That I'm FIRST!

And at work early for a meeting, but only half as brain-fogged as usual. \o?

Edited at 2016-05-03 04:22 pm (UTC)

I convinced my broken Wacom tablet to keep working! I hulk-smashed the pen in two awhile back and it is taped together. But those things are super $, so I'm delighted it's keeping on. :)
That's about it for 'interesting' from me. XD

I had an interesting experiences in viewing how the same text can be interpreted by different people. We were auditioning student speakers for our senior class banquet. One of the speakers gave a speech that started by humorously (in my opinion) cataloging everything they'd failed at as a class - stuff that no other class had failed at like knowing the school song and winning class competitions. But then she listed individual successes and talked about how the failures and successes made them the awesome, resilient people they are now.

The three of us who have been judging this selection process for years all loved this speech. It was funny, expressed sentiments that the whole class agreed with and she was a great speaker. The three other judges are the teachers that have been working with the class and they took the negative part so personally that they wouldn't even consider her. No amount of pointing out that the speech was constructed in such a way that the ending actually was stronger because of the initial contrast helped nor did assurances that we could get her to rewrite parts of the beginning to make it more positive. They were "so disappointed in her" for giving such a negative speech.

Instead they choose this dude who stumbled through a speech that was written like a first draft rookie stand up routine. I'm tasked with teaching this dude how to speak now. Yikes.

Anyhow, people are strange.

I don't know if people know (because every time I mention it, I get a lot of, "wait, what?" comments), but I'm in grad school right now, trying to wrap up and build a startup.

"Interesting" right now is the teaching opportunity I have this summer: introducing a group of 16 undergrads to "startup culture". They have an "invention" picked out for them that ties to the research they're doing as part of a competitive internship program this summer, and we're guiding them through the steps of performing a market analysis and validating the market's interest in that invention. And it's totally terrifying, because I have never done anything this prolonged before (I've done a lot of "what is innovation and why you should think about working at a startup" sort of things, but they're all two or three hour workshops; this is 12 weeks at three hours a week). I feel like I've just been thrown into the deep end. I'm teaching a traditional science module this summer as well, but holy shit, you guys.

On top of this, I'm gearing up to defend and graduate (trying to get a BUNCH of papers out!), I'm potentially going to a conference in Alaska in June, I'm going to SEMICON West in July, my friend is getting married in August and I'm traveling to the wedding, I'm potentially teaching a one-day module at UC Berkeley...I'm busy! And amazed I haven't been knocked out of Idol yet, tbh. :D