k.hsieh

The Internet Will Not Ruin College (Salon)

“Education, I’d argue, has always been the most likely sector of society to get transformed by the Internet, because the thing the Internet does better than anything else is distribute information. Distribution is not synonymous with learning, of course, but how could anyone argue against the premise that our ability to educate ourselves, on just about any topic, has vastly expanded in tune with the maturation of a global network of computers? It’s kind of amazing that it’s taken this long to start figuring out how to offer truly high-quality college level courses over the Web — isn’t this exactly what the damn thing is for?”

It’s fascinating to me how often the unemployment rate of my age group is cited in the news. And while I can understand that it is a big deal and a fairly reasonable indicator of the health of our economy, I often wonder if we, as a whole, are too focused on the numbers and not focused on the larger implications around unemployment among post-grads.

My parents were the first of my family to arrive in the United States. Where my parents and my friends’ parents experienced the alienation and struggle of carving out new lives in an entirely foreign country, we reaped the benefits of their struggles with our pampered and structured lives. Early on, we were asked (or in some cases, told) what we wanted to be by our parents, who promptly provided the financial support necessary to reach our goals. While we lived very comfortably, we were set down a straight and narrow path, often not given any room for exploration.

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 As any cyclist that spends long hours alone on the road knows, my time spent on the saddle takes my mind to weird places. These places are more often than not the best places for introspection and problem solving. As race season nears and with programming now a priority in my life, my thoughts on the road have been a bizarre amalgamation of applications I’ve been trying to debug and cycling thoughts. While it may seem weird to associate programming with the struggle of cycling, there is a certain similarity between the two endeavors.

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I’ve been grappling with my feelings on the poor-rich gap in education over the two years I’ve been working for Kaplan as a teacher/tutor. I find it fitting that this article comes out right when I’m trying to make a transition into a different job. The more time I spend teaching and seeing various situations play out, the more conflicted I am about the work I am doing. I love and care about each and every one of my students. Yet, I can’t help but feel like I’m part of the problem by working in this industry.

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finally getting into some sort of rhythm working on a few projects. the most frustrating thing about coding as you’re learning a language/framework is that despite having the logic thought out when tackling a problem, i often don’t know what to type into my code to accomplish what i need to be done.

it’s the equivalent of looking at a toolkit for the first time without having any preconception of what each piece does. i could explain to you in layman’s terms how this application will end up working, but i find that i spend most of my time searching for the next command to express what i want to get done.

I was incredibly proud of my devouring of Codecademy’s Javascript and Python offerings over the summer. However, as I got closer and closer to my self-assigned deadline for finding a job in New York City, I started realizing I was hitting a wall in terms of progress.

My experiences over the past half year with Codecademy, Team Treehouse, and other resources have been incredibly effective at conveying the elements of coding, showing how variables, functions, methods, and other pieces of code in various languages work. I’m noticing, however, that while these resources are great at teaching about these elements and how they come together in programming exercises, they fail in one aspect – teaching their aspiring programmer how all this comes together in a work environment.

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The Making of GoldenEye

“Because it was most people’s first game”, explains Graeme Norgate, “we did things we might not do again because it was too much work. We didn’t take the easy route. If something sounded like a good idea, it was like, ‘Yeah let’s do it!’ The world was our oyster! Only afterwards would you find it was a world of pain.”

as I’m struggling to overcome the hurdles in programming and mapping out my own projects, stories like these continue to inspire me. small teams (even inexperienced ones like the team behind GoldenEye) learn fast and innovate hard. GoldenEye 64 pretty much changed the FPS on the console forever.

I came across a great article in Bicycling magazine about Bikes Not Bombs this month. Typically I skim the magazine and just look at the bike porn and the heavily biased gear reviews (everything is “good”), but this article caught my attention immediately. I was thrilled that they took the time to stray a bit from the standard material and write Student Teaching.

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My recent training rides with Pete can be summed up with me huffing, puffing, and groaning in pain, watching as the speck once known as Pete disappears further down the road. I’m a huge sucker for finding parallels in my life; situations to sum up my current state. It seems like the past four months of my life post-Juilliard have been a prolonged, grueling training ride – me, exhausted and overexerting, trying harder and harder on each stage not to get dropped by a highly more capable, more practiced competitor.

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