little, but college had disillusioned her somewhat. The classes seemed disconnected, nobody seemed to care about the big picture. She'd been itching for awhile to do something about it.

Not that Felicity tended to have a lot of trouble doing things. She was definitely one of those people who got things done. It was commented on in every review that she'd ever had. She was the person who was off busy making a prototype before anyone else had even settled on what the problem really was. And it got her in trouble sometimes. She acted too quickly, spoke too quickly, and sometimes tried to solve problems that weren't really there while missing glaring issues. Still, it was something she was proud of. Her ability to get to a solution, even if it wasn't perfect. A lot of times, that was the jump-start a group needed to really start making progress.

Today they were going to start talking about the class project. The entire reason that Felicity had taken the class in the first place. Well, besides the fact that she needed it to graduate. It was an exciting project to tackle, a lot of areas that Felicity saw needing serious improvement. It was time to bring everything they'd talked about together and actually do something. Something real. Felicity had had enough of the theory behind change. She wanted to create it now.

The professor started out the class with one of the topics from his recent blog posts that they hadn't gotten a chance to discuss yet. Felicity was antsy, and even more so when the discussion kept heading down that path, careening wildly off of "come up with a class project" into "discuss the theory behind it and some details that may or may not be relevant" quickly. This wasn't a "ideal" world, it was one where they had six weeks, and needed to get something done.

There were other students who clearly didn't get it. They entertained the professor's questions, seemingly forgetting that this was supposed to be a discussion that defined the class project. Then, finally, a light in the dark: "Wouldn't the details matter more after there was a clear view of the project?" YES! The class didn't know what the project was, how could they know which details mattered, let alone what the answers to those detail questions were? You can't understand which parts of your model need to be explored deeply when you don't even have a model! Felicity was incredibly frustrated when this concern was set aside. More than frustrated, she was bewildered.

Halfway through the class, something changed. Felicity was incredibly relieved. A couple of students had taken control of the class. The train was back on the tracks to "projectville" instead of wandering around in some really pretty meadows. If this class session was going to have any value, those students had done what needed to be done. It was clear that the professor wasn't exactly sure where he was going, and we didn't have time for that anymore. Six weeks left in the class, it was time to stop talking about abstracts, and just do something. Anything.

The class ended. The last half hour had been a whirlwind. But an amazingly fun one. There were concrete project ideas now, and the students were split up into groups that were working on something that they cared about. The students were energized. The class was going to be a success. Felicity was excited. Frustrated that they'd wasted the first half of class, but at least it had gotten turned around. Who cared if the ideas weren't perfect? They were real ideas. And something was going to get done.

anonymous

When I started this blog, I didn't bother to make it anonymous. You can look at the username I used for it, the identifying information that I posted. Heck, in my first post I gave everyone a decent snapshot of my life.

I shared a few of the paragraphs I had written with a friend, because I liked the way I'd strung certain phrases together. And he asked me, "Is this public?" I told him that of course it was, I had nothing to hide, it was just for class. He pointed out a few things, how easy it was, even though I'd been vague, to piece together exactly who and what I was talking about in some places. He was right, and it wasn't information that I intended to make public.

I made one change very quickly. Search engines can no longer index this blog. Yes, some of them still have an archive, and will until stuff gets re-crawled, (search engines are fascinating!) but for the most part, this blog is a lot easier to find unless you have a link to it, which is entirely possible for the people in this class, but a lot less likely for the internet as a whole.

I am pretty open in this blog. The consequence is that I'm limiting the number of people that have easy access to it as much as possible. And that's not necessarily a good thing. Writing on the internet has a lot of advantages: it's easy to share, it's easy to provide links to other relevant things. It's easy to become relevant to someone who had no idea that you exist.

But it's hard to be completely honest. And I'm not. I talked about this in an earlier post. I'm not completely honest even though I've done some amount of locking my blog down to the general public. I might be completely honest if no one was reading this, but if I'm being completely honest, I wouldn't be writing this if no one was reading it.

I've got another journal out there on the interwebs, and that one is a hell of a lot more anonymous. And a lot more public. I'm pretty sure that any of you could read it and you would have no idea for one second that it was me. I'm a lot more honest there. Emotionally open and such. And I'm a lot less honest too, because nobody who reads that blog has any idea of where I go to school, or what classes I take. Heck, while they could probably figure out that I lived in the United States, that's about all the location-narrowing they could do. And the only reason they might guess that my name doesn't start with a 'Z' is because very few peoples' do.

I guess what I'm saying here is that there's a tradeoff between being open and honest and being publicly identified. I think a lot of the biggest gains from the internet come from the freely-sharing of ideas and crossing of communication boundaries and the raw honesty that someone can share when nobody knows who they are. I think the biggest losses from the internet come from the lack of honest, personal connection from people that comes when nobody knows who you are.

This blog has a little of both. I'm real, I'm a real person, who all know who I am. Maybe not everything about me, but something. At that both means that what I write means more to you than some random stranger, and that what I write is a lot more guarded because it's attached to my name.

I don't think there's a "best way to deal" with this, because I think it's one of those trade-offs that you can't get around. What's the best way to deal with having an awesome car and actually having money? Decide which is more important to you or win the lottery.

Best way to deal with being open in the internet age? Decide what's important to you early on, or stay off the internet.

really rough draft

Growing up, I wasn’t would you would call a “people person.” Through elementary, middle, and even high school, it was rare for me to have more than a couple of people that I actually considered friends. I wasn’t particularly uninteresting or awkward, and there were certainly a lot of people that intersected my world, but I didn’t really stick to many of them and they didn’t really stick to me. The people who know me now will laugh at the girl that I used to be, because not only is working with people part of my job, it’s also something I do easily and willingly. The tipping point, for my social life, one might say, was coming to college. I became subtly more interesting, gained a tiny more experience in dealing with people, and was exposed to a few more people than I had been most of the time in previous years. There were no life-changing moments, but something changed (in my life, at least) pretty significantly.

This is the premise of Malcom’s Gladwell’s bestselling book, The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell argues that a couple of simple rules are all that in takes to explain a number of huge phenomena. He weaves a story around anecdotes, witty titles, a smattering of science, and incredibly persuasive writing. Gladwell calls his three rules “The Law of the Few,” “The Stickiness Factor,” and “The Power of Context” and claims that they are all that is needed to understand how epidemics start and spread. For the most part, the Law of the Few talks about the “who”s of epidemics, The Stickiness Factor talks about the “what” of epidemics, and the “Power of Context” talks about the “where” of epidemics, with a healthy dose of how the people in those environments impact them.

Since becoming more of a “people person” it is people that fascinate me, and Gladwell’s chapters on people and their role in this epidemic phenomena that I found both most interesting and troubling. Particularly the second and fifth chapters, on “The Law of the Few” and the second half of “The Power of Context,” respectively. Both of these chapters have a large focus on people, special people and people in groups, if I’m being specific, but I mostly picked them because they were the two I related to most when reading the book. Each of these chapters, besides being interesting, does a good job of highlighting the general themes of Gladwell’s writing that I feel a need to comment on.

The Tipping Point wasn’t the first of Gladwell’s books that I read. It was the second, and I was incredibly excited when I picked it up, because I had loved the first. Gladwell is an incredibly entertaining writer, and after picking up one of his books, I find them hard to put down. The science is transparent to a non-technical audience, the anecdotes shared are always intriguing and sometimes something more – Gladwell does a great job of telling a story that his audience will care about, even without knowing any of the players in the story. If he were to write a fiction novel, it would probably go on my must-read list.

But here’s my problem with Gladwell. A lot of the time it seems that he’s not writing anything more than fiction. I said that his stories were interesting, and that’s not something that I want to take back. However, sometimes they seem to be little more than padding around a supposedly important point that he doesn’t have enough evidence to actually back up. I also said that his science was transparent. I feel that too often, his science is transparent because it’s incredibly flimsy. As an engineer, I respect data, and a lot of the time, Gladwell just doesn’t have it. Compelling observations yes, but even observing the same thing five times in a row doesn’t make it a fact. Obviously, the study of human behavior is not the exact science that physics is, but I still feel as though Gladwell takes too many liberties. That said, I finished the book with interest, and can’t help but see the themes that Gladwell points out in my own life.

Chapter Two of Gladwell’s book “The Law of the Few” is a section detailing a few special people that Gladwell calls Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. There’s a few people in my life who I think best fit these categories. Each of these people have affected my life in various ways, but past my own life, I see the traits that Gladwell identifies as impacting many of the people around me too. I plan on summarizing Gladwell's main points through talking about each of these people. I'm not entirely sure that I feel like actually identifying them, so for anonymity's sake... I think my friends Laura and Peter are Connectors, I think Nate is a Maven, and I'd say Adam is a Salesmen.

Shortly after I moved out to Seattle for a summer internship, a couple of my newfound friends took me out for a night on the town. We met up with some of their friends from back at school, and when I was introduced, I was met with, “Oh, you go to the University of Illinois? Do you know Peter?” In fact I did know Peter, and I wasn’t particularly surprised that these random strangers did either. Just like I wasn’t particularly surprised when I went to visit my boyfriend at his dorm one night, and found a bunch of my friends from high school there, hanging out with girl named Laura that I’d met the first week of classes. Gladwell introduces Connectors as people with incredibly large social networks, people who are masters of something he terms “the weak tie,” an ability to remain acquaintances with an incredibly large number of people across time and space. These people, Gladwell claims, are incredibly important to an epidemic, because they have they contact with an incredibly large number of people, the number of people necessary for an idea to gain enough spread quick enough to take hold.

Of course, even if an idea reaches the critical number of people, it doesn’t go anywhere if someone doesn’t collect and process said information. Gladwell coins another term for the type of people who hoard information constantly, passing it out as necessary. He calls them Mavens, and reading his description, I couldn’t think of anyone else but my friend Nate. Nate is the guy I call pretty much anytime I have a question, it doesn’t matter what it happens to be about, I’ve gotten good advice about technology, design, business, and law. Nate has an opinion about everything, and he can back it up with at least two distinct references. He’s also happy to go to dinner to talk about any issue more thoroughly. In fact, I can’t really imagine making any major decision these days without consulting Nate. I know that even if he disagrees with me, I’m going to receive a lot of good information to think about. People like Nate, claim Gladwell, are what gives an idea enough weight to actually mean something.

Nate isn’t always someone I agree with, even after consuming his wealth of knowledge. But Adam is. I met Adam late one Wednesday night, after a meeting for an organization that I had just joined. He asked if I would be interested in taking on some responsibilities in the organization. I tentatively said yes. Less than twenty-four hours later, not only had my responsibilities quadrupled, I was ecstatic about it, and hoping for more. This is what Adam did to people. He was contagious, and he could convince you of just about anything. Gladwell calls people like my friend Adam “Salesmen” and I couldn’t agree more. For an epidemic to stick, you need more than just the spread of an issue, and more than just information about that issue. You need the issue to matter, and that is what Adam did. He made me care about something that I had been completely unaware of an hour before, and care in a way that it suddenly became the center of my life.

I can’t deny the effect that each of these people have had on my life, and I don’t want to. Have they gotten me involved in social “epidemics” because of their presence? This I’m not sure about. Certainly, Adam was able to get me into something that I didn’t care about before, but it was mostly for his benefit (the work I was doing was, in reality, his work that he had delegated). Nate is, definitely, my go-to source for information, and I’m sure that I’ve learned things from him that I wouldn’t otherwise. And I know perfectly well that Laura and Peter have touched many, many more lives than I probably ever will. And yet, I can’t think of a single epidemic that I have been a part of because of their effect on my life. Maybe these people aren’t perfect examples of Gladwell’s special “Few,” but I guess I sense motivation issues behind the whole question. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen certainly could start an epidemic – if they were so inclined.

In this section I also have a few critiques of Gladwell and some of his methods. I guess my issue is that I see these people in my life, after the topic is on my mind because I've been reading about them. Would I otherwise? Most of the chapter is anecdotes about a few people, and while stories are a very nice place to start, I feel that after introducing them, Gladwell generally doesn't switch to hard data, he just makes his conclusions off of his stories. I'm not sure that these three types of people aren't superimportant in causing epidemics (after all, they have had noted effects on my life), but I feel like I could probably make up a fourth or fifth and get people nodding along with me that these people exist and have an important role in epidemics. I don't disagree with Gladwell, but I also don't tend to assume that we have the whole picture from seven or eight datapoints.

Gladwell spends a later chapter of his book talking about the "Rule of 150." This is something I feel a little safer getting behind. Despite Maxwell's prevalent writing style of story after story, this was something I was familiar with before reading the book, that I've seen in a number of contexts. Personally, it's one of the main topics that came up at an interview I did last year with a University alumni who now works at a data visualization company out in California. It feels less like a cool concept that Gladwell popped some pretty names on and more like an actually verifiable finding with data behind it.

However, on a quick note first, whhhat does this have to do with context?

(Paragraph on Ari visiting and what we talked about)

(Paragraph on what Gladwell actually says)

(My life as a “people person”, and how does this relate?)

Finally, I want to conclude the review by hopefully drawing some conclusions between the special types of people and their impact on the groups talked about the later chapter. Probably another quick mention of my likes and dislikes of Gladwell if I don't feel like I'm beating a dead horse. Overall, I think I'd recommend the book, because it's a fun read, but only if you've got someone to sit down and think critically through it with you.

getting it right

At the company where I've spent my last two summers, alignment is A Big Deal. At the end of every fiscal year, upper management for each group gets together and makes a set of commitments, which are then announced to the next level of management, who makes another set of commitments for their group that relate to the overall organization's commitments, all the way down to each individual employee, who makes a set of commitments for the year that (supposedly) align with the commitments of every sub-group that he's a part of, all the way up the chain.

Even as an intern, it was my responsibility, within the first two weeks of my arrival, to come up with a set of goals for the summer that aligned with the organization's greater aims. (Typing it out like this sounds a little bit creepy, and maybe like the "company" I was working for was actually a cult.)

The first summer that I worked there, I was approximately three degrees of terrified about writing these commitments. I didn't know if they'd be good enough, make sense, get approved, yadda yadda yadda. After all, they were my first real assignment at my first real job, and I had no idea what to expect. There was even a fancy form that we had to submit these goals of ours, and they were sent off somewhere that seemed incredibly official and important sounding. Pretty much every intern that arrives and has to write commitments for the first time freaks out and probably stays late at work at least one night making sure that everything they write is perfect.

The second summer is a lot different. I started at the same time as a couple first-time interns, back in May, and while they were frantically gathering advice from anyone they could find, I was telling them not to worry. Because as far as any of my other returning intern friends or I could tell, that form went into a big, scary, official-sounding void. Nobody had to okay them, except your manager, who, in all likelihood, was going to, because they didn't really have a solid handle of what you were going to contribute that summer either. And besides, they could be changed. They were just a piece of paper, a consequence of working at a multinational, multibillion dollar, multi-thousand person company.

So I scribbled (actually typed) something down a half hour before the meeting where my boss was going to okay my commitments, and they were okayed, and they went off into the void, and I continued working on what I was already working on, and that piece of paper really did nothing for my "alignment" of my goals with the company's.

Until something went wrong. Not bad, horrible, somebody died wrong. But both of the projects that I was working on turned out to be six month projects instead of six week projects, and both of the groups I was working with thought that I should devote my remaining time solely to their project, and that the other one, was, of course, far less important. So I was left with a choice: Work myself to the bone and not enjoy the summer at all, or make a choice on my own about which project I should actually dedicate myself to.

I decided that I wasn't ready to give my entire summer up, and so I was left with (yet another!) choice. And for this one, I didn't have a whole lot of data. Certainly, my commitments were worthless here. They just said I'd work on both projects, and gave me no help with the prioritization question.

Luckily, not everyone had spent as little time writing commitments as I had. Somewhere up the line, there was actually an established set of goals. A couple of themes that we really wanted to come across strongly in the next release of our product, a couple of objectives for the improvement of the organization. And seeing those commitments, my choice was easy.

One of my projects spoke directly to the larger goals of the organization. Besides being something that I'd said I wanted to work on, it was a core component of something my grand-grand-manager had set out for all of us to accomplish. It made the decision easy, and it was also the perfect justification to the group that I ended up leaving.

The next question to ask is, "Was I right?" Were the goals that had been set up for us almost a year in advance still the most applicable? Was designing a system of alignment like this really the best way to remain agile in a fast-paced market? I want to say no. I want to say that such a rigid structure, passed down through an organization that is not known for being particularly flat, made us lose sight of what was really important, and just grab some low-hanging fruit. We couldn't have known about the opportunity that my second project ended up fostering. It was supercool, and supernew.

But if I'm being honest, I have to say yes. The project I ended up putting most of my time into the last few weeks was somewhat boring and tedious. It also tied up a lot of loose ends on a project that was already halfway out the door. It meant a polished product with less features, but in a time where we were being heavily criticized for poor product quality, it was exactly what we needed.

Now that we've got that solid base, the organization's commitments for the new fiscal year are to get cooler. Try things that haven't been done. When I go back, I hope to pick up the work on the fun project that I had to let slide. Because this is the right time for that. And someone with a lot more market knowledge and business experience and seniority already knew that. Also when I go back, I'll put some thought into my commitments. Because I'm realizing that this alignment issue is a lot bigger deal than a couple meetings a year. And our commitments are one of the best ways we've got for making sure everyone's got the same goals in mind.

(For reference and humor, the other things I wanted to be cheeky and write this "alignment" post about: How much my back and neck hurt, how hard it is to get a document to look nice, and my D&D characters.)