introduction

This isn't the first time I've appeared in the blogosphere.

I think I started my first online diary when I was around thirteen, and I really hope I've deleted all trace of those early writings. I went back and reread most of what I'd written sometime before I headed off to college, and it was incredibly embarassing. Part of it was the subject matter... lots of fights with my mom, boys I had crushes on. But the biggest thing was the online voice I'd developed for myself. I knew everything back then, and everything I wrote was clearly the most important thing anyone had ever written. I tried to make posts about macaroni and cheese sound eloquent, and was so proud of myself when I came up with alliterative and rhyming subject lines. I also wrote absolutely awful poetry.

In short, I sounded like a thirteen-year-old, and that was mildly unbearable.

I spent a lot of time after that tirelessly revising every post I wrote, trying to make sure that nothing I wrote would ever embarass the future me. (By the way, that failed miserably.)

I love pretty much everything that I publish, and can't stand it a couple of weeks later. Sometimes when I'm particularly clever, I'll still be proud of a post a year later. That's about the limit. Maybe someday my online voice will stop changing and I'll be able to read my older posts without cringing.

Anyway, I've never really stopped writing, though the blog posts became less and less frequent as I actually had things to do besides wax poetic about what I was eating. (For reference, I do still love mac & cheese.) Now it's time for a new blog, and here I am, back at the customary intro post.

It's not actually the same this time though, because this blog is somewhat compulsory. I don't mean to apply any of the negative connotations, just stating a fact. I'm writing because I have to. Usually this does horrible things for my writing, so we'll see. I will admit that this isn't flowing particularly smoothly, and I keep stopping to revise. Oh well.

Anyway, compulsory. For a class called, "Designing for Effective Change". (I hate the periods/quotation mark issue. I tend to care less about what's technically correct and more about what looks good. That's actually my opinion on a lot of things, I'm sure it'll come up again later.) It's a class that I've frequently been telling people I'm utterly excited about, but fail miserably at competently describing.

It'll certainly be different than most of my classes. I started at the University of Illinois as a Bioengineering major, thinking I wanted to do something with genetics. After a couple of years, I knew that was definitely not what I actually wanted to do. I'd also been taking some Computer Science classes, and had helped a CS organization run a conference, which I totally loved, and decided maybe what I wanted to do was Computer Science, so I added it as a second major. (I was wrong, I just loved conference planning.)

I've got one more semester left, and I've finally figured out what I actually wanted to do the whole time. A major in oraganization/psychology/graphic design/technology. Too late to change majors, but for the most part I've found a job I love as a program manager at tech company, so that's a plus. To give some insight as to what that means, my projects over the past couple of summers have included a lot of research, coming up with new feature ideas, specification writing, scheduling, working with software developers, meeting with various other teams across the company, and other things that would sound a lot more exciting if I could actually mention any specifics.

I think I am most excited about this class because the final project is about curriculum reform, and I think the Engineering curriculum at this school is, across the board, pretty miserable and does a terrible job of preparing our graduates for anything besides sitting in a corner and doing calculations. I'd be afraid to let them talk to customers, talk to their teammates, design a project, heck, design anything. I'm hoping this class lets me do cool things that aren't boring. Also it lets me fit in all the classes I need to graduate with both my majors and honors, so that was another thing it had going for it.

But mostly I'm just really excited to talk about people and groups and change. Less excited to talk about any of Malcolm Gladwell's books. I think he'd make a terrific fiction writer, but his non-fiction kind of scares me, and I hope we don't consider him an authority figure on any subject. He seems to just come up with an interesting opinion on a subject and find a couple of studies that support his opinion. I'm not sure I actually disagree with him, but I haven't yet seen him present a solid, concrete, scientific argument that could convince me. Also, he gets some basic biology facts wrong, which bugs me a lot. I'd like to suggest this article as required reading to accompany his books: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/books/18kaku.html

Finally, a disclaimer. My current online voice is pretty sarcastic and a bit biting, which I'm sure has become obvious by now. I'm also quite open and honest. Qualities I'm sure I'll be proud of for at least another couple of weeks.