And how Cambridge has helped me see math as an art.
At MIT, it's easy to get caught up in the routine of things. Mindlessly powering through psets is common, and it makes sense when there's always too much work and too little time. An MIT education is known to be like drinking from a firehose, and for good reason: work comes in a constant stream and respite is hard to come by. But MIT, despite the firehose that it is, does have its merits. It relentlessly exposes you to so many concepts that you quickly learn how to learn. If there's anything you can be confident in after graduation, it's your ability to pick up concepts quickly.
But exposure is all it is. Cambridge emphasizes something different: understanding. It mimics graduate school in its emphasis on delving deep, not wide. There's much more time to focus on not only finishing problems, but also fully exploring concepts down the rabbit holes of textbooks and online resources. You get weeks instead of days in between learning concepts and applying them, so there's plenty of time to let the neural networks mature between new ideas and old. The Cambridge learning environment promotes a curiosity to really understand a problem rather than booking it to office hours the night before a pset is due. It's a much more traditional approach, and it puts the responsibility on the students to have the internal motivation to learn. However, I feel that I can only fully appreciate this freedom because I have experienced the other extreme. I value the time to explore topics because I know the rushed dissatisfaction of not having that luxury. Just like how you can't fully appreciate happiness without knowing disappointment, most of the value here lies in the contrast. So it's hard to definitively say that one way of learning is better than the other: students benefit from a balance of the learning types and to help them see how they can complement each other.
After being exposed to Cambridge's focus on understanding, I have a new appreciation for the beauty of how disparate concepts work together. It's a painting of academia, a dance of intertwined ideas. I'm addicted to the mindblowing feeling of finding connections between concepts in seeming disorder. It helps me view the world from a distorted, unique perspective, similar to the way psychoactive drugs work. Johann Hari explains how it is human nature to seek out the high of living, which could translate to an innate craving for understanding just to have a heightened sense of the world.
From photography to music, art tries to preserve the beauty of the world, but in an exaggerated sense, a saturated sense, an abstract sense. Math and science are beautiful in their truthfulness. They define the world in an honest glory, without the excess or frills. Studies show that the same parts of the brain fire when people appreciate art as when mathematicians see beautiful math. So why the constant bickering between the humanities and science? They both exist to fulfill the same goal: represent the world's beauty. There's so much intersection between the goals of the two that if anything, they complement each other more than they oppose.
When I came to Cambridge, I expected to encounter new sights, new smells, a new experience to be appreciated by the senses. However, I've also been introduced to a scholarly beauty that I couldn't have imagined. Thank you Cambridge for being a beautiful place in every way possible. :)
Design and travel don't seem to have much in common.
However, there's a lot of merit in traveling to become a better designer. Design today is often driven by user-centered research: a focus on personal stories to influence design direction (Julie Zhou wrote a great article about user-centered vs. data-driven design). One key component to effective user-centered design is empathy. User-centered design is dependent on understanding a wide spectrum of users, making it crucial for designers to have a good conception of people unlike themselves.
And what better way to find those disparate people than through travel? This semester abroad has pushed me to understand people in a way exactly parallel to what a designer needs. Travel elicits an empathy and understanding of cultural perspectives that fosters open-mindedness.
There's a popular theory that there is no such thing as a "real world". Instead, each person has a unique perceived world that is influenced by their past, their present, their personality, their culture, and everything else related to the individual. Thus, each person experiences a unique world, a pretty crazy concept when you consider that billions of people living on the same Earth are actually living in different worlds crafted by their own perceived constructs. (whoa .-.)
Empathy is then just a practice of being open-minded to other people's worlds. And being a designer gives you the master key to access all of those worlds and understand the nuances among them. From my completely unbiased view, I'd say that's pretty exciting. However, the role also holds its own challenges:
- You must be vulnerable: to learn about others' worlds, you have to share a little, or a lot, about your own. It's not a time to hold back from telling your story.
- It's time-consuming: if you want to learn about others, really learn about others, be ready to make the time investment to do so. This isn't a few weeks' process. Building strong relationships and laying the foundations of trust isn't a process you can speed along. It's no wonder that designers invest so much into flying to the far corners of the world just to talk to target users: establishing a personal connection is a crucial part of the design process.
- You have to be willing to take risks: you're going to end up leaving your comfort zone, and quite often. The only way to expose yourself to new people is to try new things. Go to a swing social, attend a street art festival, make time for a raunchy comedy show. Be the type of person you normally aren't to meet the people you normally wouldn't.
My last few weeks in Cambridge have taught me a lot about building relationships with people who think, react, and experience differently from me. It's coming up on exactly a month in Cambridge, and I have finally started to feel assimilated into the university. I've developed a better sense of self here, and I think that has made me even more resolved that ultimately, I want to spend my life inspiring people to be their best selves. That means seeing the similarities between me and very different people with very different goals, and having the empathy to relate to their situation so I can help the best way I can.
Empowering people is my design challenge, and I thrive to tackle it with the empathy and understanding of a user-centered designer.
Traveling is not the same as vacationing.
Or thoughts from talking to others, pondering to myself, and reading medium articles like this one.
If you read my last post, you know about "the checklist personality": the urge to do the easy tasks for that instant checklist gratification. It's pretty common in this generation, and it's not surprising given all of the life hackers, overachievers, and yuppies of today (me included). And when I say it's a personality, it really does define how you approach more than just the tasks you write down. It becomes the way you accomplish goals, build relationships, and most notably, travel.
Because when you go somewhere new, there's a difference between traveling and vacationing. Traveling is when your destination is the purpose. You've made it there and you're keen on fully immersing yourself in the culture, learning from the people, noticing the nuances, and embracing the differences, even if they make you uncomfortable. Vacationing treats the destination as the final goal. There's no personal journey: the focus is on instagramming the coolest sites, attending the hottest events, and coming out of the experience with stories to impress your friends back home. But most notably, there's always the us and them. Your identity is always tied to home.
And that's the danger of a checklist experience: all of the changes happening are in your external environment, not internal. There's no chance to change and grow. I'm still not quite there: I don't yet embrace all of the differences, I retreat back to the comfort of familiarity quite often, and I'm still distinctly American. There's a lot of cultural changes that I'm reluctant to embrace: I miss American openness and I crave the order of MIT's consistent scheduling. But just because I'm uncomfortable with some of the changes doesn't mean I don't appreciate the nuances; it'll just take a little longer to get used to.
So noticeable differences between traveling and vacationing?
There's a lot less of an urge to take pictures of everything. I've taken maybe 8 pictures so far, and 5 of those have been of the adorable stray cat that I adopted for a few hours one night.
I'm living like a real person instead of as a perpetual tourist. That means making a healthy lunch every morning (and I've lost 10 pounds! Shout out to Goal 3 ;)), going grocery shopping, and making time for myself. I know I'm in it for the long haul and that means I don't need every hour to be exciting and I need to make time to vegetate.
I'm focusing on the nuanced differences. I'm living with these people for the next 6 months, and I want to know what subtleties I appreciate and what things I miss that I didn't even realize were important to me. For one, I miss the outward friendliness, personal sharing, and obnoxious laughter that now seems so uniquely American.
I spend as much time as possible with people as different from me as possible. My goal is to learn how to perceive the world differently and see how culture can shape how people think. There's a lot of cool studies on this, but on the personal level, I just want to be exposed to new views to help me be a more open-minded, empathetic human being.
Studying abroad can be much more than being a long-term tourist. It can be about the relationships made and the deeply personal conversations shared and the things about yourself that change that you can't even put words to. It can be about struggling through the differences, adapting to them, and creating bonds that teach you new ways of seeing the world. And that experience is not tweetable, it can't be checked off a list. Perhaps the value of an experience is inversely proportionable to its check-offability. Ironically, the things worth accomplishing are never the ones you can check as accomplished. Visiting sites, taking pictures: those are checkboxes. Throwing yourself into an effort with no definition of success at the end, that has nothing checkbox about it, but everything opportunity-wise that I value. This doesn't call for a complete lifestyle redesign, but I wouldn't have realized the incompatibility of my checklist goals and traveling values without having tried to embrace both.
I love vacationing just as much as the next person and there's definitely a time for it, but that's not now. Now, I'm traveling.
I'm one who really likes checklists.
It's so satisfying to get that wave of accomplishment from a finished task. Check check check. But building relationships is far from the ease of a checkbox. There's a lot more time, care, and attention that goes into it and you're never really done, there's no end point where you think "Oh, we're friends now!" It's not so clean cut and defined; you just have to let it sweep you off and enjoy the ride of an undetermined destination.
And there's some relationships (the best ones) where that's exactly how it plays out. Girl meets other human. Conversation ensues. Girl laughs, other human laughs, they share all of their similarities, matching humor quirks, and life goals & experiences. Soon enough, time has flown by and you don't even know where you are anymore, but it doesn't matter because hey, you had a good time.
Then there's the forced journeys, the ones that seem to drag on like a bad family road trip. Each statement is slightly off mark, a tad misinterpreted. The conversational dance is just barely out of sync and neither of you knows who is on the right beat anymore. To avoid ensuing awkwardness, both of you devolve into the boring small talk that has little chance of going wrong, and pretend you're enjoying knowing what classes they're taking and where they attended high school.
And because of my checklist personality, I get impatient with these lulls, these less than optimal interactions. I want to click with everyone instantly. I want 100 best friends in the same number of seconds. I want to skip the small talk and just be my real self for others and have them do the same. I want to know what makes people tick and what their dreams are and who they want to be ten years from now.
The older I get, the less tolerant I think I am of superficial friendships. Freshman Connie was the social butterfly with hundreds of friends, and then some. Jaded Junior Connie is a different story. I'm a lot more selective with who I spend my time with and I've gotten too used to being surrounded by best friends who have already gone through the awkward early stages of friendship with me. For the past two years, I've become accustomed to the easy conversations and judgment free interactions that characterize long time friendships. So now, it's kind of like learning how to ride a bike again and retraining the long out-of-use small-talking, friend-making muscles to do what they once did so effortlessly. And if everything plays out, those muscles won't have to be in use for long, and I'll return to the comfort of lazy conversations of dreams and futures.
So here's to this adventure of unwritten checklists and exercising both body and mind.
