TEOTWAWKI

It looks like time stood still today. I knew something was funny.

I also thought i felt an earthquake earlier, and meant to look it up, but never did. I'm sure these events are related somehow.

Nothing much exciting happened at work, except the string of the yo-yo broke and i got to replace it. Now it's back to its full length, so I'm getting like 100% more job satisfaction.

I'm too lazy to write anything serious now, so I'll just paste another letter to a would-be boss. This one had to do with me answer his question about my GPA and where the other half of it ended up.

Dear Mr. Shaw,

I am writing to address your concerns concerning how I spent my time in college. Were I in your place, I would be asking the same question: if this kid has the combination of ability and masochism necessary to get into Caltech and stay long enough to get a degree, then how come his grades are barely enough to squeak by?

As engineers, you and I are not in the business of making excuses. We push our systems to the point of failure, pick up the pieces, learn everything we can from them, push the point of failure further away when rebuilding whatever it is we broke. Engineers are notorious for extending this worldview into worlds where it is not generally expected, and indeed, where it can be unwelcome. I don’t say this to dodge the central question, but to attempt to get across the idea that when I fail it is never because of lack of trying and it is rarely without learning something. It is because of thinking too hard, working on too many things at a time, expecting results too early, or some combination of all of these. My greatest strength and greatest weakness is the ability to be obsessed with dozens of ideas at a time. When in the real world, there are typically only a finite number of projects to attract my attention, but in a thriving collegiate setting, the sky is the limit. Fortunately, all I need in an R&D setting to keep these tendencies under control is someone with some common sense and a rolled-up newspaper to hit me over the head every now and then.

Among the more tragic features of live at Tech was the fact that, while Admissions actively seeks well-rounded students, the reality of the curriculum (especially in the first two years) requires most students to maintain an often unhealthy (mentally, physically, and emotionally) level of focus on academics. The immediate result of this intensity is to starve the extracurricular organizations of students who have the time to commit themselves to them fully; even though there is no shortage of talented students who would like to participate, many of these feel it not worthwhile to join organizations if they can’t go all-out. For students with academic scholarships requiring the maintenance of minimum GPAs, the compromises required of them have visibly disheartening effects.

When I discovered these harsh realities, I made a conscious decision to optimize my collegiate experience for overall quality of life, learning, and relationships, not on my transcript. This decision was not by any means an easy one for me at the time, and if my reasoning seems long-winded, it’s only because an extremely vocal minority of the voices in my head made no end of protesting it. If I had it to do over again knowing what I know now, I might not do it, but then I wouldn’t know what I know now, so I’d end up doing it all over again (you know you’re a hacker when you can put infinite loops in prose). I remember my failures for years longer than my successes, and I count those scars as the most valuable experiences of my career so far, not just because they came at the greatest cost.

As to how I spent my time when I wasn’t studying, I was basically doing everything else. Since so many student organizations were short-handed, I became a varsity cheerleader, trumpet player in the pep band, jazz band, concert band, and graduation brass section. I even enrolled in Pasadena City College as a music major to play in the Lancer Marching Band, since Caltech had no marching band. While at PCC I also played herald trumpet for the Rose Bowl Queen and her Court at official functions, including the coronation. I was active in the Society of Women Engineers, the Korean Club, Caltech Christian Fellowship, Chinese Club, Caltech Y (including community tutoring and Alternative Spring Break), CLASES (Latino club), Caltech Ballroom Dance Club, Gymnastics Club, and California Tech. It goes without saying that, having sworn undying loyalty to Fleming Hovse, I never shied away from the needs of my fellow Flems. I spent a sizeable chunk of time on house activities that are too numerous, scandalous, and/or secret to enumerate here. Finally, every spare second I had was devoted to picking the brains of my erudite and eccentric classmates, where by “picking brains” I mean “chasing skirts.”

A clever reader might suspect at this point that I participated in these activities to avoid the stresses of legitimate studying. Hopefully I can allay this fear somewhat by describing some of the classes I took outside my option to challenge myself and broaden my horizons. I took the infamous EE/CS 51 and 52 courses in embedded programming and digital circuit design, which have been known to convert aspiring electrical engineers into raving lunatics or even literature majors. These courses were not required for me as a mechanical engineer (at the time), but I knew that they would push me as I had never been pushed before. Fifty-two, in particular, was probably the most arduous and yet most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had; the pace of learning and applying knowledge was beyond all prudence and sanity for someone as scatterbrained as me. I ended up not finishing that class in the end, even though the hardest parts were behind me, not because of the intellectual challenge, but for the emotional trauma I put myself through. In some ways I’m prouder of that F than of any A I’ve ever made.

As bad as my transcript looks on paper, taking into account a few more quirks about Caltech might help one to get a clearer perspective. One of these is the abnormally high “flame rate” of the freshman class. Since the bottom quarter of the bell curve disappeared out from under me, my standing compared to the rest of the survivors was proportionally reduced. One hundred percent of the incoming freshmen were in the top ten percent of their high school classes, and dozens of valedictorians and salutatorians were among them. Since the only way to have everybody stay in the top ten percent of the class would be a massive tie for top GPA, ninety percent of us were disappointed. Since many of my classmates had immediate and serious consequences of letting their grades fall, I was willing to do my part in holding up the tail end of the curve. (All kidding aside, one of Caltech’s greatest attributes is the spirit of cooperation among students, which fosters collaborative learning and improves the social skills of otherwise reclusive scholars).

This survivor’s curse extends to individual courses, where Tech’s late Drop Day encourages many grade-conscious students to bow out if they aren’t satisfied with their midterm grades. I’m the kind of guy who bites the bullet until the bitter end, so I didn’t pull that trick in many cases where it would have benefited my bottom line.

Another reason for the difficulty of maintaining grades is the combination of a staggering array of required courses and high turnover rate of instructors for them. During my time at Tech, very few classes in my option were taught by an instructor who had taught it the year before. Consequently, much of the professors’ and TAs’ energies went into designing the courses (which often differed greatly from their descriptions in the catalog) and homework sets, whereas veteran instructors who knew what they were going to say could concentrate on saying it. Students routinely found bugs in course notes, problem sets, and even exams, which had to be fixed at the last minute. I can remember being assigned proofs for theorems that turned out not to be true and writing code in a custom language whose specifications changed without warning during the course. Although these problems affected everyone equally, I didn’t lose as much sleep over them as most of my classmates.

Just to make sure this dead horse doesn’t get any ideas of getting back up, I feel I should mention that certain personal, medical, and familial situations had a severely adverse effect on my concentration and motivation, particularly in my senior year. In the interest of privacy and (while it’s probably too late) brevity, I’ll omit the details except to say that I have spared no expense or time since then to regroup, readjust, revise, resurrect, and rebuild myself. This process spilled over into the months following my graduation, and, combined with two close family members’ serious medical problems, delayed my job search and created a minor gap in my employment history.

Obviously grades alone cannot describe the value of a student’s education or ability, just as the number of stars for a movie review is not sufficient to tell if the film is worth seeing. A GPA is a one-dimensional measure of a vastly more complex set of experiences, aptitudes, and abilities, and, while I wouldn’t mind mine being higher than it is, there are more important things to consider. If it helps, you can think of my degree as being an overall Two Thumbs Up. I don’t, because I like to think our faculty is smarter than most movie reviewers.

Thank you again for bringing me out to interview. Your leap of faith means the world to me, and I know you won’t regret it. I know also that as bad as I want this job, I want you to have only the best engineers working on these systems as you can possibly find, because the future of medicine, and therefore the quality of life for billions of people, are at stake. While I may not appear to take myself seriously, know that at the core of my convoluted thought process I am dedicated to producing excellent results. I appreciate this opportunity to show you my scars and to tell some of the war stories behind them, as it would have been far easier for you to assume that I just didn’t care enough to excel in academics.

Sincerely,

Jay Carlton