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Knowing and Doing: October 2018 Archives

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I like this passage from John Urschel Goes Pro, about the former NFL player who is pursuing a Ph.D. in math: It's cliché to tell kids to "find their passion". That always seems to me like an awful lot of pressure to put on young adults, let alone teenagers. I meet with potential CS majors frequently, both college students and high school students. Most haven't found their passion yet, and as a result many wonder if there is something wrong with them. I do my my best to assure them that, no, there is nothing wrong with them. It's an unreasonable expectation placed on them by a world that, usually with good intentions, is trying to encourage them. I don't think there is anything I'd rather be than a computer scientist, but I did not walk a straight path to being one. Some choices early on were easy: I like biology as a body of knowledge, but I never liked studying biology. That seemed a decent sign that maybe biology wasn't for me. (High-school me didn't understand that there might be a

Knowing and Doing: October 2018 Archives Knowing and Doing Reflections of an Academic and Computer Scientist October 2018 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Main October 21, 2018 9:53 AM Find the Hard Work You're Willing to Do I like this passage from John Urschel Goes Pro , about the former NFL player who is pursuing a Ph.D. in math: The world thinks mathematicians are people for whom math is easy. That's wrong. Sure, some kids, like Urschel, have little trouble with school math. But everyone who starts down the road to cre

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