I’m a little… tired and uninspired lately. Not at work – but at not-work. Once home, I’m not driven to write, or code, or read that stack of papers. I’m actually reading novels. I’ve been beating myself up for procrastination. Wondering, how do you tell the difference between being a little burnt out and needing a break, and procrastination. My inner dialogue is arguing with itself about whether I’m genuinely tired and in need of a break, or in the throes of procrastination so deep that I’m developing involved reasons and stories for not-doing stuff, rather than constructive procrastination, or better, just getting shit done.
How could I spend a day curled up on my sofa with not one, but two novels? How could I read four novels in a week? A deadline is heading towards me and I’m just looking at it with interest, wondering, idly, when inspiration will hit – rather than going and seeking it out.
The pace of my life is different now than it used to be. In school, there were always periods of intense activity punctuated with crashes which I would spend consuming novels, or TV box-sets, or both. It was a series of sprints, and every few weeks or months I would crash, and regroup. Normally once at the end and once during each semester.
Now, my life is more like a marathon. And whilst over-achieving-productive-Cate yells at human-Cate “how could you just do nothing all weekend?!?!“, human-Cate responds – “because sometimes I need to do nothing!”
This week, I’ll give my 4th and 5th talks of the year. It will be my 5th trip this year. I’ll also host the first Girl Geeks KW. I’ve submitted a conference paper – twice. Since getting my Kindle in December, it tells me I’ve read 14 non-fiction books, plus a couple of physical ones (and 32 novels, most of them on planes). Maybe this is a normal amount of stuff to do on top of 40-50 hours a week at work, but I’m starting to feel like I’m planning sprints, but never allowing myself to crash – my baseline is now 40 hours at the office, whereas the baseline in grad school is nothing. I got sick twice this year, once with a week-long temperature, and once with a throat infection. During the first I spent one afternoon home sick.
For a while, I wondered if the problem was getting dressed every day – some of my most productive days used to be spent in my pj’s, but even if I didn’t work to draw lines around my day it seems insane to work from home when the office is one block away and so awesome, whilst my apartment is not set up for working, and also never contains any food (to be fair, I do see some people in the office in the pjs on occasion, but I don’t have the nerve). But perhaps the problem I’m having is adjusting to this new pace of life.
I’ve been thinking about sustainability, rather than balance. When I consider sustainability, apparently I don’t consider my need to sometimes do nothing. I’m going to have to figure out how to factor that in. At work, I tried blocking off a week that said “DNS – Cate is Anti-social“. It was a useful experiment that I’ll likely repeat. Can I do some equivalent for my personal life? Like a “No commitments, Cate is reading novels” weekend (or week!) a month?
Sustainability is a work in progress, and a constant balancing act. But – at least I’ve moved from novel-reading to structured procrastination. That’s progress, I guess.
A year ago I was coming out of a failed relationship, a paper rejection, and not having graduating on my (admittedly insane) goal schedule of 4 semesters. I was just about to start Extreme Blue – thinking that was the start of my career, but still clueless as to what my career would look like.
OK, I didn’t graduate on any kind of schedule. But I have two papers out. Extreme Blue was extremely awesome. I have the best job, I can’t believe how lucky I am and how amazing my colleagues are. I’m still figuring out what my career will look like, but I feel like it’s going in the right direction.
Awesome Ottawa is still going. Awesome Foundation KW will give our first award next week. Girl Geek Dinners KW has a speaker and tentative date for the end of this month. I live alone in a loft full of art. My boyfriend lives in the same building, which is pretty ideal. We’ve known each other for a long time, in fact we were in the same tutorial in first year. Things started changing a year ago – when we were in Seattle, he was there for work and I figured it was a good place to go for my birthday – and he moved to Canada just over a month ago.
Turning 25 was something of a low point, or came when I happened to be at a low point. But being 25 has been good to me; new people, new experiences, new places. Sure, some failures, but if I’m not failing I’m not pushing myself – as long as I learn from them, which I hope I have.
I don’t love the thought of being closer to 30 than 20. I have a lot left to do whilst I’m in my twenties! But, I’m tremendously fortunate, and it’s hard to get too upset about time passing, when the time I’m having is so good.
When I started work, I set myself a simple rule – one that I’d less deliberately followed last summer. At the end of the day, leave work computer at work. Do not put work email on phone.
It works. I enjoy my evenings and weekends. I wake up excited to go to the office. I have insights about how to solve problems when I’m away and focusing on other things. Most recently whilst out with a friend at the KW Symphony, I realized that I needed to redesign (and what the design should look like) the interface to the component I’d spent the day fighting with.
If work-life balance is the problem, then I seem to be doing OK. But, with just two variables, that makes it sound like a seesaw. I.e. if you’re balancing “life” and “work” then everything’s OK.
That seems like a vast over-simplification to me. I prefer to think about sustainability – to me, that means that the pieces that make up your life have an arrangement, and a quantity, such that if this is how life is going to look like for the next 3 months – 6 months – a year – that’s okay.
I’m inching towards sustainability. Helped by the fact that I can’t leave the country. But also because I’m working at it. Prioritizing the things that might not be concrete achievements, but that I need to make me happy. More novels. More time at the gym. More video games. More time hanging out with friends.
Of course, more of some things means less of others. Life is not a seesaw, it’s more like balancing a non-uniform disk. I’m trying to find the spot where I can stand without sliding off, but it’s hard. It’s hard because we all get the same 24 hours in the day, and we all get to choose how we spend them. And, it turns out, we can’t do more with less sleep (it’s good to be vindicated, I’ve long refused to compromise sleep!).
My problem is not, how do I divide my time between work, and not-work, because that’s been pretty easy. It’s how do I prioritize all the not-work things I’d like to do? The paper I’d like to finish. The project I’d like to build. The apartment I’ve still not quite finished arranging and organizing. The books I’d like to read. The blog posts I’d like to write. I’ve lost the habit of working late into the night, or at the evenings, and I have a hard time sitting down and doing anything much on the computer after work.
I wonder if it’s in part due to not having my “work spot” that I had in my old apartment, on my old sofa – a corner that I’d curl up with my laptop on and hours would pass, and stuff would be produced. My current sofa is pretty uncomfortable to work on. But maybe I just need the mental downtime outside the office.
My friend Tammy once told me the secret to her productivity was “incremental progress”. I think an evening a week and a space where I could focus might help. But I also enjoy doing whatever takes my fancy in my off-time. It’s new having freedom, and not feeling “the guilt” (a term I use to describe the constant feeling of “I should be working” that plagued me through university).
So, perhaps things are in balance, it’s just that I think I should be achieving more than I am. Nothing new there! Perhaps I should set aside “project time”, but for now I might just keep enjoying living, rather than waiting for things to be over in the hope of eventually enjoying life.
Achieving things is good. But, so is a killer workout followed by 10 hours sleep. A good novel. An evening of Lego Harry Potter (Amazon). Or martinis and food with friends.
Women, especially, seem to talk about work-life-balance – and it’s synonym, work-life-integration (a la IBM) a lot. But what does it mean?
The cop out, d’uh, answer is, different things to everyone.
I’ve come to think that what it means is that the pieces that make up your life (work, family, friends, exercise, hobbies, etc etc) have an arrangement, and a quantity, such that if this is how your life is going to look like for the next 3 months – 6 months – a year – that would be okay. You wouldn’t feel that something large was missing, nor would you feel like curling up into a ball and crying at the prospect.
Of course, it isn’t static. Life changes, and there will be spikes – good and bad – any change is a spike. At some point, you’d seek out new challenge, and that would be a spike. A change in circumstances would be a spike. A holiday would be a spike, or three spikes, as you try to get stuff finished up before leaving, take a break, and come back to a pile of work. Hopefully the spike in the middle would be a pleasurable one.
But my point is, balance is not happening when you’re at capacity and you think, yes, I can do the next three months as long as nothing goes wrong. When has that ever happened? Mostly you make it work, but at what cost? You look back and think “I missed out on X” – and that’s a loss. Even if X is just spending an afternoon in a coffee shop with a book, or a couple of movie nights with your partner or best friend – because living like this long-term leads to greater losses, of creativity, of peace of mind, of relationships. Spikes are okay, expected – but they should be spikes, not normal.
I’m currently reading The Power of Now – rather fuzzy and spiritual for my taste, however the focus on being present is making me think. In a balanced life, by which I mean, a sustainable life, we are not thinking “I just need to survive X and things will be OK, I’ll be calmer and happier and have more time for Y then”.
It’s a conclusion that screams out to me, because I’m pretty sure I’ve been thinking “I just need to survive this month” since at least July. I feel like I missed out so much in grad school – because of time, money, commitments, that I created a project (Post Grad Rehab) to help redress that. January is, thankfully, the last month I need to “survive”. Hopefully in February I will go back to living. But, without spending some time thinking how I’ve spent 6 months straight feeling like I’m on the edge of what I can cope with, will I just end up repeating this again and again?
It’s been helpful to make three lists. The first – what needs to change? Second, what’s working? Third, what do I need to figure out?
The first list comprises the things that I just feel I cannot carry on with. I think this is the most important, because these are the big huge spikes that are just derailing and draining me completely. The second list is about taking stock of what is helping – it’s a reminder to keep at these things, and maybe I can find patterns and discover more ways to live more sustainably. The third list are things that may be drowned out by the big things in the first list, but may become big things themselves if left unchecked.
Credit: flickr / Rohan Reid
What Needs To Change?
Travel. I have been jittering about like Tigger on speed. Since April, I’ve made 5 trips to the US, 3 to Kitchener (from Ottawa), one to Winnipeg, and I’ll make my third trip to Europe at the end of this week. And I moved! First, I’m fed up of living out of suitcases. Second, it’s made it difficult to have a routine. Third, I’m an ambivert and travel uses up my extraversion and leaves me unsociable – not great when I’ve just moved to a new place and need to meet people! I just can’t continue living like this, it’s not fun anymore. It’s not – “ooh, new place”. It’s “another plane and another timezone change? Shoot me now”.
Rehab. This is actually my focus for February, fittingly as it will be a year since I injured my shoulder. I have been dosed up on codeine and/or in pain for a year because of lack of health-care, not taking time to heal, and taking (did I mention?) too many planes.
What’s Working?
Work Stays at Work. At the end of the day, I close my laptop and leave it at the office. I have my work calendar – (my only calendar, now) but not work-email on my iPhone. I love my job, but this distinction – shut the laptop, leave it there, is helpful for drawing a line and doing other things.
Gym in the Morning. When I don’t work out in the morning, I seem to have better hair, but my mood is not better, and I have less energy. 6am is a bit early for spinning (7am would be ideal) but going in the evening when I’m tired and hungry and have experienced the cold is actually much harder! I need to keep working at this – hopefully once I’m done travelling for a bit I will be able to get up at 530am for spinning – and not go to bed at 8pm.
What Do I Need to Figure Out?
Email. Don’t laugh – I’m actually working on mobile gMail. Between that and managing my work email, my personal email is a desolate wasteland of dashed expectations. I have emails starred as important from more than 6 months ago that I haven’t got to. I have emails deemed important by priority inbox from over a month ago that I haven’t even read. This is not okay, especially since I’m getting almost no emails from annoying people lately and so these are all from people that I like and think deserve a prompt response. So first – I’m sorry, email me again if it’s important until I respond, (perhaps with a subject line like “CATE YOU ARE A TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING”). I think if I could get on top of it it would be OK, but I’ve thought that before. Mind you, that was some time ago…
Food. Because it’s a smaller office we don’t get dinner here. Yes, I realize, there are #firstworldproblems and there are #googlersproblems. But it is hard to get up and work out at 6am when I didn’t have dinner because there was nothing in the fridge and I decided it was too cold to pick up food. Maybe I could make some soup.
Social Life. This is really “hang out with people outside of work and make more friends”.
Projects. I’m transitioning out of my role with Awesome Ottawa because it’s hard to do remotely and it’s not as much fun when you’re not part of the debate over what to fund. I’ll miss it, but everything says – time to move on and the group is working out ways to organize so I’m optimistic about that. We’ve been lacking submissions on CompSci Woman and I think it’s because Maggie and I are not very good at chasing people to write for us (or getting hold of each other to talk about a new theme!) I need to talk to her to work out what to do about that. Then there are projects in KW that I want to take on, but it is a question of what I have capacity for. What do I spend time on? What do I opt out of?
Creating. I’m really lucky in that I get to work on software that people use every day and even with my dysfunctional relationship with email I do think it is genuinely something that is helpful to people (who haven’t discovered Twitter – I’m kidding. Mostly). That’s awesome. Create something useful, absolutely what I want to do. But I don’t want to stop creating things just because they are interesting, or fun, and I don’t want to stop writing here, either.
I have a new mentee, her name’s AY Daring and you should check her out because she’s awesome.
The other day we were talking about what she wants to do with her life, and she has this great stuff that she’s doing with respect to LGBT youth, and I said, “sure, that’s great but will there be a need for that in 20 years?” Honestly I hope there won’t be – I mean, look at how far we’ve come in terms of acceptance as a society.
This led me to talk about how you don’t want to use the Waterfall approach to planning your life – an agile approach is better because 1. we live in times where things are changing fast and 2. I think an agile approach to life planning makes for a more interesting life because you will be able to take advantage of options that don’t even exist now.
This is not to say that AY may not have found her life’s passion. Just that she doesn’t need to make that decision now.
Credit: wikipedia
Anyway, let’s break down what the waterfall method is. Basically, it’s the idea that first you identify all the requirements of your project, and then you design it. Only when the design is done do you implement it. Eventually, it’s all implemented and you test it. And this is normally when you discover that either the project has taken so long that it is obsolete, or that it is extremely broken and you go back to fix it. In theory, eventually the project is maintained. The reality is that the majority of software projects are late and/or over budget or fail completely.
The waterfall method is a terrible way to plan a software project, and perhaps a worse way to plan your life. The parallel would be, school is the requirements phase and you would never leave it and join the real world – you’d definitely be over budget then!
Agile is based on iterative or incremental development. Iterations in the scrum process are typically 1-2 weeks, and every day there is a daily stand up where you say what you did yesterday, what you hope to do today, and what roadblocks you have. The parallel in life might be weekly or monthly checkins with your mentor(s).
I’m not saying that big picture is not important, but there is no need – I would say even, no point – planning out your whole life in advance. First up – choosing what you want to spend your whole life on is a huge decision. Choosing what project you’re devoting yourself to for the next 3 months to 1 year is a smaller, and more realistic way to go. A theme, or general direction is more than enough. Identifying places where you might be lacking skills and choosing a path that ensures you build them as you go along allows you to stay flexible.
I am 25 and I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. That’s OK! I just try and prepare myself for the new – and even more awesome things – that will become possible as I go. I have a vague, but ambitious theme of world changing. Awesome Ottawa fits into this (more awesome is always better than less awesome), as does CompSci Woman (need more women in tech to code a better world). What skills am I working on right now? Leadership – because it seems like a crucial skill for world changing. Communication – because I need to be able to articulate what I’m doing and why it’s important, and also I must share what I’m learning along the way. Software Engineering – much as industrial research appealed to me I decided that I needed to find a job where I would ship products; I think this is a really important thing to know.
AY’s theme seems to be community building. But themes change and evolve, so we’ll see. Meanwhile at our next mentoring chat I’ll be asking – what did you do since we last spoke? What do you plan to do next? And what’s standing in your way?
You’ve probably noticed, but our theme for September/October is – “How Did I End Up In CompSci?” – it’s a question that interests me, because for the first three years of university it was something I asked myself a lot.
Not in the way, “Wow I love what I do! How did I get here?!” – rather in the way “How did things go so terribly, terribly wrong?”
I’d ended up there after a blip in my tempestuous affair with chemistry – what I was originally supposed to be studying at university – the adventures that left me covered in acid one day (bye bye lab coat), that dyed a small corner of our brand new chemistry lab pink (ahh potassium permanganate), and created the toxic green goo that I still remember fondly ended at the end of first year. My boyfriend at the time tried to kill himself over winter break and I missed some exams as a result. Time came for the retake, I thought I was late, bottled it, and didn’t manage to walk into the examination hall.
It’s strange how you can look at the path you took, and see those moments – the ones that changed everything.
But perhaps, CompSci was always going to be more suited for me. For starters, I’m a complete klutz and destroyed an inordinate amount of glass stuff, and left that lasting pink stain on the lab. But also, I learned HTML at 12 or 13 and loved it. I went to boarding school at 16 – in large part because the teaching of computing (in fact, “IT”) at the high school I attended was so appalling. There I learned C, and coded a tic-tac-toe with a smart strategy. Then at 17 the course changed tack and I became shamefully proficient in MS Access (a skill that resulted in 2 summers gainful employment, not that that eased the pain). Perhaps that was what drove me away from CompSci. And, having an amazing chemistry teacher who was also my tutor, my passion became chemistry instead. Chemistry is everywhere – but then in the 21st century, so are computers. Anyway, I chose Edinburgh because I wanted to study three different subjects. And, because Imperial College gave me a BBB offer which I didn’t think was high enough for me to deserve to go there (to think, if they’d offered me AAB I might now have a joint degree in Chemistry and Law. I should write and thank them).
My Director of Studies (like an advisor) at Edinburgh signed me up for CompSci as an elective. Mid-way through the semester, I went to him and said “I hate it”. He bribed me to stay, promising to get me into Economics the following year. In another twist, I ended up in Economic History instead because neither of us knew what the difference was. It turned out, that Economic History is all the dull parts of Economics and all the tedious parts of History. Barely having studied History at all (and not since I was 12) I did not do terribly well at that, and a broken computer + death of my friend’s mother + blonde moment attaching an assignment to an email nearly meant that I had to resit second year as a result. Luckily it was resolved and I switched to Mac and moved onto third year.
I don’t remember what it was that made me hate CompSci so much – was it all the odd boys who washed so infrequently? In general, CompSci lecturers don’t explain things well and I remember one saying – like it was a revelation! – that you couldn’t expect students to show up knowing already able to code and install Linux. I remember struggling with the concept of Object-Oriented, I could explain it, but I hadn’t internalized it. I remember feeling like an oddity. In first year, I was a size 4 with a penchant for short skirts and cute hats. I did not look like the other compscis. I could not debate the merits of the different Unix installs. I did not play video games. I liked to be awake during daylight and leave the lab by 9pm. I drank caffeine, but it wasn’t my life-source. Nor was junk food. Luckily I had an amazing friend who was older than me and a PhD student at another university. He taught me basically everything I knew via MSN, and was sympathetic when I cried because I didn’t think I could do it.
Having made it to third year, I took more math-based courses, including functional programming. My friend and mentor was an amazing functional programmer and that was his area of research. With his help I really got functional programming and, apart from one disturbing night when I dreamed I was a recursive function, things started to improve. Once I’d made sense of functional programming, OO started to make sense too. I learned about JUnit and unit testing. Moving to Eclipse and abandoning the terminal meant that I picked typos up as I went along and no longer had those horrible moments when I’d compile and have 100+ errors. I was offered an internship for the summer, and that was awesome. I worked on an R&D project and coded a share tracker for cellphones using J2ME and J2EE. I spent my summer writing code and figuring stuff out with the help of the other interns – who were all really nice and normal. I started to feel less inadequate. At the end of the summer, I realized that I wanted to be a programmer; I just wasn’t quite ready to start the rest of my life yet.
Towards the end of third year I’d actually started to make friends with people in CS. In fourth year there were a group of us and I stopped hanging out with geography students quite so much and we stuck together. We’d hang out and drink, complain about our workload and profs, play Sonic the Hedgehog (my inadequacy at video games stopped being something that excluded me and was instead amusing to us), and Scrabble, and poker. I finally stopped feeling like I was the worst at everything, and surrounded by people who were less arrogant and disparaging I started to enjoy it. Sometimes people even asked me for help! I even ended up TAing because the first year course started with functional programming and I actually had experience in that. The bitchy comment some guy made about “why was [I] TAing” was easy to ignore, because the first years liked me. And I knew I was a better TA because I remembered finding it so hard and I sympathized rather than patronized. In all, fourth year was hard work, but awesome.
But when it was done, I didn’t find a job. I left. Perhaps because I felt I’d been studying to the exclusion of everything else, or perhaps I just bottled joining the real world. I went adventuring. Taught programming in the US, trained in martial arts in China, wondered around Europe, qualified as a ski instructor in Canada, went back to the UK and worked for an admin department at a University, helping them transform a collection of spreadsheets into a database – that was when I realized that I could do stuff with data, and answer questions that no-one had thought to ask. Eventually, I applied to grad school because I didn’t think I knew enough to join the real world, and only banks seemed to be hiring.
Started grad school. Got offered a job developing programming curriculum.. Realized I still didn’t know enough, and grad school wasn’t the place to learn it. Felt lost. Read a lot of books. Resuscitated WISE. Started blogging. Took control of my research and loved it. Got offered a summer job teaching programming in Shanghai. Took it. Read more books. Came back and continued researching. Had something I wrote go viral. TA’d in French and my students liked me. Started doing public speaking. Kept reading books. Developed another curriculum. Got offered a place on Extreme Blue. Instigated Awesome Ottawa. Had an amazing summer at IBM.
I reread what I’d written here a number of times, feeling like I should make it shorter. But perhaps it’s fitting that I have a long, slightly rambling story. It’s taken me a long time – 9 years since I started learning C! – to get to this point, and my search for, what? Self-acceptance? Self-confidence? Has taken me across 3 continents, at least 12 countries and included non-CS career aspirations from patent lawyer to ski instructor.
And so I leave you where this – the prologue to my career – ends. A rainy August evening in Amsterdam. An international phone call. An amazing job offer. Your protagonist, finally at peace with her trip down the rabbit hole, exclaims, “Wow I love what I do! How did I get so incredibly lucky as to end up here?!”
My friend Maggie tells me I’m an introvert. Not because I’m shy, or because large groups make me nervous, but because I don’t get my energy from being around people. I was surprised by this, because I guess I’ve always considered myself to be extroverted and so I asked another close friend and he said that was nonsense because I’m happy to be the center of attention and the life of a party.
It doesn’t really matter which of them is right – introvert, extrovert – it’s is just a label. Thinking about it, I’ve decided that I need to be both. Too much time alone makes me angsty, but I don’t think someone who was truly an extrovert would love living alone as much as I do.
When my life is very social, though, I do get to these points where I desperately need to be alone. Too much stuff going on, too many people makes me stressed. When I get to about a week without any “Cate-time” I will literally block off time in my calendar to make sure I get it. I got to that point last week.
Perhaps it’s not really about introvert vs. extrovert. Perhaps the real problem I’m having, is being a maker living on a manager schedule. Hour by hour blocks and lots of meetings and jamming about pitches and posters might be manageable, but then my personal life is on manager-time as well… and it’s too much. It means that I get to the point where it’s mid-afternoon on a day when we’ve spent all that day working on our pitch and I feel strongly that if I have about half an hour before I’m going to crack from too many people, too much talking. From the article linked above (emphasis mine):
I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.
My whole team was overloaded like this, and so we called it quits and I escaped and – bliss – had a whole evening of maker time, which I spent coding. It’s interesting that most of the technical people find the pitching stressful.
I would have thought I would be OK, since I do a fair amount of public speaking. However, there are two things that make giving talks by myself different:
It’s one aspect of what I do where I do my best at the time and try and improve for next time, sure, but good enough is fine. Because I won’t teach that exact same class again any time soon, or give that same talk.
The talks I give alone are either are made in maker time – in fact, require maker time to create because it’s all about connecting the dots and inspiring.
In what we’re working on, we give the same pitch nearly every day. Each time we have something new to work on. We have thrown out my section and started over on it more times that I can count. It’s exhausting. The idea might need maker time, but the pitching and the discussions and the hammering away at it until it shines – that’s manager time.
So I’m going to make a conscious decision that as my work-schedule moves to manager-time, I’m going to shift my personal life to maker-time. It satisfies my need to be alone, and my need for unstructured time in which to create. Coding distracts me from the stress of pitch-pitch-pitch.
Strange that the final stretch and living on manager-time is the biggest stress I have. But good to know.
How about you? Do you live on maker-time or manager-time? How do you cope when you’re on the wrong one?
The other day I was having lunch with some other interns, and they were discussing their GPA. It made me question what I was doing, surrounded by 20-22 year-olds who think that a GPA is a measure of achievement and/or a defining characteristic. I mean, to participate in the conversation should I calculate my GPA? I don’t even know how. Should I point out that nonsense courses to lift your GPA don’t actually make you a better programmer? Should I keep my mouth shut and edge away, because afterall I don’t fully understand the Canadian undergraduate system… except this focus I see on grades over substance makes me extremely grateful that I got my undergrad from Edinburgh.
Being at intern at 25 is… weird. Yes, it’s an amazing opportunity. Yes, we have great training. But I can’t shake the feeling that I should be doing more than being an intern at this stage in my life.
My friend Maggie (another intern) is planning her next steps at the moment. She’s incredibly together and only 20 – she makes me feel 1) old and 2) clueless. She was telling me recently, that she’s figured out that before she can work out what she wants to do and where she wants to go, she needs to figure out her priorities.
This made me realize – I’ve been picking themes by which I prioritize my choices. When I left Edinburgh to be a nomad, I prioritized an interesting life and being interesting myself (Penelope Trunk on an interesting vs a happy life). Arriving in Ottawa, I was lost, but my theme evolved to making change, or being the change I want to see – though taking a different approach to programming curricula and the talks I give, through WISE, and through the Awesome Foundation. Even working on defining influence – influence can be seen as the ability to make change.
So for my next step – what’s my theme going to be? I want it to be about how programmers can change the world; through better software, facilitating remote working, enabling connections across geographical barriers and – crucial in this age of information overload – helping people better manage the information they have available to them. What does this mean? A programming job. Finding an open source project to contribute to.
Where can I do this? IBM is a great place to work on all of this, as is the company where I’ll interview next week. And now I’ve identified my theme, I can look out for other places where I could chase this next dream.
How about you – what’s your priority for your next step?
Post-breakup, I took stock of what I was doing and decided I needed a break. I spent days in my pajamas and stopped running about. One of the things I gave myself, was the 5 season Ally McBeal: The Complete Series boxset.
I set myself a rule that between each episode I had to do something productive, theorizing that once I was done watching the show, I would be OK. My apartment would be organized and I would be over it. The productive thing between each episode? That fell by the wayside somewhat by the end of season 3. But the box set is done, and I am OK.
More than OK.
The hardest part of breaking up has not been learning to live alone, or not having my ex in my life. It’s been the friends who didn’t call. The one who – worse – discussed me with my ex and the huge argument that followed with both of them. And the scene in the restaurant when another said something completely inappropriate that I can’t bring myself to go into here.
But just under two years ago, I came to Ottawa knowing no-one. So if I have to start again from scratch, or almost, I can. And I know that even if it feels like I’m starting over, I’m not. The friends that did reach out, I value more. I have a network. I have an internship with great coworkers. I have organizations I’m involved with. I have opportunities.
So I’ve been rebuilding my life here. And it’s completely different. I sleep earlier, I eat differently, I work out more and I’m less defensive and stressed.
And, I’m focusing – guilt free – on what I will do when I graduate. I’m going after my dream job – which might take me to the other side of the world. Even if I don’t get that, there are other opportunities. I’ve had some great experiences in Ottawa, but I’m ready to leave this city and move on to a new adventure.
In fact, I’m kinda excited to do so.
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