Last year, getting into the 2014 Summer Science Program was all I wanted.
I’ve been hopelessly obsessed with space since my first grade teacher made a ritual of showing us images from the Hubble in our small, five-person Montessori classroom. Needless to say, spending a portion of my summer writing software to track an asteroid—and having this research archived at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics—sounded like a sweet deal.
But I’ve learned important things about myself since.
I attended two summer programs in 2013; an astrodynamics program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, and a computer science program at the University of Pittsburgh for which I actually relocated to the city for a month. While both were undeniably valuable educational experiences, they had a distinct personal impact.
At Embry-Riddle, students were expected to fill out a host of worksheets, sit through less-than-interactive lectures, and complete numerous pre-determined labs. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it was exactly like being in school again—and I’ve never really enjoyed traditional educational settings; I was Montessori schooled for most of my childhood, did a brief stint in a private Catholic school (which, yes, was absolutely miserable), and ended up in a fully online public high school.
Meanwhile, at UPitt, the program was radically unstructured—maybe a bit too unstructured, but I digress. We sat through brief lightning talks and logic workshops, then we were allowed to spend the rest of our time building (almost) whatever we wanted. Though I lacked direction at times, I found this to be a much more personally rewarding experience—in short, I was just happier.
The stark contrast between the two led me realize maybe another summer working on someone else’s research prompt wasn’t really what I wanted for myself after all.
The Summer Science Program application deadline rolled around, and I threw together my short answer and essay question responses in something like twenty minutes. I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to get in, even if my application did arrive at their offices before the deadline, but I did (somehow). Well, shit.
In the meantime, I had cold-called an unmanned systems research lab at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, and ended up landing myself an internship at a certain spin-off company specializing in autonomous, near-earth flight—an area particularly relevant to a recent research project of mine, designing a small unmanned aerial system for applications in precision agriculture.
Now I had a conflict on my hands.
I could ramble on, but I’ll spare you. It came down to this: my happiness. The SSP is, without a doubt, the mainstream (“safe”) option. Choosing to go wouldn’t be the worst decision of my life—but would it be anywhere near close to the best if the scope of my research was so confined from the very start?
I declined admission.
There were a few kids despairing in a College Confidential thread over their waitlist status, so I can’t help but feel like I killed two emotional birds with one stone.
Anyways, fast-forward a few months.
If the people who know me didn’t already think I’m insane, they probably do now; I received an internship offer from NASA and declined that one, too. As with SSP, the terms of engagement with NASA were too narrow, the scope of my research far too limited right out of the gate.
I know what I want (okay, fine, I have a reasonable idea of what I want), and that’s the ability to explore—at least a little bit—things that pop up and appeal to me as interesting.
“Stay mainstream until you have demonstrated success doing unusual stuff”, they say. Debates regarding what exactly constitutes ‘success’ aside, I believe it’s worth taking the time to consider what you actually want out of experiences, as opposed to just plainly pursuing what appears to be mainstream success.
For me, the safety of a well-known summer program wasn’t material. My happiness, my sense of self-worth (the degree of freedom I have in research opportunity contributes heavily to this) was. I chose to make my own opportunity, to go work for the CMU RI company given my background and interest in unmanned systems as well as freedom afforded to me when it came to choosing my projects there.
I’m incredibly lucky to have any choice at all. But while I do, I’m going to live on my own terms. And I’m not sorry.
