Decisions and Directions
When I was 15 or 16, and most of my peers were enduring the familiar agonies of puberty, I was sailing along pretty happily. I had friends, I had dates, I made good grades without having to try too hard. I was pretty. I was bright. And I was privileged I even remember thinking "Why do people act like life is so hard? Why does everyone have "serious" problems except for me? Is THAT my serious problem, that I have none?" And, I must have been quite a little brat, because it was around that time that both parents started get on my case.
With my mom, it came in an angry outburst just before she left town for two weeks to help my sister take care of her newborn daughter. I had recently turned in a book report that incorporated two of my mom's original Simon & Garfunkel album covers. I used the covers with permission, but after the report was graded (A, of course) I kept forgetting to bring it home. After a week, it disappeared, probably picked up by the cleaning staff at school. The albums were from a time when my mother had to save carefully to afford them. The covers were special to her. I had lost them, and Mom was furious. The album covers were just the tip of the iceberg, although I don't now recall what the rest of the iceberg was. I do recall how, on a drive home from my boyfriend's house, Mom pulled over to give me an unprecedented angry lecture, concluding with the fact that she was "seriously concerned about the quality of my character." That was quite the downer.
With Dad, things came to a head more lightly. I think I was bragging. I remember talking about a school project, possibly even the Simon and Garfunkel book report, in the context of how easy it was for me to get good grades. Scarily easy. Like, why was everyone else not getting good grades? And he pointed out, in a beguiling lighthearted tone, that I never attempted anything I didn't already know I was good at. Sure, I got good grades. But the mandatory classes at my high school weren't challenging for me, and the electives I chose were custom-cut to show off my talents, not strengthen my weaknesses. I'd been acing English and liberal arts classes since I was in elementary school, it was no surprise that I was still acing them now. "You could probably get by your whole life, just bullshitting," he told me, "and you'll do just fine. So you have to decide for yourself if it's worth ever being challenged, and learning how to try for real." So that was pretty sobering.
I started making changes in the following school year. It was to be my LAST year of math, which I had hated since about the third grade, and I signed up for a trigonometry/pre-calculus combination. Pre-calc wasn't required, and I knew I'd never take calculus, but I thought maybe I ought to at least set the bar a little higher for my final foray into math. I also joined the track team. I hated running and I was terribly slow, but I had close friends on the team and I thought the experience might be good for me, in light of recent revelations.
Well, that about did the trick. Before my first track meet, I confided in my friends that I was terrified I'd be dead last. "Don't worry," they told me, "there's always SOMEONE behind you." I kept quiet, but thought "Obviously, that can't be true for everyone." And throughout that track year, and the next, I would be dead last as often as not. And, as a matter of fact, it did build character. I wrote one of my many college application essays on what it takes to really push yourself across the finish line when no one is behind you, and that essay was a hit with the admissions boards. I had my track friends proof-read it for me. "It made me feel like a slacker," said the one who promised there'd always be SOMEONE behind me.
As for the trig/pre-calc, my learning experience in that class was so markedly different from its predecessors that, at the advice of my teacher, my parents took me to be tested for a learning disability. What followed was a battery of poorly monitored tests, the importance of which I had no perception, and into which I put the minimum amount of effort required to get them over with. When the results prompted the psychologist to proffer the theory "You've always gotten good grades, but I bet that's because you work twice as hard as anyone else in that classroom. You've been getting through by really putting in the hours, not on talent," my parents and I could barely keep straight faces. It never occurred to us that such a conclusion could have any merit whatsoever. It merely demonstrated the weaknesses of the doctor's testing methods. I was, in fact, the ULTIMATE slacker, and got good grades anyway. Why, then, was I struggling so hard with the math class? After a session or two of talk therapy with another woman in the practice, she gave my parents the bottom line: "She doesn't do well because she doesn't like math. That's not a learning disability, it's a dislike. There's nothing wrong with her." I mostly shrugged off the experience, but I don't think my morale got through completely unscathed. I would never cease to doubt that I could be successful at math, and the sneaking suspicion that I fundamentally lacked the ability to change that.
When senior year rolled around, I broke my promise to myself and went ahead and took another, totally optional, year of math. My favorite teacher was teaching AP Statistics, and I had managed to scrape through trig/pre-calc, and besides, an awe-struck sort of admiration had sprung up in me for those students who aced math the way I aced English. Those, I decided, were the really gifted thinkers. Of course, most of those students were taking calculus, which was, in my own estimation, still out of the question for me. But at least Stats was an AP class, and SOME of the really smart kids would be there. And my favorite teacher.
That year, my whole life-plan would undergo a rapid and striking revision. My default plan of attending a small but prestigious liberal arts school to double major in English and Psychology suddenly seemed childish. Not hard enough. If I were a stronger person, I told myself, I would major in something more "serious." I soon started to tinker with the idea of neuroscience. Like psychology, but more science-y, I thought. That would take real brains. No one could doubt that I was really smart if I was a neuroscientist. But neuroscience took a lot of chemistry, and I had not been good at that. Something more physics-based, I thought. Maybe architecture. Then my fast-running track friends all decided to major in engineering. I thought they were nuts. Who'd want to go to college for FOUR YEARS of JUST math and science? But then, one afternoon, my dad and I saw a program on the Discovery Channel about the top ten engineering accomplishments of all time. One of them was about prostheses, and the potential for advanced treatments of people with spinal chord injuries. That was it. I became feverish with the desire to work on things like prosthetic hands and feet, exoskeletons, and mind-controlled mobility aids. I raced up the stairs to re-submit all my college applications, this time specifically to schools of engineering.
I got my acceptance letter to the University of Pittsburgh's school of engineering on Halloween of my senior year. I decided to go, because that meant I wouldn't have to bother with any more applications. And besides, they awarded me a modest academic scholarship. All freshman engineering students at Pitt take the same classes. Then you have to declare your specialty. To work with medical technology, I'd need to declare biomedical, but freshman year did nothing to assuage my fear of chemistry. In fact, my chemistry grades almost lost me that academic scholarship. (Calculus, on the other hand, turned out to be within my abilities. I never had time to stop and appreciate it, but I do now). To play it safe, I declared mechanical, thinking I could sidle sideways into the medical field when I graduated.
Graduate I did, after five years, and with honors. All of my high school friends and teachers were shocked that I had chosen, then stuck with, engineering. No one had seen it coming, no one really understood it. Even I wasn't totally sold on the decision. It seemed to me that I had decided my major course of study based on a desire to prove myself, rather than to prepare for a fitting professional life. Those five years were the hardest of my life. I didn't have a single slacker-success experience. (Although I did take a critical writing class, one semester, to boost my GPA. I got a spontaneous ovation from that class at the end of the semester.) I went from being one of the top students in my high school to one of the bottom in college. And I don't mean my GPA - you learn how to get good grades in engineering school, and you don't have to learn the material to do it - I mean that in high school, my intellectual prowess commanded respect, and in college, it attracted pity. I became the student that psychologist had described, getting by on hard work and stubbornness, with no talent to speak of.
It sent me out into the professional world shaken and insecure. Here I had this degree that I felt like was maybe a big lie. Because when companies hire an engineer, they want the kind of person who always wanted to be an engineer. Not someone who chose it to prove she could succeed at something hard for her. But, I also had a load of college loans to pay, and a ticket to a bunch of high-paying jobs, so I set out to get it done. "Five years," I told myself. "I'll pay my loans off in five years, then switch to a career I'll actually like. Maybe teaching or something." Getting jobs was laughably easy - turns out the interviewers just assume you're good at engineering because you have a bachelor's degree in it with a high GPA. They meet me and immediately think "All that, and well-spoken too! And a WOMAN!" All the skills that helped me BS my way through before the big challenge were just as applicable to job interviews. I was gainfully employed in no time.
That was seven years ago. I've been in the Aircraft industry for most of that time. They offered me my first job, which moved me to a town where that's the only real industry. I'm scared, always, of getting to close to the "real" engineering. Afraid that if I design something, it will end up killing someone. Sticking to roles where I can support, be part of a team, have plenty of checks and balances in place. Creating job functions that use peripheral skills - data management, organization, communication, critical/analytic thinking, roles that allow me to contribute without having to do any real engineering. I'm not that 15- or 16-year old anymore. I'm not cocky. I have learned to fail and I have learned to follow.
And I'm starting to wonder if maybe it's enough, now. I have a bachelor's degree with a high GPA. I have glowing performance reviews and letters of recommendation from 7 years of engineering bosses. But I know that these successes are hard-work triumphs, not talent-triumphs. And, I really miss feeling like a talented person. I miss success and I miss leading. I miss being able to trust my instincts, no fail-safes required. My student loans are long-since paid off and I have a healthy savings account. Can. . . can I stop now?
I've been thinking about this a lot of the past couple of days. The first few ideas I had were more like fantasies - become a full-time dancer in a company. Run my own magazine. Write a novel. But then I read a news article about the latest breakthrough in exoskeletons. They're doing it - they're making my dreams come true, helping paralyzed patients walk again. And maybe they could use someone like me. . . maybe I could get in on that.
I'm not too sure. Just doing a life-inventory, I guess.
It's worth mentioning, too, that my hard work in engineering, while failing to satisfy me or inspire me on its own, has afforded me the opportunity to pursue my passions and build security outside of work. It kept me employed through the Great Recession and means that now, at 30, I have the option of doing a life-inventory, instead of being a slave to my income. I'm not saying I made the wrong decisions. I'm just saying it might be time for some new ones.
With my mom, it came in an angry outburst just before she left town for two weeks to help my sister take care of her newborn daughter. I had recently turned in a book report that incorporated two of my mom's original Simon & Garfunkel album covers. I used the covers with permission, but after the report was graded (A, of course) I kept forgetting to bring it home. After a week, it disappeared, probably picked up by the cleaning staff at school. The albums were from a time when my mother had to save carefully to afford them. The covers were special to her. I had lost them, and Mom was furious. The album covers were just the tip of the iceberg, although I don't now recall what the rest of the iceberg was. I do recall how, on a drive home from my boyfriend's house, Mom pulled over to give me an unprecedented angry lecture, concluding with the fact that she was "seriously concerned about the quality of my character." That was quite the downer.
With Dad, things came to a head more lightly. I think I was bragging. I remember talking about a school project, possibly even the Simon and Garfunkel book report, in the context of how easy it was for me to get good grades. Scarily easy. Like, why was everyone else not getting good grades? And he pointed out, in a beguiling lighthearted tone, that I never attempted anything I didn't already know I was good at. Sure, I got good grades. But the mandatory classes at my high school weren't challenging for me, and the electives I chose were custom-cut to show off my talents, not strengthen my weaknesses. I'd been acing English and liberal arts classes since I was in elementary school, it was no surprise that I was still acing them now. "You could probably get by your whole life, just bullshitting," he told me, "and you'll do just fine. So you have to decide for yourself if it's worth ever being challenged, and learning how to try for real." So that was pretty sobering.
I started making changes in the following school year. It was to be my LAST year of math, which I had hated since about the third grade, and I signed up for a trigonometry/pre-calculus combination. Pre-calc wasn't required, and I knew I'd never take calculus, but I thought maybe I ought to at least set the bar a little higher for my final foray into math. I also joined the track team. I hated running and I was terribly slow, but I had close friends on the team and I thought the experience might be good for me, in light of recent revelations.
Well, that about did the trick. Before my first track meet, I confided in my friends that I was terrified I'd be dead last. "Don't worry," they told me, "there's always SOMEONE behind you." I kept quiet, but thought "Obviously, that can't be true for everyone." And throughout that track year, and the next, I would be dead last as often as not. And, as a matter of fact, it did build character. I wrote one of my many college application essays on what it takes to really push yourself across the finish line when no one is behind you, and that essay was a hit with the admissions boards. I had my track friends proof-read it for me. "It made me feel like a slacker," said the one who promised there'd always be SOMEONE behind me.
As for the trig/pre-calc, my learning experience in that class was so markedly different from its predecessors that, at the advice of my teacher, my parents took me to be tested for a learning disability. What followed was a battery of poorly monitored tests, the importance of which I had no perception, and into which I put the minimum amount of effort required to get them over with. When the results prompted the psychologist to proffer the theory "You've always gotten good grades, but I bet that's because you work twice as hard as anyone else in that classroom. You've been getting through by really putting in the hours, not on talent," my parents and I could barely keep straight faces. It never occurred to us that such a conclusion could have any merit whatsoever. It merely demonstrated the weaknesses of the doctor's testing methods. I was, in fact, the ULTIMATE slacker, and got good grades anyway. Why, then, was I struggling so hard with the math class? After a session or two of talk therapy with another woman in the practice, she gave my parents the bottom line: "She doesn't do well because she doesn't like math. That's not a learning disability, it's a dislike. There's nothing wrong with her." I mostly shrugged off the experience, but I don't think my morale got through completely unscathed. I would never cease to doubt that I could be successful at math, and the sneaking suspicion that I fundamentally lacked the ability to change that.
When senior year rolled around, I broke my promise to myself and went ahead and took another, totally optional, year of math. My favorite teacher was teaching AP Statistics, and I had managed to scrape through trig/pre-calc, and besides, an awe-struck sort of admiration had sprung up in me for those students who aced math the way I aced English. Those, I decided, were the really gifted thinkers. Of course, most of those students were taking calculus, which was, in my own estimation, still out of the question for me. But at least Stats was an AP class, and SOME of the really smart kids would be there. And my favorite teacher.
That year, my whole life-plan would undergo a rapid and striking revision. My default plan of attending a small but prestigious liberal arts school to double major in English and Psychology suddenly seemed childish. Not hard enough. If I were a stronger person, I told myself, I would major in something more "serious." I soon started to tinker with the idea of neuroscience. Like psychology, but more science-y, I thought. That would take real brains. No one could doubt that I was really smart if I was a neuroscientist. But neuroscience took a lot of chemistry, and I had not been good at that. Something more physics-based, I thought. Maybe architecture. Then my fast-running track friends all decided to major in engineering. I thought they were nuts. Who'd want to go to college for FOUR YEARS of JUST math and science? But then, one afternoon, my dad and I saw a program on the Discovery Channel about the top ten engineering accomplishments of all time. One of them was about prostheses, and the potential for advanced treatments of people with spinal chord injuries. That was it. I became feverish with the desire to work on things like prosthetic hands and feet, exoskeletons, and mind-controlled mobility aids. I raced up the stairs to re-submit all my college applications, this time specifically to schools of engineering.
I got my acceptance letter to the University of Pittsburgh's school of engineering on Halloween of my senior year. I decided to go, because that meant I wouldn't have to bother with any more applications. And besides, they awarded me a modest academic scholarship. All freshman engineering students at Pitt take the same classes. Then you have to declare your specialty. To work with medical technology, I'd need to declare biomedical, but freshman year did nothing to assuage my fear of chemistry. In fact, my chemistry grades almost lost me that academic scholarship. (Calculus, on the other hand, turned out to be within my abilities. I never had time to stop and appreciate it, but I do now). To play it safe, I declared mechanical, thinking I could sidle sideways into the medical field when I graduated.
Graduate I did, after five years, and with honors. All of my high school friends and teachers were shocked that I had chosen, then stuck with, engineering. No one had seen it coming, no one really understood it. Even I wasn't totally sold on the decision. It seemed to me that I had decided my major course of study based on a desire to prove myself, rather than to prepare for a fitting professional life. Those five years were the hardest of my life. I didn't have a single slacker-success experience. (Although I did take a critical writing class, one semester, to boost my GPA. I got a spontaneous ovation from that class at the end of the semester.) I went from being one of the top students in my high school to one of the bottom in college. And I don't mean my GPA - you learn how to get good grades in engineering school, and you don't have to learn the material to do it - I mean that in high school, my intellectual prowess commanded respect, and in college, it attracted pity. I became the student that psychologist had described, getting by on hard work and stubbornness, with no talent to speak of.
It sent me out into the professional world shaken and insecure. Here I had this degree that I felt like was maybe a big lie. Because when companies hire an engineer, they want the kind of person who always wanted to be an engineer. Not someone who chose it to prove she could succeed at something hard for her. But, I also had a load of college loans to pay, and a ticket to a bunch of high-paying jobs, so I set out to get it done. "Five years," I told myself. "I'll pay my loans off in five years, then switch to a career I'll actually like. Maybe teaching or something." Getting jobs was laughably easy - turns out the interviewers just assume you're good at engineering because you have a bachelor's degree in it with a high GPA. They meet me and immediately think "All that, and well-spoken too! And a WOMAN!" All the skills that helped me BS my way through before the big challenge were just as applicable to job interviews. I was gainfully employed in no time.
That was seven years ago. I've been in the Aircraft industry for most of that time. They offered me my first job, which moved me to a town where that's the only real industry. I'm scared, always, of getting to close to the "real" engineering. Afraid that if I design something, it will end up killing someone. Sticking to roles where I can support, be part of a team, have plenty of checks and balances in place. Creating job functions that use peripheral skills - data management, organization, communication, critical/analytic thinking, roles that allow me to contribute without having to do any real engineering. I'm not that 15- or 16-year old anymore. I'm not cocky. I have learned to fail and I have learned to follow.
And I'm starting to wonder if maybe it's enough, now. I have a bachelor's degree with a high GPA. I have glowing performance reviews and letters of recommendation from 7 years of engineering bosses. But I know that these successes are hard-work triumphs, not talent-triumphs. And, I really miss feeling like a talented person. I miss success and I miss leading. I miss being able to trust my instincts, no fail-safes required. My student loans are long-since paid off and I have a healthy savings account. Can. . . can I stop now?
I've been thinking about this a lot of the past couple of days. The first few ideas I had were more like fantasies - become a full-time dancer in a company. Run my own magazine. Write a novel. But then I read a news article about the latest breakthrough in exoskeletons. They're doing it - they're making my dreams come true, helping paralyzed patients walk again. And maybe they could use someone like me. . . maybe I could get in on that.
I'm not too sure. Just doing a life-inventory, I guess.
It's worth mentioning, too, that my hard work in engineering, while failing to satisfy me or inspire me on its own, has afforded me the opportunity to pursue my passions and build security outside of work. It kept me employed through the Great Recession and means that now, at 30, I have the option of doing a life-inventory, instead of being a slave to my income. I'm not saying I made the wrong decisions. I'm just saying it might be time for some new ones.