Some Various Thoughts on Being an Engineer

Long time, no write. No surprise there.

Just some thoughts I've been having on being stuck in the business of learning about computers every day of the week for 4 years, and then programming / homeworking / thinking about computers non-stop when I'm not in class.

Nomenclature - here are some terms that are floating around in my head:

• Simmulated Annealing
• MR-LCS (Minimum Resource Latency-Constraint Scheduling)
• Non-Uniform Cache Architectures
• ILP vs. ILP (Instruction Level Parallelism vs. Integer Linear Programming)

As you can see, it's an alphabet and nomenclature soup. Here's the real issue. We nerds find this stuff to be, really cool. We like talking about it. Fuck gossip about celebrities (though I do my best to keep up with that) we talk about the latest processor or graphics card. And the worst part is, no one outside of the nerdosphere has the necessary depth (provided by pop culture sources like TV or magazines like Popular Science, Mechanics, etc.) to break into our conversations. More on nerd conversationalism in a moment...

When I graduate next year, I'll have spent 5 years learning how not to talk to people. Especially not girls, especially not 'normal people'. Worse yet, couple the intense isolation and deprivation, and dedication required by the major, and you've got yourself a recipe for individuals coming out more socially inept than when they came in.

All the blows dealt to Computer Scientists in the social department manifest themselves in other, rather hideous ways. The lack of personal self worth instilled on computer science majors getting turned down or given leper treatment by women and their peers feeds, in my opinion, to a very elitist culture. We want to be viewed as superior to something, so we turn our scorn against our fellow computer scientist in terms of who writes better code, knows more (languages, about hardware), who has built the most, etc. And so, computer science majors contribute to their own thorny culture, cluttered with the aforementioned bizarre acronyms, and puzzling algorithms, so that no one in their right mind (or without 4 or so year's time of serious self deprivation and deprecation) can get so much as a foothold.

The computer science major is an interesting beast, if nothing else.

Finally, dealing with problems of optimization, maximizing performance, and efficiency for four years also takes its toll. I see my daily tasks in terms of concepts. How can I parallelize my laundry and my homework? Which of my chores can I do at once, and what's the most efficient route to take when I'm driving, walking, or even picking up around the house?

It's for these reasons, and the fact that I can't stand to do incredibly frustrating projects for hours on end in a sterile lab with no human contact, and no windows, that I've decided to go to law school.

Hope you enjoyed the brain dump.

Kerry