Damn heating system

So I woke up this morning pretty early and my room seemed really warm...thinking that the open window had somehow caused the heater to stay on as it attemped to compensate for the cool breeze, I decided to close the window and went back to sleep...Waking up later, I realized the room was even hotter...when I finally got out of bed, the room read 100 degrees on a thermostat set to ~70. This is the 2nd time that my heater has gotten out of wack and refused to turn itself off or obey my setpoint commands...very irritating.

Went out to Cabots last night. Had some fun. Mike and I are in the middle of our 2nd Civ III game in 2 weeks...I'm getting better, but he can still kick my butt.

My drive to do homework and classwork is fluctuating in an unpredictable and dangerous rate...I really need to do a crapload for SCOPE, OSS, and AHS Capstone this week...the time for slacking has passed...now if I can just convince myself that's true.

Some conversations with Dee led us to create an informal and unofficial archiving and knowledge management group to replace some of the functions of the now defunct "official" KM group at Olin. I think we'll be rolled out our first suggested change within the next couple of days. For those of you on campus, stay tuned!

Back to a marketing memo...

Google is cool and I am confused

I'll admit to being dubious about their transition from solely search engine to containing more of the features of the traditional online portals (like Yahoo) that dived when the bubble burst...but if you check out personalized homepage option, you'll see that they're lightyears beyond Yahoo in coolness factor. You'll need a Gmail account to use it, so if you for some odd reason don't have one yet, let me know and I'll send you an invite (I have 60 just gathering dust).

So I've been spending a lot of brain cycles on the big "Post-Olin" question recently...There are two different questions to answer (in some order): job or grad school and what field do I go into in the near term?

What are the disciplines/focuses that I'm thinking about?

• Knowledge/Information Management
• Specifically I'm interested in bringing information together from a variety of sources and presenting it to users in a way that is user friendly and fits needs (dumping too much info is bad and accomplishes nothing if the important stuff is not easily accessible)
• This could either lead to Library/Information Sciences or potentially a branch of CS or Business School.
  
• International Development (largely in the technology-based sense)
• So I think that if you give people tools, they can take them really far and one of the basic tools is access to information resources (internet) and electricity.
  
• System Dynamics (I'm still unclear what a career in this field would mean)
• Basic concept is that you can try to create models of complex & dynamic systems (such as economies, societies, political entities, etc)
• Public Policy
• Okay okay...I'll admit I've wanted to "fix" politics for a long time. Make it more about addressing problems and less about being spinless & polarized political "leaders" who sacrifice our futures because they wouldn't know a good policy or true leadership if it bite them in the ass
  
• This could be either:
  
• Policy Analysis: fundamentally about proposing good laws and attacking bad ones. Not a lot of actually affecting change though...
• Public Administration: basically about managing bureaucracies and non-profits. Unfortunately I see this as basically being forced to live in a structure designed by people who probably didn't know what they were doing when they made the law and thus you're stuck managing a bad system...so you have the possibility to affect change, but only in a limited way. Michael, my boss from the summer, used to work at the EPA and I did not get a sense that working in a bureaucracy was for me. Fundamentally in the federal bureaucracy you're not rewarded for taking initiative and I think that would pretty unpleasant.
• Politican: I think I want to try this, but I don't want to try until I have some sort of stable base on which to operate. I need success somewhere else before I feel like I could do anything as a direct politican. Maybe that's the wrong take?
  
• Business Schools
• I loved Harvard Business School from the moment I set foot there last year for StartingBloc.
• I think I want an MBA as prep for either launching my own business (probably a social enterprise, or a for-profit company that addresses social problems), but I really don't know if I want it now or in a couple of years.
• Stanford, HBS, and Yale all seem appealing in different ways...more study is needed here I think
• Though I think this would serve me in many of the actual paths I mentioned above, I don't want to take this step until I know where I want to go with it.
• Engineering?
• So I've been reasonably sure I don't want to do "engineering" as a career for a while...but do I need some level of technical component tomorrow to be happy? Can I really go into a "soft" career/field?
  

So yes...I'm confused.

So long conversations with Mike and Adam yesterday helped me solidify the goal that I really want to change social, economic, and political systems to make them operate better and to broadly enhance the quality of life of the people involved. This is perhaps a slightly more specific objective to the "Save the World" mantra that I was considering previously. Though I completely value helping individuals, my interest is largely in trying to help large groups through systematic changes.

So how do I do that? My mom suggested grassroots movements...Gill's suggested public policy...And yah...I just don't know.

My parents rock

So in the last 24 hours I've had hour+ conversations with both my mom and dad about what I think I might want to do after Olin, and they actually helped quite a bit. So yah, my parents both rock.

Going to go play Civ with Mike now, but I'll consider updating this more frequently from now on. The daunting task of explaining the last 6 weeks made me ill-inclined to actually update the darn thing.

I wonder when someone will notice if I start updating this again?