Planet Olin

So a few months ago I lost my Olin College class ring.

I figured I’d find it eventually, given that the last place I had seen it was in my apartment.

Last night I was doing laundry, when I heard clinking in the washer. Thinking it might be the ring, I dug around inside for awhile, realizing that I’d need to use a wrench to take off a bolt so I could remove the piece blocking the clinking object.

When I went over to where my tools were, I found my ring sitting right next to them.

The clinking object was a quarter.

Tonight I put together a website to showcase some of the music I’ve written over the years. Until now, all of my music has been available only in disparate locations across the web.

My new page uses Yahoo!’s excellent and easy-to-use Javascript Media Player, so you can just click the little play button links next to each track.

Check it out at http://music.nertzy.com!

I recently attended the Main St. Arts Festival in Fort Worth, TX, which seems to be a pretty well-know art show as there were artists and people from all over the country. I make no false claims that I know anything about art, but I do enjoy looking at it. I tend towards non-traditional art, but I like any piece that gives you a new perspective and provokes thought. Here are some artists and pieces that I particularly liked.

This turned out longer than I expected, but this is what I've been going through over the last year, including some recent big changes:

I have been working for Texas Instruments (TI) in a rotational program in training to become an applications engineer for just under 10 months. I accepted the position over an offer from HP in November of my senior year, mainly because TI explained what I would be doing and a training program was very attractive. I was also considering graduate school, but was not really sure what I wanted to do. Looking back, I really just picked between the two offers on the table, not really thinking about if either of them were what I really wanted. So, I chose TI and had a sense of security throughout most of my senior year, which majorly contributed to my Senioritis.

The position was at TI's main location in Dallas, TX, which was definitely not an ideal location for me, but I tired to keep an open mind. While most other Oliners stayed in the Boston area, moved out to the west coast (the Bay, Portland, or Seattle), or moved closer to their families, I moved away from my friends and family into a city where I only had a few connections through families of Oliners. TI had a promise of a "family-like" atmosphere that I eagerly bought into. I moved down to Texas, found a cute apartment and waited around for a month for my start date. I got bored and a little lonely, so I found things to fill my time. I started Capoeira, joined a community orchestra, and found a Korean study group, which filled in the time nicely.

Once work started, I was very excited about the position and all the promises of getting hands-on training. I was proud to be part of a company that focused on diversity, environmentally sound practices, and ethics. I really liked the people in my program and had convinced myself that this was the right career for me. I was a wide-eyed, young idealist with so much to learn about the corporate world. TI had touted its diversity in terms of both gender and ethnic balance. I always saw a good number of women walking around the office, and there was one other woman in my program, but that was the extend to of the gender balance. As I soon learned, there were quite a few women in the company, but most were finance, human resources, administrative assistants, and sales; the ratio in engineering was still very low. Diversity was another pride of the company, and while I did see a lot of different ethnicities, they seemed very clumped by group and job role. For my first rotation, the group was all middle-aged white men, who had obviously never worked with a young female engineer before.

The first 5 months were fairly positive, except for being referred to as a "girl" a good number of times and finding myself in a few awkward conversations with co-workers on topics of both porn and going to "titty bars" on company money. These experiences put a pretty big damper on my positive image of both those people and the company.

I slowly realized that a lot of the points that attracted me to the company were all pushed from the corporate level, but not really practiced at the individual level, which I found disappointing. I was used to being surrounded by people that, to put it simply, cared about things other than just themselves. A simple case and point is when TI put on a blood drive over a few days. At Olin, a community of no more than 400, we had to sign up for a spot to give blood since the beds were almost always full all day. At TI, with over 2000 employees in just one building, I walked in to give blood and found the donation beds empty and all the blood drive workers watching TV. It's not that the people there weren't good people, but I really just expected more.

In terms of technical knowledge, I was learning a lot of great practical lab skills and learning how basic power converters operate. I tried to take in as much knowledge as possible and just wanted to know more and dig deeper. I brought my in-depth questions to my co-workers/mentors looking for clear explanations based on formulas and clear logic, but usually got a rule-of-thumb with unclear reasoning or elaborate non-committal answers. I just wanted more depth and at a faster rate.

At one point I asked if I could try doing a board layout (with guidance from a mentor), which is something that I had never done before. My manager politely told me, "oh, well you don't have any experience, so I don't think you're ready for that." Or in other words, let's keep you to something simple where you can't mess up. At first I accepted this; it was true that I had never done it before and I would not want to mess up. But, I saw both minor and major mistakes in so many other people's work slipping by that I started to question that reasoning. The Olin philosophies of "spiral learning" and "diving head-first into the deep end" rang in my ears and the fact that my managers would not take a risk on me by letting me try something that I might not be 100% prepared for made me frustrated. Didn't they think I was smart enough? My confidence, built up and fortified by years at Olin, slowly began to crumble.

I did not really understand what Applications Engineering was when I took the offer at TI, but I did not really understand what Engineering was when I went to Olin and I ended up loving it. I guess I thought that anything I picked with the world "Engineer" in the title would turn out well. I should have realized the first day of work when I found out I was in the Sales and Marketing division that maybe this wasn't the right job for me. I knew that the role involved working with customers and helping them design their product with TI chips and I thought I would be good at that since I have social skills and like design and engineering. What I soon learned is that while you do make designs and build up prototype boards, the sole focus of an applications engineer is to sell. Sell, sell, sell; make revenue. Absolutely everything you do must be focused on making more revenue even if that means pushing a more expensive product that someone really doesn't need. If it came between helping a small-revenue customer doing something really innovative and potentially world-changing versus a million dollar revenue for, really, anything, the answer is always and without thought: higher revenue.

I recognize that business must have revenue to survive. That is obviously a huge part of any business, but at the same time, I do not want that to be the focus of my job. I would love to work for a company where their focus is not just on revenue, but bringing something new and exciting to the market place and maybe even doing something good for the world. I want a company that I can stand behind and believe in what they are doing; I didn't find that at TI.

My motivation and excitement about work slowly became diluted by reality. I had moved down to Texas betting on a dream job and now I was realizing that it really was only a dream. I tried to stay happy by filling my time with other things, but it just kept my mind off the real problems and gave me no time to rest. My romantic life didn't help either, as I was still on and off with my boyfriend from college; desperately trying to cling onto something familiar, though, it was clear that it was dying. Once it was really over and I finally let go, I was a mess and my confidence was even lower. I talked with some friends about it, but all my close friends could only be reaches by phone and friends here didn't really understand the background.

I felt insanely alone and, for me, it always seems to be the case that when I need help the most is when I can't bring myself to reach out and ask for it. Many of the signs of my teenage depression returned, and I started to hate everything about myself. I knew I was falling deeper and deeper because I could recognize it this time, but I didn't know what to do. There were so many days when I would come home late from a long day and just break down, crying until I convinced myself to try to sleep. I thought I was giving off signs that I was unhappy, but apparently I'm very good at pretending to be happy when I am really just broken and hopeless inside; an art I learned during my high school depression. I knew I needed some kind of help, but just didn't know what to do.

I needed help and I needed it as soon as possible. I ended up going to visit a friend (Grant) in Austin, TX, who graduated from Olin a year before me, and his friend from childhood (Austin). Talking with them made me realized that I am extremely talented, have a wide variety of skills, and do not have to settle, especially if it is making me extremely unhappy. I decided that I would not let some mediocre job and the fact that I didn't "fit in" with the culture here completely break me down, as it had already begun to do. I told myself that I was not locked into this and could find something better. So, with encouragement from Grant and Austin, I decided to leave my job at TI.

I was scared to death, but I knew it was the right decision. When I talked with my manager, he wasn't too surprised. I had confided my real thoughts and emotions to him throughout the year, which I realize now only hurt me in the end. He knew that I was generally unhappy, was still thinking about graduate school, and was questioning a career as an applications engineer. I told him I wanted to leave in a month or so and thought I was doing him a favor by giving him plenty of time to plan accordingly, but I failed to think about the corporate perspective. The moment we had that conversation, I stopped being a resource worth being invested in and started being a leach simply using up resources, and he wanted me out of there as soon as possible.

I realize now, that I played my cards wrong. Once I decided I wanted to leave, I did not have to go tell my manager and get booted out two weeks later with no real plan for my next step. I should have started looking for new opportunities and only handed in my letter of resignation once I knew what I was doing next. I got a stern lecture from my father once he pointed out how poorly I played my cards in the corporate game and lost all my leverage. I've never been much a card player... But, you live, you learn and I will never be so naive again.

All in all, I think things have turned out for the best. My last day of work was last Friday and although the previous two weeks have been confusing and stressful, I have a new positive outlook on life and I know that I will find something that I will be happy doing. At least now, I know what I do not want to do as my career.

I am still unsure about my next step. I am considering graduate school full time, but I would not be able to get into a funded program until Fall 2009 and I would have to find something to do for the year in between. I am also considering teaching English in Korea for a year, but worry that I will miss engineering and would still be away from friends. I think I would love to work for a green technology or alternate energy focused start-up, but want to make sure I start working on an advanced degree at some point in the next couple years. In any of these cases, I plan to move away from Dallas and to a more Olin populated area. If you made it through this ridiculously long post and have any ideas or worldly (or non-worldly) advice please leave me a comment, I would love to hear from you. :)

Inside the wrapper of my indulgence of a Snickers bar read:

Nougatocity (noun). - A heightened yet fleeting state of accomplishment that makes you realize how unbelievably unmotivated you normally are.

That is more depressingly astute than I usually like my candy.

In the wake of my foray into grad schools, grad school funding, and various scholarships, I am left feeling very inept. As meaningless as I knew my ridiculously high GPA in high school was, it unlocked so many doors for me. As I prepare for my emergence from a mostly unknown college with distinctly mediocre grades, "jack of all trades, master of none" style involvement, and probably very poor class standing, I am more than a little bit concerned for myself. I still think Olin was one of the best places I could have ended up in after high school and I have always acknowledged that attending Olin meant sacrificing high class standing and surrounding myself with people who are as good or better than I, as driven or more driven than I. Still. Olin students have gone on to do amazing things and Olin students have gone on to aimlessness. Better people than I have been rejected from some of the opportunities I'd love to take advantage of.

This time of year my mood wavers between enjoying the idyllic weather to feeling swamped or unmotivated. Finals approach, there is no rest for the weary, and I wish I didn't have to deal with that blasted nougatocity.

I give my blog a minor makeover and updated the template. If the color scheme is just horrible let me know, but I figure everyone does RSS feeds anyway so it doesn't even matter.

I have recently become an avid Twitter user and thus have added a twitter application. (Feel free to follow me!) The first time I heard about Twitter was in this IEEE Spectrum article talking about how it is another application to add more useless content to the internet, but I'm pretty much fine with that and enjoy using it so far. I see it as an easy way to keep up with friends and see what people are up to. I have been meaning to blog a bit more and will hopefully get around to that later this week, but if you want to know what I'm up to day-to-day, just follow... the twitter-brick road! Ok, cut me some slack, it's late and I'm tired. Off to bed for me... :)