In the past six weeks, three different people have asked for my abstract or a summary of my work, two different people have requested my photograph, I have filled out two surveys Wanting to Know about my Grad Student Experience, and I have been invited to five different shindigs, not including the commencement ceremony itself. None of this happened when I finished either my BS or my MS, but the Bay Area is much bigger. To put this in perspective, the population of UC Berkeley, in number of students, faculty, and staff, matches the population of the entire Fairbanks North Star Borough. And the population of the San Francisco Bay Area, at 7.15 million, is about ten times the population of the entire state of Alaska, at 732,000.
Once when I was in... oh probably my early twenties, a friend from high school, with whom I'd remained close, informed me that he'd had an epiphany. "Here we are in this rat race," he said. "And there are so many brilliant people that we never stand out. What we need to do is move to a small town. Then we'd be the smartest, most outstanding people in the town." His statement made me feel indescribably sad. Why lower your standards, I thought? Much better to continually motivate yourself to be the best! Not the best among your peers, but the best that you can be! If you surround yourself by people smaller than you, and then sit back and pat yourself on the back, what way is that to live?
Now... I still feel the same way, but I do enjoy the perks of my small town. I'm certainly not the brightest fish in this pond, though! At my current job alone, I count a Harvard grad, the finest power electronics engineer I have ever known, a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed intern who's off to Stanford for grad school this fall, and (a-hem) a Berkeley grad and Silicon valley veteran. Among students I have taught, I saw some go off to grad school at Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Cal Tech, and Berkeley. We don't do too poorly attracting talent to these-here boonies. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment