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.