With the newfound stress of planning and potentially giving a microtalk now on my plate, I approached today with a very different attitude compared to yesterday, one of stress and priorities. Starting again with breakfast and a keynote speech, I switched back into student mode by trying to complete a recently released practice midterm and create a note sheet in preparation for my math midterm on Friday. At that moment, the weight of my situation felt like it was all ironically collapsing around me; a student attempting to multitask by studying at breakfast, attending a conference with the spoken goal of enrichment and the underlying goal of trying to get jobs through networking, skipping the classes that should be my main priority as a student, all in addition to trying to write a speech about the very chaos I just described. In a way, the irony of the situation and me writing it out acted as self-affirmation of my frustrations, further bolstering my confidence in this speech and motivation to write it.
The keynote concluded, and we had a long break before the next round of events for the day, so I excused myself to brainstorm more title ideas for the microtalk in a quieter corner of the convention center. In that time, I had spotted my mentor walking up the stairs and pulled him aside to bounce around some ideas from last night and this morning. I tried coming up with a clever, or attention-grabbing title, but was steered away from the idea when my mentor recommended I just be explicit with the title, since this was an idea pitch anyway, so better to not muddy the water on what I’d actually be talking about. After a few more iterations on the title and a rewrite on a new card for neatness, I settled on “Is college even worth it: An undergrad RSE’s perspective,” adding a little bit of controversial inquiry while cementing the fact that this was going to be an opinion piece.
I walked over to the board to post my pitch, but took my time to chat with everyone that was surrounding the board at the time, browsing the current list of topics and goading each other to put some of their own ideas that originally started out as jokes. Some of them ended up following through, but in the meantime I was starting to second guess my own microtalk with how many talks were already proposed, many of them sounding very well-thought-out they could be dedicated presentations in their own right. Eventually, I said “screw it,” either out loud or just to myself, and posted my title without another second thought because apparently the only way I can get anything done is on impulse. I could feel my heart racing at such a simple task, likely due to the peer pressure, and it wouldn’t let up as a watched with embarrassment as everyone at the board read my title and some even voted for it on the spot.
The session of interest for today was the Working Group Fair, an opportunity to meet subgroups of the RSE community focused on addressing unmet needs of the wider community. I gave special attention to the DEI and Education working groups, given my own background, but I made a loop around to meet and learn about every working group. I got a good conversation going with members of the National Labs working group, who recommended that I consider national labs for potential job opportunities. Keeping that recommendation in mind, we continued to discuss the growing dissonance between education, academia, and industry. From my perspective, students and recent graduates are struggling to find jobs with the rising bar of qualifications to even apply, since so many job postings expect graduates to have a laundry list of skills for an entry-level position, skills which are not taught, or at least taught well enough in school. It is not however, the fault of the school entirely, since the purpose of education to teach and for students to learn, not serve as a jobs program. The conversation got relatively heated, almost on the level of a debate, but we were cut short by the lunch call, and that was something we could all agree on.
Today’s lunch would be a mentor/mentee lunch. It wasn’t long since I last saw my mentor this morning, but it gave us more time to learn more about each other, him my aspirations and job prospects, and me his career trajectory and research. Towards the end of lunch, everyone was ushered outside for the conference group photo, before the students split from the group to visit the University of New Mexico’s Center for Advanced Computing (CARC) for a tour. The tour was about what I expected for a High-Powered Computing Center, a giant cooled hall of servers whirring so loud that made it difficult to hear anything at a normal speaking volume. What caught my attention was the fact that the building CARC was in was previously a car dealership, immediately apparent when we first entered what previously used to be the showroom floor. I guess when the goal is to maximize space and cooling, all other needs of a building, especially aesthetic, become secondary to reduce cost.
Taking a break from the conference and wanting to explore some of Albuquerque myself, I toured the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. I don’t remember the last time that I wanted to visit a museum, but I, and maybe a lot of us, had a heightened interest in World War II history, the development of the atomic bomb, and the continued role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The museum itself was packed with replicas of various nuclear weapons and military vehicles used to carry them, thanks in part to the fact that there was a massive yard to host the planes, bombers, and warheads that obviously couldn’t fit inside the building. I made my way back to the front before the museum closed, passing by an old military jeep that had been ducked (IFKYK), and the exhibits featuring modern uses for nuclear technology like energy and medicine. I purchased a keychain of Little Boy to add to my keychain collection and commemorate the trip.
From there I made my way to a Thai restaurant that was recommended to my project manager to meet up with the rest of SDSC. The group was split for most of the day, so we had a lot to catch up on, between the working group fair, the visit to CARC, the Nuclear Museum visit. We ate dinner earlier than usual, meaning we didn’t close out the restaurant for once, but more importantly because we reserved an escape room. It served as a good break from the stress I faced earlier in the morning, instead replaced by a new stress of problem-solving under the pressure of a timer. The room itself was very well put together, the game makers established the story and atmosphere really well, and we got stumped at a few parts of the room, in part because we forgot to thoroughly check a corner of the room, whoops. But it was all in good fun as a team-bonding experience, and we finished with plenty of time to spare.
When we got back to the hotel to call it a night, I checked my email before bed, and saw that my microtalk pitch received enough votes to be selected. I wish I had seen the email sooner, because now I only had the night to seriously prepare a five-minute presentation, including an optional slide for visual aid. Initially, I tried working on the slide because it’s available, so why not use it? I quickly realized however that I’d only be using it to put bullets of what I was already going to say, so for the best interest of my presentation, I abandoned the slide.
When it came to the actual content of the talk itself, I was still mentally all over the place, scrambling to figure out what I truly wanted to say in five minutes and how I would say it. I bounced between a few different core arguments, only to realize that the drive behind my microtalk was frustration, frustration which I could not properly and in good faith direct at any one individual or institution. So, after enough anguish to probably warrant talking with a therapist, I just started writing bullet points, and fast, hoping to boil down my core ideas from what continually arose during each sprint. Eventually, the thoughts began to centralize into coherent arguments, unfortunately not backed by sources like a typical argument, but this microtalk, my preparation, and the circumstances that led me to this moment were anything but typical, so I just rolled with it. I went through around five drafts that night, and with my mind still racing with stress and ideas, my only goal at this point was getting enough sleep to make it through tomorrow in one piece.