At the time when I grew up in the quiet town of York, Pennsylvania, the manufacturing industry still employed a large share of the area’s workers, but the once premiere industry now suffers steady decline. By the time I headed off to college I had been in contact with enough disgruntled, jobless production line workers to last a lifetime and I knew this trend would continue. York is not alone. All over the country manufacturing jobs are disappearing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1950 the manufacturing industry contributed close to a third of the gross domestic product in the US, but today this number is quickly falling past ten percent, being replaced by the service industry.

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A friend once told me that MIT, unlike other colleges such as Harvard, sets its students up to be accepting of failure. Whether intentional or not, classes are always difficult and the workload is very high. It is extremely difficult to achieve straight A’s throughout your entire MIT career, and to some, a B is failure. Yet even after the failure, MIT asks you to perform just as well or better on the next test, problem set, or final. I think MIT’s reason for doing this is neither to produce better engineers – in the sense of more capable – or to bring students down to earth – which it tends to do anyway – but to force students to learn to get right back into the fray when failure strikes. I think the biggest lesson learned from the ‘forced failure’ experience here is to go down kicking and come back up with the past behind you. Lessons from the failure are remembered, but not dwelt upon. You don’t get a chance to sit down and take a break. This is an extremely useful habit to foster, especially since many students are used to constant success they experienced in grade school before they came to MIT. In my case, grade school did not offer a laminar stream of success. Instead, there was some turbulence along the way that forced me to learn to fight on after failure a bit early.

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A not so long time ago it was below freezing for more than a week here in Boston. At the time, this meant little more to me than dressing warmly and hoping that someday soon it would snow. I would spend my mornings checking the weather report and satellite images for any hint that there might be snow that day. After days of anxious waiting, snow finally came at the end of the frigid week, and it was an exciting day, but then, as the evening approached, to my horror, I watched out the window as the snow turned to sleet, and the sleet turned to freezing rain. Wonderful. The rain coated and stuck to everything and then froze completely solid. The snow turned to useless concrete where it wasn’t already shiny with ice. Even as a fairly stable person, walking to class became a chore, and at that point in time I just wanted the muck to melt. But then I remembered something. I own ice skates.

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I’m busy, too busy to think about anything in a linear fashion
sometimes, and I fall into a sort of whimsical scatterbrained frame of
mind that I feel defines my life here at MIT. Unfortunately with that
frame of mind come a lot of questions when I do finally get to sit back
and think clearly for a little while, and sometimes I get somewhat
uneasy with their answers.

What have I been doing with my time? Where does it all go? What can I
do to change things? I have no idea. It probably doesn’t help that I
cannot remember most of the things I have done even a few hours after
they’ve been done. What I do remember involves not sleeping because of
some crazy, inordinate amount of work. Everyone wants me to do
something for them more frequently than I’m willing to, and then I don’t
actually get done what I planned to, so what am I really doing?

I know I have some sort of plan somewhere, but I think I lost it. It’s
great to have a plan. I like plans. Usually the plan never goes as it
was intended to go and I think that’s the best part of a plan – planning
for things not to go as planned, planning for extra time and
interruptions in your plan, and planning for new plans that have the
same problems as the old ones. Unfortunately there’s never enough time
to follow all the plans through to completion. I had a plan to finish
my website a while ago, but now I am not really sure what the address
is. I think I’ll have to start over on that plan. (more…)