Floreat gens togata
I went to a high school reunion a couple of weeks ago.
Actually, that's not quite right. As most of you know, I went to a school of moderate renown. In typical British boarding-school fashion, the school was divided into Houses, which were literally houses: you slept in your House, worked there, and (if you were lucky) ate there. This was actually a House reunion.
Though again, that's not quite right. You see, I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to this school, which remains the only achievement in my life of which I am somewhat proud. Seriously. Compared to King's Scholarships, they hand out Oxbridge Firsts like sweeties. Case in point: I did so wrist-slittingly badly in two Finals papers (out of eight) in my third year that I might as well not have turned up, and I basically screwed up my entire fourth year, and I still got a First. OK, Maths is probably one of the easier subjects in which to get a First, and it wasn't a particularly good First, and blah, blah, blah. My point stands. Anyway, for reasons that no doubt made perfect sense back in 1440, all the scholars were put together in one house, which (again, for reasons that made sense in the fifteenth century) was called College.
So that's what this was. A College reunion.
College is an amazing place. There are certain places in this world which are packed full of incredibly bright people, where nobody is less than brilliant. Xerox PARC. The Institute of Advanced Study. All Souls. Google. College. Only College is full of teenagers. Weird, huh?
Like most people, I hated being a teenager. I hated being a prisoner in my own body, a hostage to my own biochemistry. Being full of rage and lust and hatred, and knowing rationally that there was no reason for any of it, but feeling it anyway. College made it just-about bearable. In College, it seemed like you could have an informed conversation with anyone about just about anything. There was effectively no specialisation: you were expected to be conversant in ancient history, literature, philosophy, science, computers, film, music, mathematics... There was a wonderful solidarity, too. Obviously, there were people who didn't get on with each other, but in general, there was a great cohesiveness within and across the years. Probably because we felt somewhat embattled: there were seventy of us, and 1200 of everyone else (the "Oppidans"), and we dressed slightly differently and had the piss taken out of us a fair bit ("Honestly, you Collegers, you've got no common sense..."). We had a lot in common, and to a reasonably good extent we stuck together. Rather more than our teachers would have liked, actually: since we were mostly in the same (top) classes and thus set the same work, we tended to work collaboratively, and more than one beak complained about having to mark "the College solution" ten times in a row. Plagiarism simply wasn't an issue to us, though it was mildly irritating when someone else handed in an essay you'd written and got a better mark for it than you had.
I'm not trying to be arrogant: I'm just trying to explain how incredible this place was and how lucky I was to be there. Yesterday, I was reading Steve Yegge talking about life at Google (scroll down to "Good Agile"), and at one point he saysYou've got the idea. Sort of. I mean, you have a sketch of it. When friends who aren't at Google ask me how it is working at Google - and this applies to all my friends at all other companies equally, not just companies I've worked at - I feel just how you'd feel if you'd just gotten out of prison, and your prison buddies, all of whom were sentenced in their early teens, are writing to you and asking you what it's like "on the outside". I mean, what would you tell them?
I tell 'em it's not too bad at all. Can't complain. Pretty decent, all in all.
College was kinda like that.
Oxford (and in particular New College, which is a depressingly anti-intellectual place) was something of a disappointment after College. You could no longer assume that whoever you were talking to would know about Herodotus, or electronegativity, or Brownian motion, or post-Campbellian SF, or whatever; worse, they didn't assume that you would understand what they were doing. Which is not to say that I didn't meet brilliant, fascinating, well-rounded people at Oxford; but you had to look for them, rather than just being surrounded by them on all sides.
But hey, at least it had girls.
So, what was it like, to go back after nine years? Pretty good, actually. There were a couple of dozen people from my time there (at least one of whom reads this blog - hi, Jack!), and I'd got on well with almost all of them. In general, we'd all chilled out a bit, and were happier in our skins. Aside from a couple who'd dropped out completely, everyone was doing fairly well: we had a few journalists, a couple of medical doctors, a clutch of PhDs (including another mathematician), various consultants and so on. My particular bete noire wasn't there, but apparently he's found his natural niche as a venture capitalist. Nothing spectacular, as yet. Oh, apart from the House bully, who's still a wanker, but is now apparently in the SAS ("So, Name Withheld, I hear you've just got back from Iraq?" [long pause] "Yeah. Everyone should go to Iraq... or you're not a real man". I carefully refrained from calling him a drunken tosser to his face). One common thread to our experiences had been the difficulty of adjusting away from the College cult of effortless superiority - at some point, you come up against a problem that can't be solved in a last-minute caffeine-fuelled cramming session, and you have a choice between failing (painful) or entirely adjusting your working methods and value system (even more painful). You see, we had evolved a philosophy whereby only effortless achievement really counted. Degenerate? Sure. Disgusting? Probably. Arrogant? You bet. Doomed to fail? Actually, you'd be surprised how far it can get you.
Overcoming this attitude has been one of the bigger problems I've had to face; the PhD could be considered part of my recovery programme. But for all that, I don't regret my time in College at all. Floreat gens togata, et hic noster ludus muralis esto in perpetuum.
Actually, that's not quite right. As most of you know, I went to a school of moderate renown. In typical British boarding-school fashion, the school was divided into Houses, which were literally houses: you slept in your House, worked there, and (if you were lucky) ate there. This was actually a House reunion.
Though again, that's not quite right. You see, I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to this school, which remains the only achievement in my life of which I am somewhat proud. Seriously. Compared to King's Scholarships, they hand out Oxbridge Firsts like sweeties. Case in point: I did so wrist-slittingly badly in two Finals papers (out of eight) in my third year that I might as well not have turned up, and I basically screwed up my entire fourth year, and I still got a First. OK, Maths is probably one of the easier subjects in which to get a First, and it wasn't a particularly good First, and blah, blah, blah. My point stands. Anyway, for reasons that no doubt made perfect sense back in 1440, all the scholars were put together in one house, which (again, for reasons that made sense in the fifteenth century) was called College.
So that's what this was. A College reunion.
College is an amazing place. There are certain places in this world which are packed full of incredibly bright people, where nobody is less than brilliant. Xerox PARC. The Institute of Advanced Study. All Souls. Google. College. Only College is full of teenagers. Weird, huh?
Like most people, I hated being a teenager. I hated being a prisoner in my own body, a hostage to my own biochemistry. Being full of rage and lust and hatred, and knowing rationally that there was no reason for any of it, but feeling it anyway. College made it just-about bearable. In College, it seemed like you could have an informed conversation with anyone about just about anything. There was effectively no specialisation: you were expected to be conversant in ancient history, literature, philosophy, science, computers, film, music, mathematics... There was a wonderful solidarity, too. Obviously, there were people who didn't get on with each other, but in general, there was a great cohesiveness within and across the years. Probably because we felt somewhat embattled: there were seventy of us, and 1200 of everyone else (the "Oppidans"), and we dressed slightly differently and had the piss taken out of us a fair bit ("Honestly, you Collegers, you've got no common sense..."). We had a lot in common, and to a reasonably good extent we stuck together. Rather more than our teachers would have liked, actually: since we were mostly in the same (top) classes and thus set the same work, we tended to work collaboratively, and more than one beak complained about having to mark "the College solution" ten times in a row. Plagiarism simply wasn't an issue to us, though it was mildly irritating when someone else handed in an essay you'd written and got a better mark for it than you had.
I'm not trying to be arrogant: I'm just trying to explain how incredible this place was and how lucky I was to be there. Yesterday, I was reading Steve Yegge talking about life at Google (scroll down to "Good Agile"), and at one point he saysYou've got the idea. Sort of. I mean, you have a sketch of it. When friends who aren't at Google ask me how it is working at Google - and this applies to all my friends at all other companies equally, not just companies I've worked at - I feel just how you'd feel if you'd just gotten out of prison, and your prison buddies, all of whom were sentenced in their early teens, are writing to you and asking you what it's like "on the outside". I mean, what would you tell them?
I tell 'em it's not too bad at all. Can't complain. Pretty decent, all in all.
College was kinda like that.
Oxford (and in particular New College, which is a depressingly anti-intellectual place) was something of a disappointment after College. You could no longer assume that whoever you were talking to would know about Herodotus, or electronegativity, or Brownian motion, or post-Campbellian SF, or whatever; worse, they didn't assume that you would understand what they were doing. Which is not to say that I didn't meet brilliant, fascinating, well-rounded people at Oxford; but you had to look for them, rather than just being surrounded by them on all sides.
But hey, at least it had girls.
So, what was it like, to go back after nine years? Pretty good, actually. There were a couple of dozen people from my time there (at least one of whom reads this blog - hi, Jack!), and I'd got on well with almost all of them. In general, we'd all chilled out a bit, and were happier in our skins. Aside from a couple who'd dropped out completely, everyone was doing fairly well: we had a few journalists, a couple of medical doctors, a clutch of PhDs (including another mathematician), various consultants and so on. My particular bete noire wasn't there, but apparently he's found his natural niche as a venture capitalist. Nothing spectacular, as yet. Oh, apart from the House bully, who's still a wanker, but is now apparently in the SAS ("So, Name Withheld, I hear you've just got back from Iraq?" [long pause] "Yeah. Everyone should go to Iraq... or you're not a real man". I carefully refrained from calling him a drunken tosser to his face). One common thread to our experiences had been the difficulty of adjusting away from the College cult of effortless superiority - at some point, you come up against a problem that can't be solved in a last-minute caffeine-fuelled cramming session, and you have a choice between failing (painful) or entirely adjusting your working methods and value system (even more painful). You see, we had evolved a philosophy whereby only effortless achievement really counted. Degenerate? Sure. Disgusting? Probably. Arrogant? You bet. Doomed to fail? Actually, you'd be surprised how far it can get you.
Overcoming this attitude has been one of the bigger problems I've had to face; the PhD could be considered part of my recovery programme. But for all that, I don't regret my time in College at all. Floreat gens togata, et hic noster ludus muralis esto in perpetuum.