The Blurgh

Finals are in just a few weeks, and I’m so ridiculously behind it’s not even funny.  You’d think after this long I’d realize that blowing off reading with the intention of catching up “next week” is, at best, a ridiculously obvious lie.  At worst, it’s an “F.”

Getting behind in blah classes is one thing, but I really hate it when I get behind in a class that I actually enjoy.  My History  of Peace class has rocked my socks all semester, but I find it extremely difficult to do the readings…they’re just so hard to follow.  Every time I pick up one of the texts, I feel like I’m about to enter an alternate dimension–one where everything you thought you knew is only marginally meaningful, and the things that used to be irrelevant are now monumental.  It’s interesting learn new things about events you thought you had studied to death, and I like the paradigm the class is based around, but holy crap, it sure can be exhausting.

We have to write a paper for the final, and the question is: “In your opinion, how is peace best prolonged?”  We’re supposed to take certain time we studied periods and use them to build our case.  Easy, right?

…

Dr. Huang also said that he’s planning on publishing a book of short essays in order to get more people interested in the subject, and that if we do well enough and are interested, that we can work with him on getting our essays in it.  Yeah…no pressure at all.

So what do you think?  Any ideas?

It’s that dreaded time of the semester again–midterms.  This time around it’s not too bad, but I am afraid that my biotech test is going to royally kick my butt.  There’s nothing like hoping everyone else in the class sucks at it as much as you do so that the curve will be enough to save you…it’s kind of like betting on who’ll lose a game instead of who’ll win it!

Otherwise, everything is going pretty well.  I had to tell CRR that I needed some extra time for studying last week, which they were cool about.  They’ve started hinting at some possibilities opening up after I graduate, which also makes me happy.  They’re good people and they do good work–it’s hard to get much better than that with an employer.

My directed study, though, has come to a bit of a roadblock.  We’ve done some interesting demographic research, which I’ll try to put up here sometime next week, and that shows some interesting trends.  What makes it hard, though, is trying to find a good measure of that nebulous thing we call “community.”  Some people have used things like fraternal organization membership and local sports clubs, but those plummet pretty much across the board nationally after the 1970s, even in places where there’s lots of “community,” so that doesn’t seem like it’ll provide a constant measure.

It’s also possible that what we call “community” has actually changed over the past hundred or so years.  Anyway, Dr. Lemley has a really good time thinking about this, but it’s starting to make my head spin.  Anyone out there have any ideas on the subject?  What does community mean to you?

As you may know, in addition to my internship, the other big thing going on this semester is my Directed Study with Dr. Lemley.  The project is on tracing the development of community in the South Side over the past 100 years, and it’s been difficult so far, but interesting.  One of the first tasks I had to do was get census information on the neighborhood going back to 1920. Easy, right?  Not so much.

Well, that’s not exactly true. The census data for modern decades is easily attainable online.  Further back than that, however, and it gets real dicey.  The choices are to either scan through a million and a half scanned records that are unsearchable, or go to Hillman’s microfilm collection.

Now that’s an adventure…

The machines must be 50+ years old, and they look like something out of a really bad late 20th century sci-fi movie.  They’re located in the back room at Hillman, and when I went back there, the employee was immensely surprised to see me.  Oddly enough, people don’t use the machines very often…

We had to look through shelves upon shelves of little boxes to find the right one, and then I had to scan through the film until I found the right information.  It felt like I was in a movie doing research in some weird alternate universe…I can’t believe that at one time people used them a lot.  It’s kind of like when my mom told me about how they used to use some kind of number system to find books in the library, and there were cabinets upon cabinets of little cards that would tell you where the book was.  Weird.

We still have a long way to go before we get enough information to build a good case, but I’ll keep you posted!

When I was in high school, I had a habit of staying up all night just for fun from time to time. I would get these great bursts of creativity, get a whole ton of stuff done, and then be in a wacky mood the next day which didn’t really matter because it was just high school.

Yesterday I found out those days are looooong gone.

I pulled an all-nighter the night before last because I had two essays due and a mid-term that required major cramming. I was very confident that it would be just like the old days; I would get a second wind around 1:30 am and by the time 6 am rolled around, everything would be done. Well, as it turned out, by 3 am I was on my second pot of coffee, I had one essay done (poorly), an outline of the other one (also bad), and I’d been staring at the same two sentences of my textbook for at least 20 minutes straight.

I decided to crash for two hours, and then I somehow buckled down and got everything done. The rest of the day I felt slightly hungover. My body was in full-scale rebellion against my lack of planning, and the confidence I had felt a mere 12 hours earlier seemed like a distant memory.

Since then I’ve pretty much done nothing but sleep. This morning I felt better, but I’m afraid to look at the essays I turned in. Does this kind of stuff happen after college? Does a secret spell come along with your diploma that suddenly makes you organized? I really hope so, because otherwise, I’m screwed.

One cool thing, though, is that for the first time in what feels like an eternity, Gretchen and I are planning on going out to enjoy a night on the town. First we’re going to hit up the new Jamaican place in Bloomfield (have you seen all the crazy new restaurants going up around there?), and then hop the train downtown and catch a show. Although maybe the tickets would be better used as a bribe for my professors..

This semester has been going really well so far, so well that I’m actually amazed. At the beginning it seemed like I’d be overwhelmed, and I am busy and basically have no time, but it’s been really fun. One class I haven’t touched on much is my History of Peace class, which has been blowing me away.

Given that I’m a History major and a graduating senior, I’ve taken quite a few history classes, and *thought* that I had a pretty good sense of what’s been going on in the world for the past several thousand years. This class, though, has made me rethink everything, and at this point it feels like I need to start over from scratch.

The accepted view people have of history, and the way that the vast majority of the classes are taught, is by viewing the wars/major conflicts as the pivotal points in time, and the periods between as explanations for them. Look at the table of contents of most History textbooks and you’ll see this illustrated very plainly; there will be twice as many pages dedicated to World War II than there will be to the Great Depression or the 1920’s. And after you go back to anything before the Civil War, good luck finding more than a paragraph describing anything that isn’t a war.

According to this class, and to the professor, Dr. Huang, this paradigm is completely backwards. As people say, if we don’t learn history, we’re doomed to repeat the past, but what does that really mean when the history we’re taught is focused primarily on conflict? Are we learning how to better prevent conflict and prolong prosperity, or are we learning how to prevail in conflict and better fight wars? Dr. Huang’s class is based on the idea that it’s more important to discover the “whys” of peacetime rather than the “whys” of conflict, because ultimately, we as a society should be much more interested in enriching lives and culture rather than how to better kill other people. So far, it’s rocking my world.

I met with Dr. Lemley yesterday to plan out our Directed Study, and my alarm over how busy this semester will be continues to grow.  Why did I ever think my last semester at Pitt would be a cake walk?  Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and smack some sense into myself.

What gets me, though, is that everything I’ve committed to doing this semester is so interesting that I can’t bring myself to drop any of it, and the Directed Study is no exception.  The idea we had when we first discussed the project a few months ago was to take a neighborhood in Pittsburgh and track different variables over time, for example population, employment, etc.  One of the first things to figure out is what data is out there for us to track.  We did decide on a neighborhood to focus on, though: the South Side.

It’s hard to think of a neighborhood in Pittsburgh that embodies its history better than the South Side.  Even before steel came to Pittsburgh, it was the center of another industrial boom–glass production.  When steel came, mills and millworkers built the neighborhood, and when steel left, it became a ghost town.  Even before the next big revitalization, though, the South Side started to bounce back as a center for nightlife, and today, it’s one of the most happening areas in town.

So, my first job is to dive into census data as far back as I can go to see what’s there, and then report back to Dr. Lemley.  Thank god the library stays open late!

My final semester at Pitt has begun, and it has begun with a bang. It’s only my second day, and I’m already feeling completely overwhelmed!

I have always loved the first week of classes, and I thought this would be one of the best. Besides my directed study with Dr. Lemley and internship at CRR, the rest of my classes were just ones I needed to take to finish requirements. I was looking forward to professors handing out syllabi and dismissing the class early, but starting with my first class, it wasn’t meant to be.

Almost everyone I know took Intro to Biotechnology to satisfy their science requirement, and they all said it was a piece of cake, but my professor is new and seems to be on a mission. To make my life hell. The first class was yesterday, and we already have to read chapter 1 and be ready for a quiz on Friday. I mean, people are still in the add/drop period, so what’s she going to do when a new student comes in Friday who just signed up? I feel sorry for that kid already…

I also couldn’t resist taking another history class, the History of Peacetime. Its basic premise is that long periods of peace should be studied just like wars are, which sounded very interesting to me. After looking at the syllabus, I need to think about how much “interesting” is really worth. There are short writing assignments due every other week, and 3 large essays spaced out during the semester. Yikes.

My last class satisfies one of those cross-discipline requirements I need to finish my psychology major, and I picked Sociology of Gender. I haven’t had a class yet, but I’m hoping against hope that it doesn’t fit the same pattern as the rest of them.

I am excited about my internship, though, which will start later this week, and I’ll be meeting with Dr. Lemley soon to plan out our directed study. I’ll keep you posted!

Tis the season for finals, but thankfully, it looks like they won’t be too bad this semester.  My worst final will probably be Neuroscience, and that’s mostly because my attendance got a little shaky by the end of the semester.  One of the nice things about being a history major is that the finals tend to be essays done out of class, which eliminates the whole test anxiety deal.  On the other hand, though, you also have to write yet another essay…I guess finals just suck no matter what form they come in.

For the first time, though, I’m actually excited about one of the finals essays I have to do.  It’s the one for Dr. Lemley’s History of Pittsburgh class, and the essay question is: Is the current boom in Pittsburgh’s economy different than past booms?  If not, why, and if so, how?

There are a lot of answers to this question, which is the essence of what I think history is all about.  One of the thing’s I love about Dr. Lemley is how he always stresses that history is not about dates and names, it’s about argument and analysis.  Understanding, or at least being able to make a compelling argument, about the “why” of something is much more useful than being able to recite the “what” from memory.  I wish more history teachers taught like that; if they did, I think history would be a lot more popular than it currently is.

Anyway, since the essay is only supposed to be around 5 pages, I really can’t get too deep into an analysis of a lot of different boom periods in Pittsburgh (there are more of them than one would think).  Right now, I’m planning on taking the big one, the rise of the steel industry, breaking down the major themes, and then trying to do the same with the current boom.  I haven’t gotten too far in outlining it yet, but so far, it’s looking pretty interesting.

Big steel rose in Pittsburgh for a number of reasons–local raw materials, high-quality transportation, technological breakthroughs, etc.–and its rise acted like a magnet for immigration.  Up until World War 1, though, a lot of the immigrants did a lot of going back and forth between their homelands and Pittsburgh, which meant that while a lot of people were in Pittsburgh, a good chunk of them weren’t laying down roots.  What stopped that was when immigration was cut-off around World War 1, which meant that people stayed put and built many of the neighborhoods and communities that we still recognize today.

One element of this progression that fascinates me is how external it all is, and by that I mean that people were reacting to outside influences (here’s the psychologist in me coming out).  The industry rose because the environment was right for it, people came because of the industry, and people built communities because they couldn’t leave.  That is the big difference between that boom time and the current one–the catalyst for the current boom was a decision made by many individuals that they loved the city and they weren’t going to let anyone stop them from making Pittsburgh into the city they knew it could become.  It was an internal decision instead of a reaction to externalities.

The problem with this analysis is that it’s hard to get credible citations to support my current boom-time theory.  I’m planning on citing some blogs operating around the turn of the century, citing an increase in new progressive organizations being founded, and increase in the amount of programs sponsored by local universities to increase innovation and entrepreneurship, but no matter what, it isn’t going to be as clean as the data in support of the steel boom.

Maybe that’s because not enough time has passed yet, but I think when it comes down to it, it’s a result of the internal-focused nature of the current boom.  How do you get a nice and succinct citation for what thousands of individuals decided they wanted to do?  How do you document the many small, sometimes imperceivably small steps people took to slowly build momentum?  My guess is that it’d take a little more than 5 pages, but maybe it’s something I can get a littler closer to during my directed study with Dr. Lemley next semester.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions, especially if they help me get an A!

Just got word today–I’ll be interning at Community Recycling and Renewables (CRR) next semester! I’m still not sure exactly what I’ll be doing there, though. They have a lot of programs, and I’m not sure if interns work on all or just one of them. Their biggest areas are: Community Outreach, Technology Vendor Outreach, and Project Implementation. These closely follow the model that that CRR uses, which is to connect neighborhoods/communities with recycling and renewable energy providers, and then assist in implementing the plan that they put together. All of the areas sound interesting to me, so I’m hoping to get a taste of each.

Dr. Lemley also agreed to work with me on a Directed Research project next semester, so I’m excited about that. We met in his office and discussed different possibilities for what the project should be about, and we had a lot of good ideas. I don’t know why, but whenever I speak with Dr. Lemley, I’m never afraid to say what’s on my mind and to get really engaged in the conversation. I guess that’s the sign of a really good teacher.

Throughout the History of Pittsburgh class with him this semester, I’ve been most interested in learning about the different communities in Pittsburgh, and how they’ve changed over the decades. Dr. Lemley suggested picking a neighborhood and tracking different variables (population, employment, etc.) through time. I really liked the idea, and we decided to use the South Side as the model. We’re going to meet a few more times before break to further develop the idea, and we’ll start full-force in January.

The rest of the classes for my last semester at Pitt (wow, that feels so weird to say!) will be just the classes I need to fulfill the rest of my requirements. I also decided to have a little fun and take Aerobic Fitness Boxing, too…I just couldn’t help myself!

Yet again, it’s that joyous time of the semester where I need to start planning what the hell I’ll be doing in the spring.  Unlike like last year, though, I’m actually excited about it.  There’s a couple of internships I’m going to apply for that I heard about at the Office of Entrepreneurial Development (OED), and I’m also pondering asking Dr. Lemley if I can do a directed research project with him.  That way I can knock off my last upper-level class requirement, and Dr. Lemley is also awesome as hell.

It occurs to me now that I never wrote about my trip over to the OED.  The office itself was really nice–it reminded me a lot of the Study Abroad office.  There were books with information, several “Who’s Who” type of directories, and ample sitting areas.  I was a little nervous, so I whipped out my computer and sat on one of the couches before going and talking to the staff.  I noticed a good number of people coming in and out of the office–around 5 in the 10 minutes or so that I was stalling…I mean waiting.  It seemed like a lot of the people were students like me (i.e., liberal arts majors), and they were just checking in with the people who work there (who I overheard being referred to as counselors).

After I rehearsed what I was going to say, I gathered my courage, went up to the front desk, and totally blanked.  I think my exact words were, “Hey, ummmm, my name is Frank, and ummmmmmmm, I was just wonderin’ if, uhhhh, you know…I could…”

The person at the desk just smiled as I was doing my Mario Lemieux impression, and then interrupted and said, “So, this is your first visit here?”  I guess they get that all the time. We talked for a while about my majors, my interests, etc., and then I made an appointment to speak with Ms. Devali, one of the counselors there.

I went to the appointment the next day, and I was a little less nervous, but still unsure of what to say.  The truth is that I really don’t know what I want to do with my life after I graduate, and I don’t feel so great about that.  Most of my friends knew what they wanted to do for a long time, sometimes it seems like they knew since they were born.  I’ve had a lot of ideas, ranging from environmental engineer (whatever that means) to high school history teacher, but nothing ever seemed to stick.  All I really know is that I want to do something I care about, and I want to do it well.  Anyway, that’s what I told Ms. Devali.

She listened as I rambled on about that, and after I was done, she said, “Sounds good, let’s look at some options.” I was expecting her to send me away to think about it some more, so I was pleasantly surprised.  We looked at some different companies and organizations that were offering internships, and a lot of them looked interesting.  There was a really cool community development organization in Homewood, there was a marketing and design firm on the South Side, there were several online magazines…I was amazed by how much there was.  Ms. Devali also said the the OED does not advertise internships that solely involve making copies and doing busy-work, which is something I was afraid of.

The companies that really caught my eye, though, were the ones in the renewable energy field, which ranged from biofuel manufacturers to innovative recycling firms.  One, however, really stuck out: Community Renewables and Recycling (CRR).  This company combined three elements that really interested me–cutting-edge green technology, low-tech implementation, and community outreach.  Building off of Mayor Conway’s original idea to implement renewable energy solutions residentially, their approach is to work with local community groups and grass-roots organizations to develop neighborhood-wide green implementation plans.  They also get down to the actual installation level, which interests me a lot because I love getting my hands dirty!

I applied there as well as some other places as backups, but I’m really banking on CRR, which I should hear from in about a week or so.  After I left Ms. Devali’s office, I realized that going to the OED was one of the biggest single things I’ve done so far to address what I’ll be doing with my life post-graduation.  I’m really glad they were there and so helpful, even for someone as clueless as I am!