TITLE: Doing What You Love, University Edition
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 13, 2006  6:09 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Several folks have commented already on Paul Graham's
<A HREF="http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html">
   How to Do What You Love</A>.
As always, this essay is chock full of quotable
quotes.  Ernie's 3D Pancakes highlights
<A HREF="http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2006/01/xyxy.html">
   one paragraph</A>
on pain and graduate school.  My grad school experience
was mostly enjoyable, but I know for certain that I was
doing part of it wrong.

Again as always, Graham expresses a couple of very good
ideas in an easy-going style that sometimes makes the
ideas seem easier to live than they are.  I am thinking
about how I as a parent can help my daughters choose a
path that fulfills them rather than the world's goals
for them, or mine.

Among the quotable quotes that hit close to home for
me were these.  First, on prestige as siren:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious.
If you want to make ambitious people waste their
time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the
hook with prestige.  That's the recipe for getting
people to give talks, write forewords, serve on
committees, be department heads, and so on.  It
might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious
task.  If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to
make it prestigious.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Ouch.  But in my defense I can say that in the
previous fourteen years my department had beaten
all of the prestige out of being our head.  When I
came around to considering applying for the job, it
looked considerably less prestigious than the ordinary
headship.  I applied for the job precisely because
it needed to be done well, and I thought I was the
right person to do it.  I accepted the job on with
a shorter-than-usual review window with no delusions
of grandeur.

Then, on prematurely settling on a career goal:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Don't decide too soon.  Kids who know early what they
want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer
to some math question before the other kids.  They have
an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

From the time I was seven years old until the time
I went to college, I knew that I wanted to be an
architect -- the regular kind that designs houses and
other buildings, not the crazy enterprise integration
kind.  My premature optimization mostly didn't hurt me.
When some people realize that they had been wrong all
that time, they are ashamed or afraid to tell everyone 
and so stay on the wrong path.  During my first year in
architecture school, when I realized that as much as I
liked architecture it probably wasn't the career for me,
I was fortunate enough to be feel comfortable changing
courses of study right away.  It was a sea change for
me mentally, but once it happened in mind I knew that
I could tell folks.

I somehow knew that computer science was where I should
go.  Again, I was fortunate not to have skewed my high
school preparation in a way that made the right path
hard to join; I had taken a broad set of courses that
prepared me well for almost any college major, including
as much math and science as I could get.

One way that my fixation on architecture may have hurt
me was in my choice of university.  I optimized school
selection locally by picking a university with a
<A HREF="http://www.bsu.edu/cap/">
   strong architecture program</A>.
When I decided to switch to a CS major, I ended up in
a program not as strong.  I certainly could have gone
to a university that prepared me better for CS grad
school.  One piece of I advice that I'll give my
daughters is to choose a school that gives you many
options.  Even if you never change majors, having 
plenty of strong programs will mean a richer ecosystem
of ideas in which to swim.  (I already give this advice
to students interested in CS grad school, though there
are different trade-offs to be made for graduate study.)

That said, I do not regret sticking with my alma mater,
which gave me a very good education and exposed me to
a lot of new ideas and people.  Most of undergraduate
education is what the student makes of it; it's only
at the boundaries of high ambition where attending a
particular school matters all that much.

Nor would I have traded my time in architecture school
for a quicker start in CS.  I learned a lot there that
still affects how I thinking about systems, design, and
education.  More importantly, it was important for me
to try the one thing I thought I would love before moving
on to something else.  Making such decisions on purely
intellectual grounds is a recipe for regret.
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