go bold

Today I signed a lease. I signed a lease that I negotiated down (helped in part by the current state of the real estate market), essentially decreasing rent per room in our five-bedroom by $200.

Today I ended a stint with a startup. I ended my time at Aardvark as part of The Mechanical Zoo, and on Tuesday I start my time at Aardvark as part of Google.

And to think I could have been five months into my Master’s thesis, wrapping up the first month of my last semester at MIT.

I laughed out loud to myself today as I was waiting for the bus to take me home from the landlord’s office – I like this life.

Last week at around this time, I had just been told that my four roommates were moving out, and that I either had three weeks to fill four rooms or find a new place for myself. I got the rent down, two roommates stayed (plus the dog and the cat), a friend moved in, and we did the Craigslist dance to fill the last room. So now we’re good, with a little terror, stress, and hopefulness thrown in.

Two months ago at work (plus change), all of us piled into a room like we normally do for our end-of-the-week meeting. We were told that a term sheet had just been signed for us to be acquired by Google. Due diligence was done, HR negotiations occurred, and secrets were held for far too long from far too many people. We start at a different office in three days – and I’ll be bringing my personal little knot of excitement, apprehension, and curiosity.

In looking at life post-college, I was worried it’d be too routine – I thought that without “landmarks” to look forward to (winter break, summer vacation, finals, formals, trips), I might be bored and let time slip by without noticing. Well – now school looks methodical and predictable and the extraordinarily safe option.

What have I learned? That question will, hopefully, be answered thoroughly in the future in frequent intervals, but for now, a brief summary of my favorite learnings of the last several months:

• How to fix a flat on a bicycle (and a little about how the bicycle works to begin with)
• How to pick a health insurance plan to fit my needs
• What an acquisition looks like from the inside, and how many things could go wrong without a strong negotiator on your side
• French men are the most amusing members of a tech startup
• Socializing and quality alone time are most beneficial in a carefully maintained balance
• I still don’t take enough advantage of the opportunities around me! (Talks, meetups, people)
• Everything usually works out in the end

But I know I continue to be extraordinarily lucky. So I’m extraordinarily thankful – and am excited to see what else is in store!

I think the world should be a meritocracy.

There, I went and said it. Come and get me, I’m ready.

First, my definition of merit: the quality of a person’s contribution to a given environment for the role they have been commissioned to fill. This means hiring someone or rewarding someone based on what they can do, rather than what they represent. This means pressing every member of the team to step up and distinguish themselves in some way, rather than hiding in the back trying to blend into the background.

What about rewarding “hard workers”? People should be held accountable for the work they took on, and measured on the quality of the work they produce. In my environment – in a software development environment – if I’m lacking in a ‘knack for things,’ then I should go make up for it in any way I can find: reading books and blogs about my craft and industry, keeping on top of new and relevant changes, finding some way to fill some niche in my environment that has not yet been filled. A meritocracy is no place for complacency (and is apparently not very friendly for work-life balance, either) – everyone should be pushed to be better.

And what about encouraging destructive competition within a team? I think people are big enough to recognize that working together allows everyone to achieve more (I sound like an inspirational poster in a second-grade classroom). Helping others does not detract from the quality of your own contribution, and can often improve skills in other aspects of your life – ones that may become valuable in surprising ways.

More to come next week. Possibly not on the same subject. Can you stand the anticipation?

Note: I’ve formed a blogging support group (pair?) of sorts with a friend. So we’ll now find a way to meet up and/or blog together once a week, as we both recognize the value in: 1) writing down our thoughts in some structured way, 2) exposing our thoughts in a public forum, and 3) company while miserable. Or, at least, company while doing things that all too easily get pushed to next week’s to-do list. Hopefully practice will make perfect – and the quality of these posts will improve.

I got into an extended argument the other day with a friend who made the claim, “MIT does an awful job of making sure its students know what they want to do after graduation.”

Another graduating senior choosing to pursue the one-year Master’s of Engineering next year (like most, to have some extra time to discover his career interests and direction), he is dissatisfied with how MIT has guided him along his path to graduation. A sound bite of his I can’t seem to forget: “I know less about what I want to do now than I did when I entered MIT.”

It makes me laugh, this sense of entitlement – the idea that a student enters this prestigious institution, often and widely advertised by its “huge range of opportunities,” and expect to be helped and told what he or she specifically is passionate about. The discovery of one’s interests, one’s passions, one’s desired area of expertise – these pursuits seem to need to be by definition self-driven.

Figuring out what you want to do with your life is a problem to deal with every year of your life, as priorities and interests change. It should be something to constantly search for, lest you find yourself at a point in your life dissatisfied and unfocused. As a student, it’s not the Institute’s responsibility to guide you. Provide lots of information and resources, yes – guide you and direct you, never.

It’s your responsibility to try our internships and research opportunities, to take an interesting range of classes, and to explore your field (academically and in the industry) as much as possible.

One other interesting viewpoint that came up when I discussed this with another friend was – MIT does an amazing job of challenging preconceptions. Plenty of pre-med majors are made un-pre-med by the Institute, simply because MIT makes them ask themselves, “Do I really want to do this? Do I really want to be a doctor (and go through this pain of being pre-med), or is this just something I’ve expected to do?” And I think that’s a positive thing – being forced to, as I mentioned earlier, constantly reexamine your own goals and expectations for yourself.

This is the time to explore – this is the time to discover yourself, and let your interests flourish. Why would you allow that responsibility to anybody but yourself?

I’ve been working with kindergarteners once a week as part of http://www.scienceclubforgirls.org/ , an absolutely amazing after-school program here in Cambridge focused toward helping girls explore science and become confident in their own abilities, and I think the number one thing I’ve learned thus far has been how much I can learn from these kids.

Not only have I been learning my own limits — like the fact that I’m awful at exacting discipline from them, and that I’m incredibly susceptible to the emotional manipulations of little girls — it’s been interesting watching them interact with each other and us.

The first week, when the girls saw me and the 8th grade helpers, a couple yelled that they hated us, that we looked funny, and (most strangely to me) that we hated them. As the semester went on — it was clear that that first session was just a testing of the waters, behavior-wise, and how much some of them liked us seemed to vary with the color of their shirts.

It’s funny — one of the 8th graders, Rowan, is a little less smile-y than the others, and so usually doesn’t get a ton of affection from the girls in return. Today, though (our last group session for the year!), we went to the playground for the last ten minutes of session and everyone was having fun — running, screaming, and generally playing. Most interestingly, the girls seemed to have the most fun pulling her in all directions, sitting on her, tickling her, etc.

At the end of the day, I was amused — I was chatting with my co-mentor and brought up how fickle I thought the kindergarteners were, and how flighty… then thought a little more. Firstly — I realized that the girls’ behavior was probably actually affected less by fickleness than by a lack of prejudice and grudge-holding. Their main priority is having fun — not in being right, not in associating only with people like them, not in holding onto snap judgements. Secondly — why was my first assumption that they were being fickle?

Why was I so quick to judge them? What happens to us as we get older — this cynicism in people?

I’m looking forward to going back in the fall — I’ll have a bit more time with my Master’s next year, and want to see what more I can learn from them about myself and the people around me. :)

I’ve never pretended I knew everything. In class, in my extracurriculars, or my personal pet projects. I’m not great at asking for help, either, but I find things out – I look things up, I test by trial and error, and I bang on it until I either cave in and ask for help or the magical cogs click into place and things work the way I expect them to.

In each challenge that matters to me, in each different situation I face, I try. Sometime it isn’t good enough – sometimes I get that B instead of that A, or take an extra three months to get the damn server doing what I want it to. But sometimes that effort spent trying to fix things… fighting to get things done my way, is what makes that success so much more triumphant – or that failure somewhat less harsh.

I’m trying to be better about it, actually. To be better about asking for advice, so that I can trim those three weeks of fighting with Apache down to two days, or to find the shortcut around brute-forcing a problem set. And maybe I’ll find that I learn just as much, and the answers given will stick with me as well as the answers I find myself. And maybe – just maybe – the victories will taste as sweet.