I’m pretty confident that 2012 is going to be better than 2011. One of the things that makes me sure of this is that I now have Elite status on Air Canada. Airports, a huge source of misery, are set to be less miserable with access to the lounge (or maybe I’ll just get liquored up there so I notice it less).
But joking aside, during the time in transit to, and from, and in, Europe through much of December and the start of January, I’ve had time to take stock of what I want to be different.
The first week of the year, I spent skiing in Andorra. It was really nice to get away and have a break. It was nice to be outside, and active. I need more of that in my life! I also took advantage of the hotel spa. Pretty much my ideal vacation.
The big thing – living more intentionally. Being less reactive. Designing my existence such that the things that I want to do don’t get subsumed by obligations.
This year I will travel less. I will do fewer talks. I will go to the spa more often. The new gym opened and it seems like a nice place to spend an evening. I also joined adult racing at the local ski hill and got a season pass.
This year is set to be my last year in Canada. I want to make the most of it – yes – but I also want to enjoy it.
I feel tremendously fortunate that when I write something I’m hesitant to hit “post” on, people leave these amazing comments that make me feel like less of a failure and like whatever it was I wrote, was worth sharing. Having a crisis about not finishing grad school, I wrote Being Human, and then Dropping Out when I came to the conclusion that I can register for another semester at uOttawa this will be the same story, the same crisis, 3 months from now.
Meggin left this comment:
OK, this might be a rambler, but I feel the topic warrants it.
Wednesday night, I was sitting in a bar in San Francisco with a very close friend of mine. It was an important night, as right now she is in surgery having a portion of her breast removed.
Why the heck am I telling you this? On that same day (Wednesday), she shared with me some good news about her work. (She is a scientist for the Google-equivalent of cancer research.) For the past year, she has been managing a team, and been having to put most of her time into the projects under that team. In her heart though, she is a horizontal thinker (incrementalist is another way of seeing it). She doesn’t see herself in one project, but looks across the horizon and sees patterns and relationships.
Her own boss has been encouraging her to move away from this and get more involved with management (as there is serious potential for a directorship in her career path).
But my friend believes full heartedly that she wants ot make strides in science, in her papers, and in looking across the horizon – not in some title that is given to her (and probably with a serious large paycheck).
In the middle of all this crazy going on in her life, the CEO of said major company met with her with a couple of VPs, both of whom want more of her time, and he asked her point blank what she wanted and she said that she wanted to pursue the science, that she had an inkling about certain relationships, and that by dabbling in a range of projects, she would be making strides in some serious stuff.
He agreed that she was making the right choice, and now he is making it happen for her.
You may find that now you need to walk about from your dissertation, as you are still in that discovery period, that time of absorbing all and anything that comes your way. But later in life, when you have accumulated enough of a horizontal view to see a pattern. You will have something truly meaningful to your type of thinking that gets you excited to finish. And really serious people, like CEOs of major companies, will look to you as the real deal (which they probably already have a hunch you are).
Enough said (probably way too much).
I used to know who I was and what I was doing, but somewhere along the way I got lost in details and I forgot. Meggin reminded me, and I can’t thank her enough for that.
I have an overarching theme. And it might not connect what I’ve done enough to make a masters thesis out of it, but it connects it enough for me to make sense of it. Here it is:
How is technology changing the way we interact?
And that means it makes complete sense for me to be interested in programming education – programming is a technology and an interaction, education with technology is another interaction. And as we produce reams of user generated content, we (or companies) need a way to make sense of it. As our interactions take place online and off, trying to find patterns with which to characterize our online interaction types, and extract our online communities is working on that question. I got interested in visualization because I was trying to work on teaching programming in a visual way. The way we run Awesome Ottawa and CompSci Woman, even, leverages this change to create something – a platform, a community, some awesome.
I feel less schizophrenic realizing this, I’m building upon the things I do, just in an incrementalist way. It may not make sense to other people. It may not get me a masters degree. It makes sense to me – and that’s a start.
My boyfriend, ever the geek, describes my crisis as a “resource allocation problem”. It helps me to think less about what I’m failing at and more about what I’m saying yes to as a result of saying no to the thesis. Yes to other projects. Yes to things I’m actually interested in. Yes (maybe) to a better school and a different kind of masters. Yes to the bigger, overarching question.
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?
Cookie Consent
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. By using our site, you consent to cookies.
