Eurotrip (Part 2: The Group)

If you want to learn more about my Eurotrip, check out Part 1 of this series. These posts are all focused on the lessons I learned and adventures I had during my travels. This one is on the second week, which was mostly spent with MIT friends. I hadn't seen many of them in months, so this served as a wonderful Italian reunion :)

The Group

Traveling in a group of five, Ruth, Priya, Virup, Jin, and I took on Italy. I took the train from Rome to meet up with them in Florence, and of course, ended up jumping on the wrong train and making a 1 hour journey into a 4 hour one. Luckily, I was able to get in contact with them thanks to our universal wifi savior: Mcdonalds. You can always count on Mcdonalds, no matter what country you're in!

Florence was one of my favorite cities with all of its quaint village charm. I was glad I got to share my time in Florence with such great friends as we ran from market to Duomo, leaving raucous American laughter in our wake.

Cinque Terre was also one of the best hiking experiences I've ever had, especially in the company of avid hikers. The initial day of rain didn't dampen our spirits as we prepared for an early start the next day over thick hot chocolate and tiramisu. The villages all sported infinite winding alleyways that allowed for easy exploring for our energetic selves. We spoke with shop owners, marveled at the simple yet charming lives of the residents, and enjoyed our youth over the views of teal blue water.

Traveling in a group definitely contrasts with both traveling alone and with one. With a group, it's easy to feed off the energy and adrenaline of everyone, so 7AM wake up times and late night drinking are no thang. However, with more people comes more inertia. Moving from place to place takes longer and there was a lot of splitting up that led to some panic attacks, but mostly "searches" that ended in carousel rides and running through shops. It's also nice because you have built-in breaks. You linger over meals, spend more time deciding where to go and how to get there, and generally spend time enjoying each others' company. Solving problems with a group is also inherently less stressful than doing it by yourself. The whole bag storage fiasco ended in more laughter than anxiety, although I know I would have been stressed out had I been on my own. I also developed a deeper appreciation for hiking. In no other context would I have woken up at 7AM to catch the sun shining through the clouds from the top of a cliff. And without my friends dragging my ass out of bed, I would have missed a beautiful view of the world.

Traveling in a group of good friends is no doubt the easiest guarantee of a good time. It's easy, it's fun, and you have people you love to share the experience with. It's definitely my preferred mode of travel, but that's not to detract from the unique benefits of traveling alone or with others. More thoughts on that in the next post! :)

Eurotrip (Part 1: The Boyfriend)

In classic Connie fashion, I'm making this trip a learning experience.

My travels took place in three parts: with Mike, with friends, and with myself. Each leg of the journey lasted about one week, and I'm writing a post about the unique experiences and lessons from each. The location was much less important than the people I was with; I would have had very different experiences in each place had the people been different. It just makes me all the more grateful for the wonderful people with whom I get to share being alive. So without further ado, I present Part 1: The Boyfriend!

The Boyfriend

We started off in Paris. Both carrying only a backpack for the next three weeks, our mobility was streamlined, meaning one less worry for the trip. Our time in Paris was largely characterized by pastry consumption and lots of walking. I'm interested in understanding the cultures of the places I travel, so I strongly prefer walking over taking public transportation so I get a chance to see more of the city. It's crazy to see people casually go on a daily run by the Louvre or observe the friendly interactions among the people of Florence, moments that I would miss if I didn't see them in passing. I enjoy wandering with loose plans that give me a chance to serendipitously discover the pulse of a place.

I don't mind tourist traps with a great view though. Anything that involves a bit of a hike and a satisfying overlook of the city is worth it to me. On that first night, the overlook of Paris from Montmarte was magical. The twinkling lights of the city with people from around the world singing Beatles songs was surreal.

Next stop: Barcelona. This was definitely a favorite: the beaches, the local flair, the bustling markets, the great food, and the hipster fashion was everything I wanted and more. It was such a casual place with men running out into the streets at 2PM for a game of soccer and people lounging by the water with a pint of beer, soaking in the afternoon rays. We also participated in an eatwith, which was a great chance to share a meal with some wonderful strangers. If you haven't participated in an eatwith before, I strongly recommend it. Much like how airbnb gives anyone a chance to run their own bed and breakfast, eatwith gives home chefs an opportunity to run their own pop-up restaurant. It's especially great while traveling because you get the chance to meet people familiar with the area and enjoy a meal of local cuisine. Our new friends recommended we try calcots, large green onions grilled to a charred black, and then served with a tomato sauce. They are the Barcelona equivalent to the food served at US barbeques. So the next day,we set off to feast on calcots, and ended up at a rustic restaurant with the friendliest waiter. He spoke to us in Chinese, laughed with us, and served us post-lunch shots, saying that they were the Spanish equivalent to a very strong Chinese alcohol. Without a doubt, the people we met largely defined my experience and are what I will remember most about the city.

Rome was a bit of a disappointment. It was overrun with tourists and seemed more of a historical site made into an amusement park than a city of unique individuals. Maybe it's because we didn't get the chance to meet many people, but Rome wasn't very satisfying. The water poisoning and subsequent nights of vomiting were also a fun curveball. The sights from the Orangerie gardens and the Knights of Malta Keyhole were memorable, but other than that, not much happened besides food and history.

And with that, we closed our adventures. These travels taught me quite a bit about myself, Mike, and our relationship. I learned how weak my stomach is, a good thing to know for future travels. I also learned how tiring it can be to travel with only one other. The increased mobility is a blessing and a curse: you can see everything, but moving around all the time is the best way to burn out. However, it can also be quite relaxing not having to balance the needs of a whole group. Mike and I are luckily compatible travelers: we both get tired at around the same rate and are interested in similar things. However, being in close quarters 24/7 was a new experience. Traveling is unlike the working/student life when you mostly see each other in the evenings and your day is interspersed with interactions with others. It's just two people. These unique circumstances helped me appreciate a lot of things about Mike: his leniency, his focus on enjoyment rather than frugality, his ability to balance work and play. You discover a lot about a person by traveling with them, and I'm grateful for this opportunity to discover not only new places but also new appreciations with Mike.

Quantification

I've always defined myself with numbers.

It makes sense though. I'm an engineer by study (although I like to think that I'm designer at heart) and numbers have always come easily to me. I'm naturally predisposed for quantification. In general, our minds also wrap around numbers more easily than around descriptive statements. Quantitative is just easier to comprehend than qualitative: easier to explain to others, easier to scale, easier to prove progress.

And that's why investors and grants all want quantified evidence of progress. However, just because something is quantifiable, doesn't mean it's a valuable measure of success. Often, great opportunities and ideas are passed up because they're difficult to quantify. Take education. Out of all US Foreign Aid, only about 3% goes towards improving education (USAID 2012 Performance Report), while arguably, an educated population could be the best path towards change. Unfortunately, educational progress isn't easily quantifiable. You can't assign a number to how a teacher inspires students or how a student suddenly adopts a new interest in art. Instead, educational progress is reflected in the personal anecdotes of teachers and students seeing the transformational, unquantifiable changes happening day to day. When you start looking for numerical evidence in education, you create a dependence on test scores, standardization, and percent increases rather than what's really important.

The same goes for companies. By solely looking at the profit margins since Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo, you'd say the last two years of her leadership have been a flop. However, looking beyond shows that she has rebuilt the foundations of the company and rebranded it from a search engine to a mobile pioneer. This has been a huge time and resource investment, but an internal overhaul that will change the company's trajectory forever. Maybe these changes aren't showing results yet, but it's unfair to say the work has been useless. However, that's the conclusion a lot of people are coming to because there are not yet many outward-facing successes.

Thus, quantification deters risk-taking. When you're looking to impress with annual progress and big numbers, you're going to go for easily achievable results rather than the transformational changes that take much longer to implement. Which is why when I noticed my own dependence on numbers, it was clear that I needed to change. In high school, my number was my GPA. I became obsessed with achieving the highest score possible because that's how I measured my worth. I made short-sighted decisions in order to fulfill my quantifiable definition of success. 

Recently, my number has been my weight. Instead of asking myself if I feel like I look good, I'm reliant on a measurement to tell me how to feel. In addition, quantifiable goals often become moving targets, and setting these unreachable standards has become way too common. It's why people can't escape the hamster wheel of finance. It's difficult to reach a point of having "enough" if enough is never defined and ever-changing.

So now I'm making a conscious effort to not quantify everything, and to look through a qualitative lens instead.  Quantifying limits the ways in which we can view ourselves. It's on us to be conscious of quantification and make our own decisions for when and where it is valuable to have numbers in our lives.

(re)Defining Directions

I hoped to find direction by moving in a different one.

Cambridge was my way of literally and figuratively moving out. Moving out of MIT into somewhere new, moving out of my comfort zone into the unknown, and whether for better or for worse, moving.

Since then I've found that being out of the MIT intensity has been a double-edged sword. I needed the change of scenery to disrupt my mental bubble, but the lack of like-minded, passionate people at Cambridge quickly led me to complacency. DFA used to be my reminder of why I get up in the morning, but now I didn't have that constant tap on the shoulder.

After a lazy month of thinking about the future only in passing, the internship search catalyzed my focus. "What am I doing this summer" led to "What do I want to do for the rest of my life?" The internal conflict between d.thinking and engineering, people and product, the personal and the physical, kept recurring.

And now I'm trying to find my niche on the spectrum.  Where do I belong? What do I want to spend the rest of my life doing?

I love working with people, but don't want to waste my engineering background. I appreciate the quick iterative process of design, but want physical deliverables to show for my work. I love the buzz of gathering user insights, but am too aware that "understanding people" doesn't sound like a legitimate interest, especially in the engineering world. My background has made it so I will never be completely satisfied by the fluffiness of strategy or organizational design. On the other hand, a completely hardware approach will keep me wanting for more personal interactions.

So where's this leave me? Mike has inadvertently taught me a lot throughout this search. Seeing how passionately he pursues projects, I see my own passion for working with people. His excitement for solving difficult problems is the same as mine for advising project teams or redefining organizational structures. It's clear now that my heart is not in hardware design itself; I'm driven by the people I can affect and the minds I can change. I want to inspire, and that's easier for me to do through interacting rather than creating. For me, product design has always been a means to an end and that's no way to go about things: I know I will never be completely satisfied in hardware design when I am living from the high of one user interaction to the next.

So the struggle is now in finding the perfect balance, and many flowcharts and cafe visits later, the working idea is this: 

Start a design consultancy that has two focuses:

1. Design solutions for impact-driven clients looking to redefine how people live in a meaningful way (vague I know, but it's a start :D). Shoutout to Gravity Tank for doing some damn cool and inspiring consulting work.
2. Redefine CSR by having employees mentor students in design for social impact projects. Take an active role in the community like ideo.org or Vecna do. This will hopefully set a new precedent for corporate community engagement.

So that's where I am now, and I'd say that's a pretty reasonable start. I'm sure this idea will go through many iterations in the next few months, even weeks, but the core is there: I want to impact lives and understand people. The path to get there will likely wind through many obstacles, but I'm more confident with those uncertainties now that the goal is defined.

The Beauty of Theory

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. :)

How Travel is Making Me a Better Designer

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.

Goal 4 (Part 2)

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.

Goal 4

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.

Goal 6 (with a dash of Goal 2)

Last semester I deemed as my "get shit done" semester.

Which is why this semester was very purposefully designed to be the "get inspired" semester, a cheesy way of saying that I want to focus on my personal growth. Because it's crazy how little inspiration and productivity overlap. At MIT, it's easy to get so consumed by the firehose of psets, clubs, friends, and UROPs that you can barely catch your breath to ask yourself "What am I here for?"

But with the sudden influx of free flexible time here at Cambridge, its been a welcome change to casually read or take up new hobbies or to just think. Because that's exactly what is lacking at MIT: time to reflect. There's so many opportunities for growth that are simply missed because there's no time to stop and consider the point of anything or think about what is gained. If you look at it from Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, MIT leaves you stuck at esteem and searching for a sense of achievement, and it's difficult to reach your highest potential when you have no time or energy to invest in it. When your mind is so jumbled with everything else, self-growth is no longer a priority.

But one change I've made since coming to Cambridge is making that time for self growth, and that involves writing daily. By writing, I'm forced to reflect on what I do and do things deliberately instead of approaching everything as a checklist of tasks. It helps me to go beyond doing a thing into doing the right thing. I allot my time more wisely to the things I care about, I get more time to think in thoughts rather than in schedules, and I feel more relaxed than usual. And I found out that there are so many unconsidered dimensions of thoughts that don't crystallize until I get them down on paper. In this way thoughts are kind of like icebergs: on the surface, each thought only shows a small percent of itself, but once you purposefully try to uncover its meaning, you realize there's so much more to discover. So if anything, writing has helped me become more aware of who I am, what I think, and what matters to me. And that sounds like a pretty good first step towards getting inspired.

Goal 5

It's strange how such a new experience can feel so familiar.

The uneasy faces of confidence and the nervous checks on my habits echo my experiences in freshman year. I'm the new kid and it's the first day of school when there's too much new sensory input to not feel self conscious. Am I laughing too much? What do they think of me? These sound like silly insecurities, but they've definitely crossed my mind. But these are the opportunities that brought me to Cambridge in the first place; another chance to be the new kid, another round of experiences to grow from.

And if I've learned anything, putting myself in uncomfortable situations is the best way for me to grow. It's so easy to retreat back to the people, the places, and the mannerisms that I'm used to. Although I'm in a different Cambridge, there's still many other MIT and US exchange students who I could go to as we all try to find our niche in this new habitat. But I came here to experience something new so I'm throwing myself into that mindset. Instead of easing in to it, I'm jumping headfirst into the things that I'm afraid of because why not. It's kind of like entering really cold water: it's easier to jump in and withstand the shock than to take it slow because you'll get used to it faster. So say hello to the new ballroom dancing, lone traveling, strangely un-athletic athlete who is now Connie :)

This past week has brought a lot of new adventures. There were salsa and waltz classes (I prefer salsa) that pushed my bodily coordination to its limits, but were fun nonetheless. I met many similarly clumsy and nervous individuals, and we laughed with each other and at each other as we tried to improve our barely there skills. There was also the badminton practice that helped reaffirm my goal to become more fit as my supportive teammates met my weak playing with only encouragement and helpful tips. Frisbee was also an option until I realized that the cold, rain, and muddied shoes would probably prevent me from going at all. But ballroom dancing and badminton are a start!

There's been a lot of changes and I'm optimistic that each new experiment will push me closer to Goal 6: finding future Connie. Existentialist? Maybe, but that's not a bad thing is it?