#0.2: Metamorphosis…
Welcome to my second META post on here, which is where I talk about why I’m interested in pursuing this blog. After all, this isn’t my job (I’m only a student), and I’m not getting paid for any of this. If you’re at all interested, keep reading.
So, earlier on, I mentioned that most of this blog would just be me exploring the intricate workings of sustainable energy. And you probably did see a lot of that on this blog. If you’ve been reading for a while, you probably saw my first attempt at writing a meta post.
In it, I pretty much went through and talked about a bunch of stuff related to sustainable energy. It was the first post I ever made on here and I was kind of hyped about the whole thing. I was just a really giddy engineering enthusiast, and, after completing my first internship at the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy, I was hyped to know more about how a solar cell really worked. I wanted to understand all of the nooks-and-crannies, all of the loopholes.
In short, I had to know how everything worked. And I still do. That part hasn’t changed. But at the same time, that’s not all I want to do on this blog.
What do I mean by that? Well, although most of my entries for the first few months were pretty much focused only on physics, chemistry, and engineering, I should point out that my interests have broadened since then. On my tabs, you may have noticed the addition of a few new icons, which contain some different topics, such as economics, history, as well as politics.
I’ve been trying to explore sustainable energy from some different perspectives. In essence, I’ve realized that engineering isn’t all about math, physics, and complex equations. It’s more about how those different concepts fit into the larger network of fields and disciplines. For instance, I can’t really get a full grasp of why it’s important to research the efficiency of solar cells without understanding the economic implications of decreased power output.
Likewise, I’ve found that investigating energy-policy in more depth has been very beneficial to my understanding of the overall field of sustainable energy. Why? Because, although I didn’t want to admit this for quite some time, it does get kind of close-minded to keep exploring a topic from a technical perspective. Why does it actually matter that a DSSC is constructed with cheaper materials than a Gallium-Telluride panel? Why should I need to comprehend the photoelectric effect in my everyday life?
In short, I realized that I had started asking myself many ‘why’ questions–questions that can’t really be answered through a series of equations, or by writing lines of code. Sure, understanding the inner workings of sustainable energy devices is still something that greatly fascinates me, and something that I hope to continue pursuing, whether it be in college or through my co-curricular endeavors [ugh, I went really formal right there–won’t happen again I promise], but I want to branch out, as well.
On my first META post, I described myself uniquely as an aspiring engineer and someone who liked understanding how the equations of science, mathematics, or physics could be morphed into real-world items. However, that’s only one facet of me. Sure, I’d like to continue exploring this side of me, but I have other sides, too!
So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I want to stop fixating on a single discipline. I want to be interdisciplinary in everything that I do since I think that so many things in our lives, whether it is sustainable energy or not, are far too broad to be boxed into an arbitrary academic discipline.
I’ve called this blog post Metamorphosis for two reasons: a) because it’s a great pun with the word ‘meta’, and b) because it’s my transformation, from a single-faceted coin to a multi-faceted d20 DnD die [please tell me you get that reference…]
Anyway, I’ve wasted enough of your time for now. Plenty more interesting articles in history, politics, economics, and also engineering to come!
Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed. I try to do some of these ‘META’ posts from time to time to kind of expand on why I’m running this blog. Just as you, the reader, is learning from what I write on here, I’m also learning. In fact, this blog started out as a repository for my explorations into sustainable energy [it very much still is] before metamorphosing [teehee] into its own thing. Anyway, please let me know with if you’d like to see more of this stuff. Cheers!
