I graduated at the end of May from the Design Engineering program that took over my life for the past two years, and a month out of the haze now, I feel like I am already at a loss of how to express the exact feelings I had at that moment, during the moment. In the moment, I thought I would never have the chance to experience that kind of learning ever again. The type of intellectual community I was privileged to be a part of felt so much easier to reconcile with my mental image of myself. During these two years, I remember the gradual but dramatic mental shift I experienced from being skeptical of Architecture, of GSD, and completely at a loss and out of my element in the technical frontier (block chain, AI, micrograms, mesh networks, whatever) and somehow became entirely comfortable in this space by year two. I did a much poorer job documenting the second year, but I wish I had captured my emotional journey through my thesis exploration in much more detail than the random patches I dropped here.
I do remember returning from the summer, feeling downtrodden and beat-up by the summer in Palo Alto. The city itself was fine, but life was lonely and strange, and I never wanted to return. Paradoxically, during my time there, a few designers were working on a project called The Discomfort Zone, and I think my summer in the Bay Area was a micro discomfort zone in the broader Discomfort Zone of graduate school.
The classes I took were challenging this semester, particularly in the fall with AI. I remember the desperation I felt with the coding, and how it never seemed to get better until Chao gave me his old code for reference. By forcing myself to go through that process, however, I think I really became a much better coder. Some of the other classes (Autonomous Vehicles, HCI) thrust me into a totally different trajectory this year. Whereas my first year was spent being amazed by the possibility of the design school and the arcane maze of Archibabble, my second semester was spent delighting in the fact that I could try to take on radically different identities for myself and… Do an ok job.
This year I was:
– Jenny the HCI PhD student: from working with Gajos and Amy on so many projects, I learned to read research papers, write them, LOVE Overleaf, build bibliographies (I will never use anything else for citation management again), and even submit a number of papers for conferences — so far, I’ve gotten rejected from CSCW (but it was close!) and submitted to ACM CS and Law and later, CHI
– Jenny the Law Student: I ended up graduating with 3 law school classes in my time here, strangely enough. Between the Climate Solutions Living Lab (which was quite out of my element) and Autonomous Vehicles Lab, both of which allowed me to explore an interesting policy topic in detail but also dissuaded me from working in those spaces, I most appreciated getting to take Internet and Society, and get to know JZ and the Berkman family in a way that I had only dreamed about remotely the year before.
– Jenny the Tech Policy WONK: Techtopia was a delight this semester, and getting to participate in an inaugural program for an interdisciplinary group and actually have it be well-run gave me so much hope, having been a part of so many Guinea pig projects that have gone a wide variety of ways. Between the HKS class, the many Techtopia talks, Digital HKS, and a sprinkling of events across Cambridge, I got to know the topics facing technology deeply and feel like I got a Kennedy School-esque experience, down to the technocratic solutions.
– Jenny the Teacher? As a TF for the whole year, as well as a winter J-term session teacher at Grenoble, I got to explore a skill I actively knew I was bad at. I am an awkward teacher; I don’t know how to command a room or maintain the attention on me. Still, I maintain my hypothesis that teaching will help me be a better manager. I even got a job after graduating as a instructor at General Assembly teaching UX Design, and would love to eventually end up in the SVA or Parsons or GSD teaching circuit. It’s so strange to imagine myself in one of these roles, but having seen the GSD way of looping in associate teachers and thinking about the history of Bauhaus, where former students come back to become teachers and contribute back to the community, this is exactly the type of role I’d like. I even took a class at the Education school, letting me scratch my fabrication itch but also learn some fundamental educational theories that I had otherwise not cared about at all
– Jenny the Technologist? For a long time, I was so overwhelmed by “AI” and back-end work. After building the Node app last year and starting to get a sense of what NodeJS and apps actually were, I finally finished reading Eloquent JavaScript after graduating and found myself actually understanding the principles of app development. The actual implementation of it, of course, is still murky. Amy helped move the interface to Python and Django, and I need to take a deeper look at how that works. I’d still rather prefer to work with JavaScript for web-based stuff. But I feel so much more comfortable building any of these sites, from D3 to Processing to web-based apps, and can confidently say I feel like a technologist these days. I even got a much better handle on AI and Python, though I realize that my statistics and math skills need to level up a lot more if I am going to do more data science. In the past month, I really devoured Pandas and PLT (and a little bit of Numpy) in trying to process my thesis project data, and am excited to build this into something more rigorous with the website.
– Jenny the Book Editor: This was a thorn in my side. But a book is coming out. See also: thesis paper writing (PhD student)
– Jenny the Community Leader: My first year was spent with a number of big personalities in my class, and I was happy not to assume the role that had consumed my Penn days. But as many of those people shifted their priorities or burned out, I was left holding the torch for a number of different initiatives. I don’t think I care more than any of my classmates or am that much more effective, but I am good at executing and am mostly characterized by endurance and stubbornness. For me, this program represented everything I wanted, a “heart-need” as someone told me yesterday, and I was willing to do anything to keep it up. So the variety of meetings, director representations, reports, teaching and mentoring opportunities, etc. that all came up were each things I was happy to do, no matter how tedious. This is less of a new role, but one I did not expect to fill (though Brian had mused about whether that would happen this year, and it did).
– Jenny the Ceramicist: I was never interested in ceramics as an art form, but the more I took Ceramics this year, the more I came to love it. I found my niche making the little plant dudes (Tina calls them “Todds”) and also enjoyed making a variety of other things. I didn’t think I would love this so much or think about continuing this in NYC, but having this community around me has made it a much more salient part of myself.
And of course, everything with Vivek was a wonderful surprise this second semester, wrapping up a strange and beautiful year in an unexpected way.
I thought I would be so sad upon graduating, and for the first night or so, I was. There was a certain emptiness in my heart I remember feeling, and variations of that feeling have come back every time I had to bid farewell to a friend — sending Nicki and Kenneth off, Terra, Kiran, etc. But a number of people have actually also stayed around the Cambridge area, and I’ve enjoyed unwinding slowly (very slowly) while still maintaining some semblance of income and busy-ness during the days (with TED, ceramics, Ed school work, freelance, book design, and a whole lotta traveling in June) that it has all felt very natural.
I’m excited. I am looking forward to continuing to work on myself, and on the things I didn’t get to do while I was in school. I’m going to do my damndest to stay in touch with the new avenues of expression and interest I have found here, because they have given me more joy than anything else I have ever done in my life. We are starting to venture to new places. In undergrad, that feeling was motivated by fear of the unknown, but for most of my spring, it was a dread of the known (rather than for most of my classmates, which was the fear and dread of the uncertainty). But that’s gradually evolved to anticipation and an increasingly crystallized confidence in myself. Would this sense of self and confidence in my abilities have been there without school? I don’t know; it’s hard to say. But this was a crucible of sorts, clarifying the aspects of my personality and interests to the most discrete, most essential parts. Stripped of peer pressure and parental pressure and given the privilege of economic freedom of coasting on five years of comfortable savings, I had this incredibly luxurious, painful two years of exploring who I was when all the layers were peeled back. The glorious pearl of a discovery brings a smile to my face — I’ve stared into the core center of myself, and found myself loving what I saw.
