The hidden lessons
Now that the end is in sight, we have started to talk about impact. What impact are we making? Have we truly inspired students?
I don't know.
But I’ve realized that our interactions with parents are just as important. It means a lot to become a concrete example – like a puppy in the ad asking you to adopt. To be a young person who is pursuing engineering, but also someone who cares enough about it to come talk to them. On bikes. Someone who has a unique windy, unsure even, background, but is here, talking to kids and parents about what brought me into engineering.
That matters almost as much as the actual teaching.
We are knocking down the “I-knew-I-was-going-into-engineering-from-when-I-built-my-first-space-satellite-at-age-ten” stereotype, and instead replacing it with a diverse slightly ragglety-tagglety collection of college kids who maybe didn't get interested in engineering until they were 18... or, 20. Ordinary-seeming college kids.
As I introduced myself to young people at Week of Code at Awesome, Inc, a start-up incubator and co-working space, I talked about being in mechanical despite a background in math and immunology. I said, “the moral of the story is guys, I still don’t know what I’m doing.”
But actually.
As a young child, if you asked me about my future career, I would say I wanted to be “a painter”. Not as in an artist, but as in someone who whitewashed walls.
At some point that changed to “a scientist”. I started college thinking biology, or maybe computational biology. Between then and when I finally declared computational math in April of my freshman year, I went through thinking I was going to study biology, chemical engineering, biochemical engineering, and computer science. I sat down two days before the deadline to declare with a list of all the majors; I think I managed to rule out just seven of more than twenty options.
Somehow I wound up in math, but after a semester and a half of continuing to take seemingly random classes (There are probably few to no other Mech-Es at MIT that have also taken organic chemistry, real analysis, discrete math for computer scientists, and modern art & mass culture), I was still contemplating applied math, urban planning, civil engineering, and then mechanical engineering. And now here I am in mechanical, with not much more of a clue than I’ve ever had (or lacked).
But I’m taking mostly classes that I like, so I’m happy to explore. I always liked to tell people I was majoring in “taking cool classes”, and that is what I want kids to walk away with. Talking to kids and parents about how my interests brought me to mechanical and to be standing in front of them made me think a lot about the things I care about. At the same time, interacting with strangers and new cities has made me realize what matters to me in day-to-day life as well. And those things will change over time. And that’s okay.
from Portsmouth, Ohio,
cali
