Hey GWCers,
I’d been meaning to write this post for a while now, but I got swamped with various projects and work, so it kept sliding down on my to-do list. I’ve got a few minutes this morning, though, so I wanted to crank it out. This post is, fundamentally, a thank you to GWC (Crüe & listeners alike) for being one of the motivating factors behind a major event for me recently. Let me explain.
When I started college (seems like an eternity ago), I was majoring in Materials Science & Engineering. It was interesting enough, and it came really easily to me, but I was always slightly apathetic towards it - mostly because I dreaded the idea of eventually getting a job where I stare at spreadsheets of x-ray diffraction data all day long. Somewhere along the way, I decided to dual-major in a brand-new program at my university, Human Centered Design & Engineering. In all honesty, it was basically just a fun side-endeavor so I could take some enjoyable human-computer interaction and design courses to offset the tedium of my other classes. Over time, though, as I took more and more classes for it, I started to think that it was the direction I wanted to ultimately go in with my education and career.
This reached a head a few months ago when I was looking at my transcript and realized that I was going to be done with my bachelors in HCDE, and had another year worth of classes to finish up for my bachelors in MSE. At this point, I had a big choice in front of me. I could either proceed with the original plan, spending another year on MSE courses before graduating and getting a job (likely in the materials field), or I could drop to a minor in MSE, be done with it, and apply to a PhD program in HCDE.
For a few weeks, I wrestled with this decision. Materials Science was, in the short-term, probably the smartest bet. There are always good entry-level positions in the field, and my parents had been on me for a while to hurry up and graduate 
. My work in HCDE, though, was something I was passionate about. I was researching human-robot interaction and assistive technologies at the time, and I really felt drawn towards the opportunity to delve fully into this arena. I had to weigh the pros and cons of each.
In many ways, though, the tipping point was the Geekdom arc (in and of itself a microcosm of the entire GWC community). My experiences over the years here, and listening to the stories in the arc, made me realize that the decision was more simple than I was making it. It was a matter of embracing my inner geek, doing what I was interested in (regardless of whether others might think it’s uselessly nerdy etc.), and taking the plunge.
The above long story short, I decided to take a complete 180 in my academic career, drop to a minor in Materials Science, and submit a PhD application. Just a couple weeks ago, I received my official notice that my application was accepted! This fall, I’ll be starting up my doctoral research in natural-language processing in the context of human-robot interaction and assistive technologies here at the University of Washington.
So as I said at the start of this post, this is basically a thank you to all my fellow GWCers for motivating me to go with my geek-gut and start down the crazy road to PhD-ville. So as corny as it might sound, thanks everyone! I’m not sure I’d have done it without the influence of all of you.
-3/John
