Tag: Reflections

The Story of a Girl Who Tripped, Fell, and Ended up in CS

Credit: flickr / bitzcelt

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?!”

Credit: flickr / Rob Sheridan

Originally posted on CompSci Woman.

September 9, 2010
Graduate School

Credit: flickr / Themis Chapsis

I went back to school because I didn’t think I knew enough to go and join the real world, yet.

Then I got to graduate school, and realized it wasn’t the place to learn it.

I’m not a better programmer than I was before I came. I know a little more about some things, but not a whole lot.

But – graduate school gives your space for other things. Defining my thesis topic has give me a better idea of what interests me. I’ve been able to experiment with different presentation styles, and become better at public speaking. I found that I had something to write about on this blog – and – still incredible to me – people would be interested to read it. Discovered that I can bring something to the table in conversations about technology, and education, and the future. Expanded my horizons by teaching and presenting in French. Learned how to write better. Learned to read academic papers, they’re not always as boring as I thought. Realized that other graduate students know no more than I do. Some may even know less. Tried this being a leader malarky. Tried to find balance in my life. Experienced being an expat. Felt lost. Felt lonely. Felt a great sense of achievement when I realized I’d come over with nothing and built a life.

Saw that the amount I didn’t know was even bigger than I expected. Realized a PhD was not the place going to help me get that knowledge.

Gained confidence – I still don’t feel I know enough, but realize I never will. I no longer want to postpone joining the real world, in fact – I’m excited to be a part of it.

Some people say graduate school is a terrible idea. But I’ve got as much out of it as I expected to – perhaps more – it’s just it wasn’t the type of value I was expecting.

January 20, 2010
Decisions

I have a confession about almost every big decision I’ve made. Going to Edinburgh, working in the US the first time, training in China, coming to Canada.

Someone else suggested it to me.

The other big things have mostly been opportunities, that I’ve said yes to.

Each one of these has taken me outside of my comfort zone.

With the end of my masters in sight, I’m seeking out advice and suggestions on what to do next. I’m drawing up a list of companies to apply to and opportunities to take advantage of.

I think I’m average, but the ideas I get from the people I know, suggest they don’t agree. The opportunities that have presented themselves to me lately, force me to acknowledge that even if I am average, I’m at least presenting myself and pushing myself outside my comfort zone in a way that is not. I think this is how you become not-average, but I’ll tell you when I get there.

Here’s the suggestion I received today:

Suggestion from @pinemud

I guess we’ll see if he’s right.

Seek out people who you respect, who believe in you. There are just 24 hours in each day and you need to sleep – don’t waste them on people who run you down.

Trust the suggestions from those people – even if you’re not sure you’re as capable as they think you are. There’s likely a reason why they believe in you.

Say yes. Sometimes you’ll fail, but that too is a learning experience.

Keep saying yes, even when you fail. This is how you eventually succeed.

December 24, 2009

Perspectives on Perfectionism

I was reading random posts on Penelope Trunk’s blog last week when I came across one on perfectionism. Basically, she was saying that perfectionism is stupid.

I have some perfectionist tendencies, but I’m not going to argue with this. I think perfectionism can mean you avoid the feeling of OK, what next, what’s inspiring me today? – you’re always busy “perfecting”, never happy with what you’ve done. My perfectionism has definitely calmed down, and I think this is in part due to some of the experiences I had on my gap year, so I’m going to share them with you.

China

In 2007, I spent 3 months in China, 2 of them training in martial arts near Yantai in Northern China. I trained with a shaolin monk, for about 6 hours a day Monday-Friday. I existed on perhaps 1000 calories a day. It was intense, but being so focused on the physical was interesting. I spent a lot of time reflecting. I lived for a week without internet access (where we were was pretty remote, Yantai is a small city and we were over an hour drive away).

Shaolin Monks can spend a year working on a form. A form is a memorized series of movements, like a dance with intent. It has to be perfect before you move to the next one – the first is a basic form, no weapons. Then you move on to the staff form, after that there are swords and stuff. It’s pretty awesome. The Westeners where we were, didn’t have to spend a year on a single form – it took around a month for each (where half the days were spent on Sanda – Chinese kickboxing – and fitness). But the quest for perfection was still extreme to me. One of the masters I trained with would threaten to deny us lunch if we hadn’t perfected something, and we would have to train instead. When you’re hungry constantly and lunch is where you get most of your nourishment, this is quite terrifying. Another time, we were doing drills of kicks to his count. I missed a count, and he hit me with his staff. It hurt, but I had to carry on. I effectively did extra (because I did the kick on the count as well) but it didn’t matter. Perfection was what was important.

There was a girl who’d been there longer than me, she was just 17 and behaved like a child – and a bully – too. I never fully internalized the quest for perfection, but she had – in front of the master, at least. Elsewhere she drank alcohol, slacked off, and was a bully. My master, from something he said to me, seemed to know this too.

Lesson? You can pretend to be perfect, but people will see through you if you don’t live by it. Perfectionism in one aspect of your life will not make you a good person, and will not make people like you.

View from the Top — View from the top of the hill we ran up and down 4 times on a Friday

On Fridays, we would run up and down the hill in the picture above, there were steps. Many people didn’t manage it their first week (you’re already exhausted) but I was determined to. It took about 2 hours, and I didn’t do it perfectly. I walked parts of it. I looked a mess. But I did it. The picture on the right shows what I looked like at the top for the last time. I’m beat! The next time was a lot easier.

Lesson? Sometimes, getting it done is what counts. Don’t opt out of something because you’re worried you won’t do it perfectly.

Me after my first 4 times up the hill — Me, after my first 4 times up the hill – killer! But I made it.

Europe

In Europe, I traveled with a guy I’d met in China. He was older than me, and frustrated that his life hadn’t turned out as he expected it too. He complained – a lot – he took things out on me – a lot. We had some fun too, though, and so when we parted ways in Switzerland, I thought I would be sad and miss him. Actually, I was just relieved.

Lesson? You can plan, and you can check all the boxes but things can still go awry. Complaining won’t change that, so you’ll just have to make the best of it.

Have you seen the Gaudi Building in Barcelona? From the outside, it looks like whoever created it was high as a kite.

But from the inside, it’s the most beautiful and light-filled building I’ve ever been in.

Inside the Gaudi Building - beautiful and full of light — Inside the Gaudi Building – beautiful and full of light

Lesson? Even if something doesn’t seem perfect, it can be.

Canada

After, I headed to Canada to train as a ski instructor. My parents had been learning to ski with the BASI ski school shortly before I left (I was with them). The difference was fascinating. The BASI way is to do a snowplough perfectly before you progress. The result is, my mother does an exemplary snowplough (better than mine!) but I wonder whether she will progress to anything more. She’s committed to it, but so much effort into it, spent so long doing it she’s scared of the alternative.

The Canadian way treats the snowplough as a tool. You have to do it good enough, and then you progress. The purpose of it is to start you moving on snow, get the sensation of the weight on your downhill ski and a sense of where your balance is… and that’s it. Then you progress.

Lesson? Don’t expend too much effort on something that’s just a tool, a means to an end. Don’t commit yourself so fully to something that should just be a stepping stone on your way to something greater.

In skiing, the quest for perfectionism comes later. I’m a perfectionist on my carving technique, I like to ski fast so I can’t really afford not to be. I’ll spend hours doing drills, focusing on where every part of my body is and making sure all my movements are in harmony. But – I want to be a great skiier, and the better I get the further I realize I am from that. For someone who just wants to ski for fun, good enough is fine.

The US

Back in the US again, I ended up working with a guy who’s job was impeded by his drinking habits. My inner perfectionist came out, and I kept picking up the pieces, anticipating where he would screw up and making sure I compensated for his shortcomings.

I resented him so much. He was having a great time, and I was not. I was exhausted by picking up the pieces and disheartened by him having been given the job that I proved every day I could do better. And I thought that someone would notice this, that our boss would realize that he was incompetent and drunk. But she didn’t. In fact she told me that I should have let him fail. I never knew, given the nature of our job, when would have been an OK time to do that. His mistakes all seemed too big, his oversights were on things too important.

Lesson? Don’t be a perfectionist for someone else. You won’t be noticed, because no-one notices disasters that don’t happen, mistakes that aren’t made.

The real kicker? He got the job again next year. I ended up in China, which is cooler, but still. I heard on the grapevine that he didn’t suck. So a lot of what I was doing he could have done all along, he just chose to let me take responsibility – and I chose to take it.

Now…

We spend a lot of time and energy seeking out perfection in places where it’s unrealistic. Sometimes we think we’ve worked so hard and are so talented that what we deserve will come to us. That’s nonsense. It wasn’t the case for the guy I traveled with in Europe, and it wasn’t the case for me in the US. Perfectionism is a free pass to ignore the bigger picture, but when you look at it… why would you want to? The bigger picture is a much more beautiful, exciting thing.

Learning to let stuff go when it’s not “done” is scary. But the thought of clinging on to things and missing out is, I think, scarier. Last week I handed in my report for my combinatorial algorithms class, on the clique finding I’d done for Twitter graphs. It wasn’t perfect, there was lots more I could have done, and wanted to. But here’s the bigger picture – my supervisors and I hope there’s something publishable there. So why worry about the micro-picture, my grade, when the macro – a publication – is so much better?

December 21, 2009

The Accidental Programmer
So far this is the best new name I have for my blog. I’m still brainstorming, but this is a story I want to tell and now is as good a time as any.

I wrote, a while ago, about how I don’t have Imposter Syndrome any more. Perhaps it would have been better to say, I mostly don’t have impostor syndrome. Sometimes I don’t feel geeky enough. I don’t subscribe to xkcd (although I do appreciate the ones that I see), and I’ve never watched Star Wars or Star Trek, don’t understand the distinction, and I’m not particularly interested to either. I don’t drink Red Bull and stay up all night coding.

The nerdiest thing I ever did was get fed up with Windows when I was 16 and wiped it off my hard-drive, replacing it with RedHat. Only I was at boarding school, with no internet connection, and couldn’t download all the necessary drivers. So my dad took it in to PC World, they fixed it, and I put up with Windows until I eventually got my first Mac nearly 3 years later.

I learned HTML at 13 or 14, but didn’t learn to code until I was 16 (when I learned C in school). Then I went to University to study Chemistry, I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do but I liked making stuff go fizz and occasionally burst into flames. My DOS (director of studies) put me in Computer Science as an elective, and I took the mandatory math course.

Part way through my first semester, I went to him and said “I hate Computer Science”. I was frustrated by being taught programming through slides, not doing (I still don’t think this works well, especially not for beginners), and weirded out by all the boys who didn’t seem to wash regularly. I was also completely mystified by “Object Orientated Programming”, having learned procedurally. I could explain it beautifully, but the concept just made no sense to me. I remember a professor commenting in my third year that Computer Science had changed because you couldn’t expect everyone coming in to have taught themselves a good chunk of what they needed to know anymore – because there were non-geeks. Non-geeks like me.

My DOS bribed me to stay in CS for another semester, promising he’d get me into Economics the following year. Anyway, it turned out Chemistry didn’t have enough explosions for me and I ended up still in CS, and Economic History rather than Economics (another story altogether, and not such a happy one… Economic History is all the boring bits of History and all the non-math-sy bits of Economics. It’s very dull). I guess at some point I started to like it, and then to love it. I wrapped my head around OO, discovered Recursion and Functional Programming (which I really liked) and met people who, if rather more nerdy than me, were at least clean. I interned at a wonderful company which gave me so much more confidence in terms of my ability, and I graduated with a good 2:1.

I wanted to be a programmer, but I wasn’t sure where, or what kind, and I wasn’t yet ready to settle down, wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to grad school or not, so I took off. I worked in the US, trained in martial arts in China, hung out in Europe for a while, qualified as a ski instructor in Canada, worked for a bit in the UK and then went back to the US to work, ended up here in Canada at uOttawa. I’d realized I wanted to know more stuff and as only banks seemed to be hiring (oh, the irony!) it was a good time to go back to school.

In the US I worked as a programming instructor, and after the second summer they recruited me to develop the programming curriculum. It also lead to the opportunity to work in China, last summer. In the UK, I worked to transform the zillions of spreadsheets a department was using to organize themselves into a database, that was easier to update and maintain and easier to extract information out of.

The job in the UK really hit it home to me how we as programmers often don’t really understand how “normal people” use computers, which ultimately means that we don’t always know who our users are. People who don’t realize what a little know-how can do, and how if you represent your data the right way it can be a goldmine of information, with little effort. It’s now something that I try to consider, and it influences my research and general attitude to users.

I read this article the other day – don’t let your strengths become weaknesses. It’s fascinating, because it explores this idea of how your weaknesses have corresponding strengths. So if my weaknesses that I’ve been talking about here are:
- Lack of confidence
- Not feeling enough of a geek
My corresponding strength are:
- Lack of confidence -> Patience as an instructor: I remember what it’s like to be confused so it’s easier for me to be patient when my students get confused. When they make an endless loop, I find it funny rather than frustrating.
- Not feeling enough of a geek -> empathy with end users, and a better understanding of people for whom computers are a facilitator, not the be-all-and-end-all, or even the most important thing. An interest in how computers can be useful to regular users, rather than just technologically or programmatically more advanced.
So an accident? Yes! A happy one? Yes! And if I don’t always quite feel like I belong, that’s not necessarily a bad thing – it can lead to other opportunities.
November 16, 2009
When 1 Week = 7 Steps Back

Credit: flickr / Random Tony

Last week, and at the start of this week I was feeling really worn out and disillusioned. Things were taking longer than they should, and despite working a lot and effectively I really wasn’t making the progress I wanted to be. I felt like I wasn’t achieving anything. What this really means, is that on Monday I worked from around 8 in the morning to 11pm at night (- perhaps 2 hours) and yet didn’t cross anything off The List. Tuesday I started a little later, but ultimately didn’t cross anything off the list either. Or Wednesday.

I feel this real need to make progress, achieve something concrete, day in, day out. I’m aware that as a grad student there’s a risk of ending up at this place where you show up but nothing concrete happens, and this continues until you’ve been there for several years and people joke about whether you’re ever going to graduate.

I don’t want to be that person.

My far off goal, is finishing my thesis. It’s impossibly far away, and too large to conceptualize, so I have to break it into smaller, manageable tasks that mean I’ll make it, in increments. Like reading a paper a day. Coding a new visualization. Writing up all the papers I’ve read that are covered in notes into my work-in-progress. But then sometimes I end up spending a week on stuff that doesn’t help achieve these goals – like marking, or a ridiculously large assignment for the course I have to take. And then at the end of the week I look back and think, well I worked really hard, and I got this done, but in a months time (or even just another week) will anyone care? Will I care?

It’s frustrating. And so every day, I set myself an unrealistic list of tasks. If something (for example, the presentation we made this week) takes longer than expected and I don’t achieve them, the following day’s list is even more unmanageable. And it continues. This is why the “Week in Brief” and my “Goals” list are so helpful, because when I’m trying to do 10+ high level tasks in a week I have to give myself a reality check and admit, that’s never going to happen.

Setting goals that push me but don’t overwhelm me is something I’m working on. Because when I’m overwhelmed I’m not effective, I’m just overwhelmed. I’m not getting stuff done, I’m not motivated, I’m contemplating hiding from the world and wondering if everything would be OK if there were just 30 hours in the day. Panicking because I think I’ve missed an important appointment when I’ve in fact just misread my calendar.

The irony here? After all that stressing at the start of the week, there’s a chance I might just cross everything off the list this week.

Lesson? Start big tasks at the start of the week. Postpone smaller ones to the end of the week. Achieving large tasks motivates and inspires me to achieve the smaller ones. Vice versa does not work so well. Spend more time doing and less time scheduling.

November 15, 2009
Awesome Quote from Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky – Why I Ignore 5 Year Plans

Gives you something to think about, huh? This stuff that’s so natural to us is new and game changing. Who knows what will be different in 5 years time? I can’t wait.

October 18, 2009
Effectiveness, not Efficiency

Someone once described me as “scarily efficient”. I have to say, I took it as a huge compliment. However after reading The 4-Hour Work Week (Tim Ferriss – Amazon) and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R Covey – Amazon) I’ve been focusing more on Effectiveness. There’s an important distinction. You can be efficient at doing trivial things, effectiveness is focusing your energy on things that will allow you to achieve the most important things.

One of my friends was talking to me this evening about how she’s not achieving what she wants to, and about how she feels like having a personal life eats into her “work time”. I hope I gave her some reasonable advice, so I’m going to reproduce it here.

1. Get Some Perspective

Read The 4-Hour Work Week and 7 Habits (Amazon) and learn the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Think about the things that you do that are efficient, rather than effective, and whether it’s possible to eliminate them.

2. Don’t be Overwhelmed

My friend has big problems keeping up with her RSS feeds. But if you’re overwhelmed to the point where you’re not reading anything, you’re not keeping up with what’s important. Incidentally, if you’re getting more articles than you can read a day and you stop trying to keep up, you’re still getting more articles than you can read a day and ultimately it won’t take long before you’ve got more than you’ll ever catch up with. Don’t just declare “RSS bankruptcy” – eliminate ruthlessly and keep just the important feeds. Learn to skim – if you start reading something and it’s not interesting, or relevant enough, don’t waste your time reading to the end – move onto the next thing.

3. Set Manageable Goals

If you have a full time job and work 50-60 hours a week are you really going to spend your weekend reading an entire text book? I really hope not! Get a proper todo-list manager (I’m liking Remember The Milk) and make some lists. Set repeating tasks that are manageable. Manageable is key, because once you get behind you probably won’t be able to catch up. I feel that a backlog of a week’s daily repeating tasks should be able to be cleared in one day focused on them – but that’s not a scientific measurement. Also, as a grad student my schedule is somewhat different.

A really useful aspect of a todo list, is if you get home feeling drained knowing you should do something productive but incapable of deciding what – the todo list will decide for you. Do it, and you’ve achieved something more than just watching TV. Consider the warm glow this gives you a gift. I do this when I’m feeling overwhelmed, just pick the top-priority task of the list. Or pick an easy “repeating” task to warm up and gear me up to being productive.

4. Put Those Goals in Public

I’m finding my Week in Brief really helpful. I put my goals in public and that makes me accountable. I also evaluate what my high level goals for the week are. As a graduate student, I only answer to my supervisor but he’s just concerned that I’m making progress – he doesn’t prescribe what that progress should be. Once I’ve written the list for the coming week I can evaluate how the tasks I’ve set myself fall into my “roles” (grad student, TA, blogger, President of WISE). At the end of the week when I evaluate what I’ve checked off and what I haven’t managed, I can see whether I’ve devoted too much time to one “role” at the expense of another, and when I look at what I have managed I can take a moment to be proud of what I have achieved this week. A Masters Thesis is this big, long-off goal, but I know that if I chip away at it week in week out, I’ll get there.

If you don’t want to announce your todo list on your blog, you can always share it with a friend and get them to motivate you!

5. Focus on What’s Important

Now you’ve got your life in order, you need to stop it getting out of hand again! New opportunities, people, and activities are great but do they help you achieve your longer-term goals or distract you from them? For instance, I get really drained by people who enjoy an argument. Not, as in, a good debate, but deliberately taking a (relatively unimportant) point of contention and making it into a time consuming argument which just leaves me frustrated and bored. One of my friends really enjoys these, but after I finished one the other day with “I’m going to go and have a more productive conversation with a brick wall” we’ve agreed that he’ll stop having them with me.

6. It’s not All or Nothing

Finding a degree of balance in your life is hard, and there’s debate on whether or not it’s a good idea (I wrote more about my personal findings on happiness in this post). But I really don’t believe that having a boyfriend or girlfriend need negatively impact your professional life. My boyfriend is incredibly supportive with everything I do for WISE, and honestly I wouldn’t have achieved as much there without his advice and support. He’s President of IGADI (CS Grad Association), and I encouraged him to go for that. He wasn’t wild about me going to China, but he supported me in it (and never said “I told you so” when I got frustrated). I’ve dated more than my share of idiots and possessives, but my experience in a stable and balanced relationship is that we build each other up and achieve more.

7. It’s OK not to be Super-Human

I’ve been reading Stumbling on Happiness lately and it’s really insightful. Losing control did make me miserable, and I’ve realized that when I imagine the future it’s one where I sleep a maximum of 4 hours a night (I think I’m fairly productive, but in my imagined future I achieve new, unimagined levels of productivity and there are never unforseen setbacks). I’m starting to try to imagine the future in a more rational, balanced way. I probably won’t become an uber-productive cyborg, but that’s OK. I expect uber-productive cyborgs don’t have that many friends, anyway.

October 18, 2009
Expat Reflections

There are many things I love about Canada, but as it’s now October I should warn you: winter is not one of them. It’s so cold here that going outside feels potentially fatal. Of course, last winter (my first) was particularly bad as the result of certain situations and the 51 day bus strike (which of course was longer, because after that long they had a big maintenance backlog).

At this time of year I start to think fondly of Scotland where, no, it is not that cold (Brits say it’s cold, but after experiencing Canadian cold I can tell you we are not talking the same language of temperature) and you rarely see snow. The one time there was snow, everything ground to a halt and my Smart Car did a good impression of an ice cube.

So it’s a good time for me to be reminded of why I left the UK. The restriction of a newpaper to report (now lifted) and the news that the UK is the worse place to live in Europe. The fact that our Prime Minister did not face a vote within his party and has been in power now for over 2 years without leading his party to a general election (and has another year before he has to call one) is another good one, as is the level of national debt.

So – thanks for having me Canada. Despite the weather, I think it’s a real improvement. Just have to maintain this feeling until next April…

Snow in Edinburgh, 2007

Snow in Ottawa, 2008

October 13, 2009