Dear Aurora, Jess, and Bonnie,

Here's the portrait I promised you guys. It’s still kinda hard to believe how much I lucked out that the first and only ad craigslist ad I replied to turned out to be kick ass people. Thanks for sharing your house and animals with me. During these three months I’ve gone from scared shitless of dogs to really loving all the animals in this house. Also, I think my cat allergy isn’t as severe as I thought it was. Thanks for also showing me that life doesn’t end after 30. Oh, and Bonnie, thanks for the chocolate moose, mouse, mousse.

I’ve compiled a “best of the animals” series:

Choya (Cholla?)

Rosco

Daisy

Riley

Rose

Kitty Boy

:)

Sorry, blame it on me

Sometimes I get in this funk where I’m constantly apologizing.

I bump into a desk. “Sorry.”

Someone’s waiting for me to finish filling my water bottle. “Sorry.”

Someone’s makes a joke about something I did. “Sorry.”

I have a question I need to ask. “Sorry.”

And I hate it. I like to think that I’m a genuine person. For the most part I’ll tell it like it is. I have my own set of values that I feel are important to adhere to. I am chaotic good.

But recently I’m dropping apologies at every chance I get, and I’m pretty sure 90% of the time I'm not actually sorry about what I did. The insincerity makes me feel gross when I’ve realized what’s happened and it made the times when I’m actually sorry mean so much less.

And I can’t help it. It’s like a reflex right now. Anything negative that comes up makes my throat tickle and cough up an apology.

I think it has to do with where I feel like I sit on my mental totempole. When I’m at Olin and with other students, I feel like I’m an equal. When I’m at Olin and with my professors, I feel like I’m an equal. When I’m at Olin, I feel like other people will take me seriously (or not seriously cause I’m haha funny).

This summer I’m the intern. I’m sitting pretty low on my mental totempole. I keep quiet because I don’t feel like my opinions are as valued. I work extra hard on writing down my opinions and supporting facts before I open my mouth. I raise my hand like a freaking highschooler. I feel like I need a solid wall behind me to push against when people are dismissive because ‘you’re just the intern’. And at some point I’ve adopted that mentality, I’m just the intern. It feels awful.

So yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s why I’m in this rut. “Sorry” is actually short for “sorry I’m the intern but,”.

Hopefully I’m going to curb this nasty habit soon. I’m not actually sorry.

The Internet's Own Boy

Yesterday I watched a documentary called “The Internet’s Own Boy,” it was about Aaron Swartz, boy genius, co-founder of reddit, a fierce leader in the campaign against SOPA, and an advocate of our rights in the digital age. Most of the time when faced with stories of 13 year olds doing incredible things, in Aaron’s case he was one of the main developers working on RSS, I’m left to wonder “what am I doing with my life.” But what impressed me more than his seemingly bottomless brilliance was his tenacity in which he tried to change the world.

I remember back (around late 2011) when my favorite youtubers started posting videos about SOPA pleading their watchers to sign petitions. If you're not familiar with SOPA it was bill that would essentially cripple the internet allowing companies to shut down entire websites for extremely loose definitions of copyright infringement (ie. linking to a site with pirated content, posting a cover on youtube, etc). I knew that it was evil and bad, but 16 year old me did nothing about it, not even take the time to sign out one of those petition, however many seconds it would taken, even though I basically lived on the internet. I’m pretty sure some of it was part “I’m just a teenager, what can I do?” and the other, plain lack of education. Back then I had no idea that this crazy bill actually had a very strong chance of passing, that in a year the U.S. could’ve been sent into the internet dark ages.

I don’t think I’ve gotten much better since then either. I’m finally old enough to vote in the next election but all I really know about any of the candidates are the occasional posts that crop up on my facebook feed (usually either about how awesome Bernie Sanders is or taking a jab at  Donald Trump). Now that I think about it, the same rationale could be applied here: “I’m just a single person, what can I do?” coupled with the fact that I really know next to nothing about what platforms our candidates are running on. I really am no better than I was four years ago.

Aaron was focused on huge monumental change, like on a worldwide scale, and here I am just beginning to explore what it means to make myself a better person. I’m still preoccupied with “can I make a living when I graduate college” (the answer is probably, of course…), but Aaron was busy trying to figure out how to make access to information on the internet a universal right.

I’ve gone to two hackathons so far and what I made was “the Olin Orchestraless Conductor” and “Turtlebot.” My mindset going into hackathons was usually “I want to make something cool, I don’t care if it’s useless!” But I think next hackathon I want to try a hand at changing the world.

TEAMWORK!

(omg this was way too hard)

If I could make the perfect team, I would not clone myself four times.

As a teammate I’m flawed:

• I have a strong personality and tend to think that my ideas are superior (“if your idea was better, I would admit it, but it’s not”)
• I don’t trust people enough. Which leads to
• I tend to micromanage (and I hate micromanaging, which makes me a crotchety emailer)

to list a few. But this isn’t about my personal failures as a teammate (at least directly), its about what makes a good team (which also makes it harder to write because I’m way better at talking about my opinions).

Lets start off with what makes a team a team. Fundamentally a team is a collaboration between people. If communication only flowed in one direction (ie. down a chain of command) it is not a team. What makes a team more special than, lets say an assembly line, is that a good team is better than the sum of its parts. Kinda like how a well written research paper probably isn’t “you write one part, I’ll write the other, and we’ll combine it on google docs.”

I asked HelpMe (an Olin mailing list) about what their best team experience was and why. Three things stood out from the responses. A good team:

1. Has a mutual shared interest (ideally it would be the project at hand, but it could also be something like an interest in keeping the team together, or chocolate).
2. Has diversity: in both opinions and skill sets.
3. Is baller at communication.

Communication of course is a huge umbrella term for a bunch of interactions but we’ll break it down into several key components:

1. Respect - Respect for things like my teammate’s time, making sure that I get to meetings on time, and that I respect things like deadlines for completing things that my teammates waiting on. But also just respect in the normal sense, don’t be a butt face.
2. Trust - At the same time, when the table’s turned and I’m asking my teammate for something (ie. designing the linkage system for a kinetic sculpture) I need to take a step back and let them do their thing. I’ve found that hounding people not only pisses me off but usually pisses off the person getting hounded.
3. Acknowledgement - Acknowledgement is key for trust to happen. It’s hard for me to trust people on faith alone. Especially when group work in K-12 usually just meant more work. Little things like getting an “Accepted” response after sending a meeting request, small updates in the hall like “I just pushed the code onto github” are important for me at least to keep peace of mind. At the same time I’m guilty of reading an email, understanding what needs to happen, failing to communicate that, possibly causing some anxiety to the sender.

People say that communication is a two way street, which is an okay analogy but I think it’s really more like a four way stop, when you and that other car get there at the same time. The other driver does that nod thing, you bring up your hand like “thanks.” Driving is one of the biggest displays of human cooperation. And I’m off topic.