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places and culture
Sep. 27th, 2013 03:14 pmI have been in some places where it's full of exciting people pumped up about learning and ideas that I want to learn about.
gatech, oh mans. While the experience as a whole was often stressful and upsetting, my community was beautiful. We had impromptu programming competitions in the dorms. We were buzzing with weird nervous energy, trying to learn everything we could because it all seemed so important. Just showing up in 2001, it was clear that I had arrived at permanent nerd summer camp. I guess going to a university as an 18-year-old, you're pretty likely to build a sense of community and long-term intimate friendships.
Showing up at Google in 2007 was similar. Never before had I been around such startlingly clever people interested in so many different wild things. (especially at the main campus, holy cow!)
When I go to NLP conferences, I'm around people who know so much about what I'm trying to do and speak every language and have written all the cool NLP software. Internships on Google Translate were basically like an extended NLP conference, with breaks for writing software that, y'know, gets deployed and helps people understand each other better. The team takes it upon itself to read all the papers and have fun social events and it's a party and I love all of those people.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that my experience at IU has been pretty lacking in many of these ways. I love a lot of the people here. But there's just so much missing energy and community and a sense of people trying to grow me.
I get the impression that a lot of people at IU have never actually seen a high-functioning team and don't get what they're missing. The third floor of Lindley Hall is so quiet today. I wish people would come in to the office. (many are out at a conference this week, of course -- and then there are a fair number of people who are upsetting to a fair number of other people, so the tendency seems to be to just stay home...)
I'm ready to get out of here: let's graduate and go somewhere where people like both people and ideas and are excited about making stuff.
gatech, oh mans. While the experience as a whole was often stressful and upsetting, my community was beautiful. We had impromptu programming competitions in the dorms. We were buzzing with weird nervous energy, trying to learn everything we could because it all seemed so important. Just showing up in 2001, it was clear that I had arrived at permanent nerd summer camp. I guess going to a university as an 18-year-old, you're pretty likely to build a sense of community and long-term intimate friendships.
Showing up at Google in 2007 was similar. Never before had I been around such startlingly clever people interested in so many different wild things. (especially at the main campus, holy cow!)
When I go to NLP conferences, I'm around people who know so much about what I'm trying to do and speak every language and have written all the cool NLP software. Internships on Google Translate were basically like an extended NLP conference, with breaks for writing software that, y'know, gets deployed and helps people understand each other better. The team takes it upon itself to read all the papers and have fun social events and it's a party and I love all of those people.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that my experience at IU has been pretty lacking in many of these ways. I love a lot of the people here. But there's just so much missing energy and community and a sense of people trying to grow me.
I get the impression that a lot of people at IU have never actually seen a high-functioning team and don't get what they're missing. The third floor of Lindley Hall is so quiet today. I wish people would come in to the office. (many are out at a conference this week, of course -- and then there are a fair number of people who are upsetting to a fair number of other people, so the tendency seems to be to just stay home...)
I'm ready to get out of here: let's graduate and go somewhere where people like both people and ideas and are excited about making stuff.
