One of the scariest realizations you can ever have is that maybe, just maybe, you’ve been wrong for eight years.
I’ve been telling myself since, heavens, even before I moved to Ithaca that my true destiny was to do something with computers. I knew it had to be computers. I knew it. Knew it. Knew it. But as I stayed home today because I blew off all my homework so I could hang out with Daniel, and dreaded doing the next APCS project, I started talking with Paul. We discussed our schedules and all that jazz, and he asked why I was taking math next year.
Because not taking math would be silly, of course.
Why is that silly?
Because…you have to have math to be a Computer Scientist. I don’t really like math, though. I don’t dislike math, but I gotta know it.
Why?
It was somewhere around this point that I kind of realized that although I enjoy all things technological and computerized, it just isn’t what I want to do in life. I like programming, it’s fun, but I don’t like programming under deadlines and doing things that I WOULD have to do were I to go into that field. I enjoy the idea, but I definitely don’t enjoy it enough to live it.
The thing that really sold me in the first place was when people started telling me I was good at this stuff. Boy, was that reassuring. But then came Digital Electronics. Wow, do I not care about this stuff. At all. It didn’t really hit me until just now that – hey, I don’t enjoy this. So, what DO I enjoy?
At this moment, I’m really not sure.
The basic fact I can rely on here is that I like computers and like playing with computers. But the times at which I’ve enjoyed the technical aspects of computers were always towards other ends. In general, towards advancing this blog. I didn’t learn javascript or PHP for the heck of it, I did it to improve the blog. My motives behind learning the hardware inside my computer weren’t just to build a computer, but mostly to learn how to improve it, so I could run my games at leet settings. The learning was a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.
What do I want to do? I don’t think it’s computers anymore. I’ve known for a while now that I enjoy analyzing things a lot more than doing things that require analyzation, and I think some form of creative expression is a lot closer to what I want to be doing. Paul says he’s looking at journalism, which I find to be a really intruiging idea. I am a geek, I know that for certain, but being a writer for some kind of magazine or website sounds a lot of fun. I admire the guys at Gamespot a lot – what they do isn’t as easy as it looks.
Something that’s always stuck out in my mind is a story I wrote in 7th grade. Those of you that had Mahadabe (NO IDEA HOW TO SPELL THAT) for English at DeWitt, you might remember that really crappy slave story we read, called Nightjohn, and the extra chapter assignment we did. I did it with some level of vigor, and when I read it in front of the class, there was a collective “….huh?”. Upon recieving the paper back, it was covered in gigantic letters reading: “WOW!!! THIS IS AMAZING!!!”. I had accidentally left the file up when I was done, and my dad had read it (family computer days), and then proceeded to send it to my brothers and showed it to my mom and my cousins, and my uncle, which resulted what could only be described as very bothersome.
Now, I know a 7th grade English paper proves absolutely nothing concerning my skills of an author, but upon retrospect, I really enjoy writing. That’s why I have this blog, that’s why I make this blog look pretty (actually, the current design isn’t all that pretty, but that will eventually change). I enjoy the technical aspects of making this blog work, but honestly, I enjoy the things that have instant output. I don’t like the drawn out process of programming, I like the NOW aspect, which is what I got in Programming 1 & 2 – extremely basic programming that produced pretty results, thanks to BlueJ and Objectdraw. So, what does this all mean?
I’m not entirely sure. This leaves me baffled as to what I’m gonna do with college. My entire future was set on this idea of going to a tech school. I think the main reason I really wanted to go to RPI was not for the training, but the poeple I’d be with. I find the idea of being in a gigantic dorm with hundreds of geeks like me extremely appealing, but I don’t think that’s the reason I should be going to a place like RPI. What this means for me next year, I really don’t know. I need time to figure this out, but until then, I have to work. Work, work work.
[edit: i revised this a good bit, so it will look significantly different to those of you that already read this]