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I am not new to blogging by any means, but it has been many years since I actively maintained one - well, "many years" as viewed through the chronographic lens of a 21 year old. I sort of grew out of the practice a few years before I entered undergrad and, let's just say, earlier blogs that I maintained didn't exactly have "happy endings".... ahh, interesting memories! I'll leave that at...precisely that.
But this has been a rather traumatic year for me in many regards, and I've come to grips with the fact that, being an introvert and a man of ideas, writing is the most potent form of catharsis I can ever hope to exploit. And through unusual circumstances I've also realized just how important the maintenance of an active journal can be for an individual.
In late February my mother died, far too prematurely (age 52) from unanticipated complications related to a rare kidney disease. It was brutally abrupt and nobody saw it coming; in fact, I had just spoken with her for several hours the prior night regarding one of the Obama-Clinton debates. As I was sorting through thirty years of her belongings, I stumbled across a diary that she kept for more than 25 years, starting just before her days as a graduate student; it was a guarded secret, for no person in the entire family knew of its existence. Yet I knew that she wanted me to discover it and read it, for she left it on top of everything in the "secret place" where I had been told that all of her important documents would be maintained. It was unquestionably the hardest thing that I have ever read in my life in terms of the emotional toll involved, but also one of the most beneficial. I was able to trace her development from roughly my current formative stage in life (early 20's) to the sagacity of a tried, somewhat disenchanted but eternally hopeful women in her early 50's. As I read hundreds of pages in that journal from cover to cover over the course of several hours, I learned more about both her and myself than I had ever before in such a similar period of time. It was like years of bonding rolled into approximately a 6 hour period of intense reading, tears streaming and my mind bearing torn in a million different directions. In particular, reading about her own self-doubts as she dealt with the death of her father from cancer also at a young age - 28 years old - helped me immeasurably as I coped with the burden of funeral planning, estate matters, and grieving, all while undergoing my last few months of undergraduate education and the selection of a graduate school.
The point of her multi-decade endeavor was well-taken and left upon me a lasting impact: journals are a powerful introspective tool. There are certain thoughts that should not be made public for sake of prudence - and I would never make them public - but much of what she wrote, and what I will write, does not need to be cached from public view. Well, individual judgment comes to bear with much of that; I'm a stereotypical kid of Generation Y, and as such my standards on "privacy" are a tad more liberal than those of my elders. I make no apologies for "shocking" old fucks - the few of them that can turn on a computer, anyhow.
So what will this be? Principally, a day-by-day storybook of my life as a graduate student at one of the world's top schools - Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It's a period of intense study in my chosen field - Information Sciences/Business Information Technology - but it's also a period of personal discovery and refinement. I have always intended for graduate school to be far more than a few semesters of cramming business and technology expertise, while graduating to some plush white-collar job. As the penultimate stage of my formal education, grad school should be a period of tremendous personal growth; a period of pushing my "comfort zones" to the limit, learning how to think in novel ways, widespread exploration, and consistent pursuit of knowledge from a wide variety of angles, not just reading books, doing group projects and discussing classroom examples. Phew, that's a mouthful. So far it has been all of that to a certain extent, but I still have a long way to go.
So introductory and background info first, just so that you have the context in which this will be set. I'm Adam Harpool, a 21 year old African American. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Florida, matriculating in August 2005 and graduating in May of 2008 with a BSBA (Bachelor of Science, Business Administration) degree: major was Decision and Information Sciences (DIS), and my minor was French. I've had a passion for technology for a long-time in my life, but early on in high school I determined that I would rather use technology in "practical" settings - especially in the business world - as opposed to sitting around all day and thinking about how to improve some algorithm. Besides, the fact that I'm far more gifted qualitatively than quantitatively - far more - probably wouldn't have led to a stellar career in the latter option. The field that I've chosen is a great mixture of business and technology; it was quite typical for me in undergraduate to have one homework assignment that involved comparing EBITDA ratios for two companies, while having another assignment involving normalizing database tables and creating some ER diagrams. Whee... and yes, I actually do enjoy that stuff.
Anyhow, I began my grad school search near the middle of last year and decided to apply to five: the University of Florida, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of California-Los Angeles. All had stellar information sciences/information systems programs; Florida's perhaps less so in comparison, but UF had significant emotional weight attached to it at a time when I was reticent to make additional changes in my life. Still, Berkeley quickly emerged as my top choice out of my final list. I dreamed and dreamed of getting into Berkeley, living in the beautiful, diverse Bay Area for two years, and truly maturing as a business technologist.
Then reality struck: I was accepted into every single one of the above schools except for Berkeley. I never saw that one coming...lol.
Choices, choices, choices. UF and UCLA- the "warm weather" schools as I fondly saw them - provided absolutely no scholarship support, and were thus ruled out after grueling deliberation. I had visited Champaign, Illinois during winter of 2007 and liked the place; plus, family was nearby. But Carnegie Mellon had a far better reputation and, to my amazement, provided me with a scholarship that would cover the entire cost of tuition over three semesters, provided that I maintain a paltry 3.0 GPA. That translated into a package worth some $54,700, meaning that I would only have to take out loans for the cost of room, board and supplies - meaning roughly $20K in debt versus at a minimum $50K in debt at the other schools. While spending part of Spring Break at a friend's house in St. Petersburg, Florida, I did the unthinkable and chose a small private university in the Northeast - a region and type of school which I knew next to nothing about - over a large public university in the Midwest - a region, and a type of school, with which I had great familiarity. It was one of the biggest comfort zone leaps of my life, and it forms the subject of and title of this blog.
More background. I was born and raised in Florida, though like 99% of Floridians my family roots are elsewhere (mostly Kentucky, in my case.) Also like most Floridians, I do not consider myself a Southerner and am, frankly, irritated when people demonstrate their lack of understanding of the Sunshine State by making that assumption (a good article on the subject can be found here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E1D81330F932A1575AC0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all ). I'm openly gay, a bit of a nerd. I speak conversational , fluent on basic matters and semi-fluent on more advanced things French that is probably decaying every single day that I don't get to use it (maybe one day I'll get a chance to live in Paris or Geneva on an international secondment and over that time acquire true fluency; tout est possible, non?) I identify as a Floridian and I plan on settling down for the long-term in South Florida (Miami or Fort Lauderdale; I'm fairly indifferent between the two, but Fort Lauderdale is more liveable) after graduating, but I have lived in four states: most of my youth in Florida; about 5 years in aggregate in Kentucky (mostly comprised of summers when I was growing up) ; about 4 months in Texas for my first internship; and now Pennsylvania for most of the nearly 1.5 years between August 2008 and December 2009. I've traveled through several countries in Western Europe on the foreign scale, and I'm certain I'll visit Canada at some point before I leave Pennsylvania. Travel is a huge passion of my life. My MBTI is ISTJ; I used to be much more strongly introverted, but that element of my personality has been declining somewhat since the start of my undergrad years. And, also like most Floridians, I have an incredible distaste for cold weather (note that my definition of "cold" is a day when the high temperature fails to top at least 60. If there is significant cloud cover and a chilly wind from the north, make that a day when the temperature doesn't top 70.) I can count on my fingers the numbers of times I've seen "real" snow in my life, and I've only driven in such "real" snow once before. So expect a good part of my writing to be devoted to the mayhem that winter in the Frost Belt is going to wreak in my life...yayyyyy. As I told myself many, many times as I waw finalizing my decision to live in Pittsburgh, "just deal with 1.5 winters there, get that exposure and experience, and then haul ass back to South Florida and balmy January weather in the 80's."
Enough of that. Other details will pop up over the course of my writing. So this weekend I:
But this has been a rather traumatic year for me in many regards, and I've come to grips with the fact that, being an introvert and a man of ideas, writing is the most potent form of catharsis I can ever hope to exploit. And through unusual circumstances I've also realized just how important the maintenance of an active journal can be for an individual.
In late February my mother died, far too prematurely (age 52) from unanticipated complications related to a rare kidney disease. It was brutally abrupt and nobody saw it coming; in fact, I had just spoken with her for several hours the prior night regarding one of the Obama-Clinton debates. As I was sorting through thirty years of her belongings, I stumbled across a diary that she kept for more than 25 years, starting just before her days as a graduate student; it was a guarded secret, for no person in the entire family knew of its existence. Yet I knew that she wanted me to discover it and read it, for she left it on top of everything in the "secret place" where I had been told that all of her important documents would be maintained. It was unquestionably the hardest thing that I have ever read in my life in terms of the emotional toll involved, but also one of the most beneficial. I was able to trace her development from roughly my current formative stage in life (early 20's) to the sagacity of a tried, somewhat disenchanted but eternally hopeful women in her early 50's. As I read hundreds of pages in that journal from cover to cover over the course of several hours, I learned more about both her and myself than I had ever before in such a similar period of time. It was like years of bonding rolled into approximately a 6 hour period of intense reading, tears streaming and my mind bearing torn in a million different directions. In particular, reading about her own self-doubts as she dealt with the death of her father from cancer also at a young age - 28 years old - helped me immeasurably as I coped with the burden of funeral planning, estate matters, and grieving, all while undergoing my last few months of undergraduate education and the selection of a graduate school.
The point of her multi-decade endeavor was well-taken and left upon me a lasting impact: journals are a powerful introspective tool. There are certain thoughts that should not be made public for sake of prudence - and I would never make them public - but much of what she wrote, and what I will write, does not need to be cached from public view. Well, individual judgment comes to bear with much of that; I'm a stereotypical kid of Generation Y, and as such my standards on "privacy" are a tad more liberal than those of my elders. I make no apologies for "shocking" old fucks - the few of them that can turn on a computer, anyhow.
So what will this be? Principally, a day-by-day storybook of my life as a graduate student at one of the world's top schools - Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It's a period of intense study in my chosen field - Information Sciences/Business Information Technology - but it's also a period of personal discovery and refinement. I have always intended for graduate school to be far more than a few semesters of cramming business and technology expertise, while graduating to some plush white-collar job. As the penultimate stage of my formal education, grad school should be a period of tremendous personal growth; a period of pushing my "comfort zones" to the limit, learning how to think in novel ways, widespread exploration, and consistent pursuit of knowledge from a wide variety of angles, not just reading books, doing group projects and discussing classroom examples. Phew, that's a mouthful. So far it has been all of that to a certain extent, but I still have a long way to go.
So introductory and background info first, just so that you have the context in which this will be set. I'm Adam Harpool, a 21 year old African American. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Florida, matriculating in August 2005 and graduating in May of 2008 with a BSBA (Bachelor of Science, Business Administration) degree: major was Decision and Information Sciences (DIS), and my minor was French. I've had a passion for technology for a long-time in my life, but early on in high school I determined that I would rather use technology in "practical" settings - especially in the business world - as opposed to sitting around all day and thinking about how to improve some algorithm. Besides, the fact that I'm far more gifted qualitatively than quantitatively - far more - probably wouldn't have led to a stellar career in the latter option. The field that I've chosen is a great mixture of business and technology; it was quite typical for me in undergraduate to have one homework assignment that involved comparing EBITDA ratios for two companies, while having another assignment involving normalizing database tables and creating some ER diagrams. Whee... and yes, I actually do enjoy that stuff.
Anyhow, I began my grad school search near the middle of last year and decided to apply to five: the University of Florida, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of California-Los Angeles. All had stellar information sciences/information systems programs; Florida's perhaps less so in comparison, but UF had significant emotional weight attached to it at a time when I was reticent to make additional changes in my life. Still, Berkeley quickly emerged as my top choice out of my final list. I dreamed and dreamed of getting into Berkeley, living in the beautiful, diverse Bay Area for two years, and truly maturing as a business technologist.
Then reality struck: I was accepted into every single one of the above schools except for Berkeley. I never saw that one coming...lol.
Choices, choices, choices. UF and UCLA- the "warm weather" schools as I fondly saw them - provided absolutely no scholarship support, and were thus ruled out after grueling deliberation. I had visited Champaign, Illinois during winter of 2007 and liked the place; plus, family was nearby. But Carnegie Mellon had a far better reputation and, to my amazement, provided me with a scholarship that would cover the entire cost of tuition over three semesters, provided that I maintain a paltry 3.0 GPA. That translated into a package worth some $54,700, meaning that I would only have to take out loans for the cost of room, board and supplies - meaning roughly $20K in debt versus at a minimum $50K in debt at the other schools. While spending part of Spring Break at a friend's house in St. Petersburg, Florida, I did the unthinkable and chose a small private university in the Northeast - a region and type of school which I knew next to nothing about - over a large public university in the Midwest - a region, and a type of school, with which I had great familiarity. It was one of the biggest comfort zone leaps of my life, and it forms the subject of and title of this blog.
More background. I was born and raised in Florida, though like 99% of Floridians my family roots are elsewhere (mostly Kentucky, in my case.) Also like most Floridians, I do not consider myself a Southerner and am, frankly, irritated when people demonstrate their lack of understanding of the Sunshine State by making that assumption (a good article on the subject can be found here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E1D81330F932A1575AC0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all ). I'm openly gay, a bit of a nerd. I speak conversational , fluent on basic matters and semi-fluent on more advanced things French that is probably decaying every single day that I don't get to use it (maybe one day I'll get a chance to live in Paris or Geneva on an international secondment and over that time acquire true fluency; tout est possible, non?) I identify as a Floridian and I plan on settling down for the long-term in South Florida (Miami or Fort Lauderdale; I'm fairly indifferent between the two, but Fort Lauderdale is more liveable) after graduating, but I have lived in four states: most of my youth in Florida; about 5 years in aggregate in Kentucky (mostly comprised of summers when I was growing up) ; about 4 months in Texas for my first internship; and now Pennsylvania for most of the nearly 1.5 years between August 2008 and December 2009. I've traveled through several countries in Western Europe on the foreign scale, and I'm certain I'll visit Canada at some point before I leave Pennsylvania. Travel is a huge passion of my life. My MBTI is ISTJ; I used to be much more strongly introverted, but that element of my personality has been declining somewhat since the start of my undergrad years. And, also like most Floridians, I have an incredible distaste for cold weather (note that my definition of "cold" is a day when the high temperature fails to top at least 60. If there is significant cloud cover and a chilly wind from the north, make that a day when the temperature doesn't top 70.) I can count on my fingers the numbers of times I've seen "real" snow in my life, and I've only driven in such "real" snow once before. So expect a good part of my writing to be devoted to the mayhem that winter in the Frost Belt is going to wreak in my life...yayyyyy. As I told myself many, many times as I waw finalizing my decision to live in Pittsburgh, "just deal with 1.5 winters there, get that exposure and experience, and then haul ass back to South Florida and balmy January weather in the 80's."
Enough of that. Other details will pop up over the course of my writing. So this weekend I:
- Went to the Andy Warhol museum with a friend. Total pop art awesomeness (I'm a big museum nerd.) I was pleasantly surprised to find out that CMU students get to the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh absolutely free! Take that Pitt kids! (Just kidding; I think the whole level of animosity that seems to persist between Pitt and CMU is a bit silly, even though the student bodies are quite different. And besides, if anything I think Pitt is far more balanced academically and socially than my school, where many of the students seem to have the social aptitude of a common brick wall and the weirdness level of the smelly hobo on the corner.) Warhol had the typical life of a bohème in the NYC art scene of the mid-20th Century, and the museum exhibits a rather comprehensive selection of his works. Didn't get the see the Marilyn Monroe piece, unfortunately! I especially enjoyed the background info on his life; the Silver Clouds; his Time Capsules; and one especially bizarre work called "Oxidation." It involves a certain type of bodily fluid; I'll leave it at that!
- Took a long stroll through Schenley Park for the first time. Largest urban park that I've ever seen other than NYC's Central Park, and I plan on making a habit out of those on the weekend (even when it's cold!) Very beautiful; I can't imagine how breathaking it's going to be when the fall colors are at their peak.
- Slept in till after noon today...my dirty little sin is excessive sleeping on the weekends. I'm decent during the week, but my indolence level during weekends just seems to skyrocket. Not that I'm complaining.
- Pirated a shitload of music. I hope that Comcast isn't reading this. Coincidentally, re-read a far-too-detailed (like most of them) Harvard Business School case study involving MSO entry into the telephony market, particularly Cox Communications.
- Finished reading Obama's "Change We Can Believe In." It's basically 270 pages of his policies and speeches. Also known as ambrosia for political junkies like moi. If interested, you can purchase it here.
- Tried to decide what extracurriculars to really get involved in while at CMU, without overextending myself (I do have a short list.) Decided that one or two Heinz School clubs plus the CMU LGBT alliance (known as "Allies") would be ideal. I plan on just being involved and not taking any leadership roles, though that could change. I feel, given my courseload and the fact that I'm already working part-time, I don't need to put anything extra on my plate that's going to be a major time commitment (in my senior year of high school I worked part-time and volunteered to teach evening computer classes and took a heavy courseload and was Student Council president; it was a generally miserable year in terms of work-life balance, and I learned my lesson. I'll leave the egregious overachievement to the Type A's ... I'm here to learn and explore, not to kill myself. Besides, I already have a job I'm happy with and I hardly think that my resume needs additional "padding.")
- Listened to music by Rufus Wainwright, The Beatles, John Mayer, Sade, and Corinne Bailey Rae while doing a crapload of homework. For some reason, I've found that mixture to be my optimal studying and relaxation quotient. Whoo.
And that's that for post one! My goal is to update this each and every day, with the obvious exception of days when I don't have access to the Internet (and if anything significant happens on those days, I'll just jot it down in Word and upload it later - as a techie, days when I don't have access to a computer at all are exceedingly rare, and usually invoke a varying degree of misery and despair.) Back to the grind tomorrow...
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