Eric Johnson
12-25-2016
David Collum’s annual Year in Review is awesome (read it here). I am a bored college student on break from school, so I am going to write my own. Granted, I may not be as insightful as Dave (yet), and do not have an investment portfolio to tell anyone about (yet), but I am happy to share some of my ideas and experiences as I reflect on this year.
I had a pretty good year of doing work and getting paid for it. I watch a lot of Casey Neistat on YouTube, and I really liked his piece about reaching personal goals and aspirations. It is important to remember there is not just one path to success, and that deviation from the norm will not result in an inability to achieve your goals. Moreover, occasionally it’s really easy to begin to think of a job as a stepping stone, or just a means to an end, but I really feel that if you aren’t trying to get everything you can out of any work you have to do, you are selling yourself short. I try my best to embody this in all of the work I do.
I did a lot of freelance app development this year. I did all of the work through a startup at school, Belle Apps. We [Belle Apps] are a group of developers helping clients make their ideas into a reality. The first app I built promotes sexual safety on college campuses by digitally enforcing consent before any act, on both iPhone and Android. I built this from scratch, collaborating with a designer to make sure everything looked good, and otherwise implementing the full stack myself. From this I learned a whole lot about time management, working independently, and user experience. Asking for consent through a screen is a tricky process, and it took a while to really get the details ironed out to an experience we felt was personal and safe enough for use by a number of people. My next gig, if you will, was to fix and rebuild an existing application for Belle. The app is a food delivery app and was currently only offered as an iPhone application. My task has been to update the iOS version and to build an identical application for Android. I am rounding out that work now. While I have definitely learned a lot from my time freelancing, it has been a challenge to manage simultaneously with school, and sometimes I wonder if I had bitten off more than I could chew. Who knows. Either way, I owe a lot of my ability to learn new things on the fly to these experiences, and I am happy I have put in the work over this past year.
I had a summer internship in Syracuse, New York. The internship was with SRC, Inc.. SRC is a private defense contractor and builds some pretty exciting stuff. Over the summer I got to make a prototype of a web application that allows a drone pilot to see if their drone is being shot at by an enemy. It was a fun challenge and (as far as I know) it has a chance to eventually be used in real life. That would be pretty cool. I learned a lot over the summer there too. I learned cubicles are sometimes good and sometimes bad, and I think they are more bad than good. I also learned about a working in a corporate work environment, which I hadn’t experienced before.
I also picked up a job at the Johnson School at Cornell. Although my last name may suggest otherwise, I have no family relation to the school, I know, boring. I work in the audio-visual services department and my job is to help anyone who has trouble (with audio or visual techonology) at the school. Its pretty cool to be able to help professors and professionals get their work done, and I have had the chance to meet some very smart and interesting people. Also, when a company comes for an information session or to recruit the MBA students for jobs, I get free food and drinks which is pretty great.
The two semesters I spent at Cornell in 2016 were definitely a challenge, but a lot of fun too. I learned some cool stuff, e.g. how to build this, and met some awesome people too.
I began the Spring 2016 semester by joining two fraternities. Wait, how? I joined one social fraternity and one professional fraternity. Through these organizations I grew and have met many of my best friends in at school. Greek life isn’t for everyone, and certianly has a lot of negative stigma, but I think you are selling yourself short if you find yourself in college and don’t at least check it out. Additionally, people ask a lot about pledging and hazing and other bad things that many greek organizations are stereotypically known for. Having lived through pledging two organizations in the same semester (and taking engineering classes at Cornell) I am proof that pledging is not what you hear about in rumors or movies or the like, and is not too bad.
A big part of going to school at Cornell is the rush to get a big internship and/or job for upcoming summers (or post-graduation). It kind of blows my mind how intense recruitment is here. My friends at other schools don’t really worry about having any professional experience before their junior year of college, while for me, if I didn’t have an internship to put on my resume during my sophomore summer, I felt behind the pack. Its hard not to get into the habit of joining things simply to “check a box”, or because it will look good to a recruiter in the future. I have definitely been guilty of this. Anyways, I did participate in recruitment this past fall semester and worked to try and get a summer internship. I learned that interviews are stressful, but I think I got better at them as time went along. I even got to travel a couple times, which was awesome. Eventually I landed an internship, which I am looking forward to next summer. It’s in the city and it’s going to be awesome.
A major part of school is what you’re studying (duh). For me, I have been set on engineering for a while. (If you have read this far, you can probably tell that I am not spending much time studying english). However, I hadn’t really been confident with which discipline of engineering suited me best. I know I like computers, and programming them, and I know I don’t like chemistry, so I definitely knew I didn’t want to major in chemical engineering, but still, I had a few other options to choose from. Of the other options, the best fits are Electrical and Computer Engineering [ECE] and Computer Science [CS]. I know that sounds like three options but for Cornell, ECE is one degree. So I kind of floated through my first few semesters telling people I was going to major in ECE, but I was never really sure. I took a lot of classes in both ECE and CS, and generally liked both. Up until my most recent semester, I was still very much on the fence about switching my major to CS, and mostly unsure what to do. I had worked at SRC in a completely software engineering based role and really enjoyed the work. But I still felt, and feel, that working in software is a bit more of a niche role than the kinds of jobs an ECE degree prepares you for, which was proven by my ability to get a software internship without majoring in CS. Finally after taking classes this semester, I felt confident that I wanted to stick with ECE and (try to) graduate Cornell with that degree. The class that sold me was Mathmatics of Signals and System Analysis. I didn’t even do that well in the course, but the skills and concepts I took from the class are the skills I want to continue to build on for my career. Also, the professor, Delchamps, is among the best at Cornell, and taking any course taught by him is truly a gift. Naturally, I am going to continue to take related classes in the major. I am now confident that ECE is the best choice for me, and fits best with my long term future goals.
I traveled a good amount this year. At least a good amount relative to traveling I have done in other years. If you want to see what I mean by a “good amount” of traveling, continue reading.
I started the year with a quick stop in the city (the city always refers to New York City, of course), before heading the Vermont for a week of skiing and snowboarding with friends in Killington. Thanks to El Nino, the snow wasn’t the best but it was a blast. Next, I went back to the city for February break from school. Here I looked at some art (Whitney and MoMA) and ate some good food. I didn’t venture out again until spring break, where I went to the exotic locations of Washington DC and Philidelphia. I got to look at some cool exhibits, and really enjoyed seeing the Liberty Bell in Philly. At the very end of the semester, I took a trip to DC again to watch my favorite baseball team (St. Louis Caridinals) play live for the first time ever. They lost, but it was still fun. On the way home, there was a spontaneous trip to watch the Mets play the Dodgers (right in the middle of the “Mets fans hate Chase Utley with a burning passion” phase). The atmosphere in the stands was incredible and Curtis Granderson hit a walkoff homerun, so that was definitely worth extending the trip. Next was some international travel all the way to Montreal, to listen to music (Osheaga) and drink (its legal!). I ended my summer with the annual family trip out to Montauk, where again, I pretended I could surf and probably made a fool of myself while out in the ocean with my paddleboard. I love my paddleboard. I went again to the city (surprise), and got to eat more good food, and looked at some art I didn’t quite grasp at the Guggenheim over fall break of Fall 2016 semester. The architecture at that museum is incredible. I rounded out my year of travel with two expenses paid trips to interviews, which were stressful, but great experiences nonetheless.
2016 was a polarizing year. Brexit, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Feel the Bern, Panama Papers, Wells Fargo, Chicago Cubs, the Warriors blew a 3-1 lead, I could go on and on. I’ve realized when something (usually something bad) is happening, it’s hard for me to take a step back and remember that nothing is permanent, and whatever just occured is not going to last forever. This year was filled with such events, and each one ended in its due course. We got back up, brushed ourselves off, and carried on with life. Looking ahead to 2017, its important to keep this in mind, for our new president, for our tumultuous markets, and for anything else that may come our way.
If you look at anything I have ever done, accomplished, or won, it was almost never on my first try. The same can be said for a number of people in many different professions and walks of life. Don’t ever let a failure stop you from working towards your goals.
Like I mentioned above, I may have bitten off more than I could chew this year. I was very busy throughout both semesters of school, and even during my summer I felt like I did not have the free time I wanted to work on my personal ideas. This was not a bad thing, and I do not want to come off as lazy. With that said, I think it is important to know your limits, and to know the extent to which you can handle multiple projects, jobs, commitments, etc. I say to “under promise, over deliver” because that is what will make everyone most valuable. Taking on less work, but doing that work exceptionally, is more valuable than agreeing to a back-breaking amount of work and being mediocre at all of it. An example of this is Google. Not the Google we know today, but Google in its infancy. All Google did back then was search. No Gmail, no Drive or Docs, and no Pixel phone. Google’s sole promise was to be the best search engine, and it very well delivered. This is the kind of attitude I think is important when attacking a project.
These are some things I want to accomplish by this time next year.
Thank you for reading all of this. I apoligize for any crappy spelling and grammar, my editor was on vacation. If you liked anything I wrote or want to chat about it, tweet me!