The next three days or so is University of Pittsburgh’s “Arrival Survival.” Now, I’ll get to experience Oakland as a neighborhood teeming with….college students.
I was once a college student. I probably still look like one. I still dress the same as always. I don’t think there’s much I could do to change my appearance without buying a whole new wardrobe–which I intend to do, slowly, once my finances have settled into steady-state.
Confusion reigns, though. I go to work just like any other income-earning laborer. My ID clearly says “STAFF.” But as far as the work’s concerned, I’m a student. When you have a categorization system that’s limited, the “student” label fits best. In the memo to UPMC HR requesting an ID card, I am described as a student.
The lady at the bank asked me if I was a student at CMU or Pitt. I said I was staff at Pitt. She said that I looked too young to be staff. I said that I skipped a year of high school and I just graduated from college.
After my stint here is over, I’ll go back to being a student.
At work, I feel just about as helpless as the other grad students here. I just learned today that I’m not allowed to operate the scanner by myself. Fine, I guess. It’s an expensive piece of equipment and you don’t want just anyone operating it. But it’s a serious impediment to the work that goes on. The research administrator here used to offer an operating course, but in the wake of losing a handful of MR technologists and some other personnel, apparently we are “understaffed” and “priorities have shifted.”
When Philip was here, he told me how slow it was getting anything done to begin with because it was difficult to get good blocks of scanner time. You’d make some changes to your sequence in the comfort of your desk space and you could simulate the results, but to get any useful feedback you needed to run it on the scanner. And hell if I know how the damn place is run, but scanner time is a precious commodity. There are always other studies being conducted that seem to fill up time slots. During the short time Philip and I worked together, we’d maybe get a half-hour here, fifteen minutes there. Never got much of anything done, other than to see “Yeah, it’s hard to get a good image using spiral on the 3T because of the inhomogeneities and the off-resonance” and “Still haven’t gotten extended dynamic range to work with the sequence” and “Hey! The weave artifact’s gone! No, wait, there it is.”
Now, with Philip gone, I was all set to immerse myself in the work. I was looking forward to the new responsibilities. And then I’m told that I can’t use the scanner on my own? I bloody hell well used the scanner on my own last year in New York. Dr. Prince was amazingly helpful when my senior project group stuck around late nights to do work, and would even entrust us to lock up when he had to leave early. I know what I need to do with the scanner for the spiral sequence. Dr. Wang would always ask Philip, “So, can Anthony run the sequence on his own?” Yes, I can. I’ve read the fsckin’ EPIC programming manual, I’m familiar with the behind-the-scenes hardware and the godawful code that drives it.
But “there’s no way to verify what I know.”
I felt I was being treated rather prick-ish. But, to feel that way would mean that I’m prick-ish to begin with. I’ll get to that in a second.
The advice given to me was that I should just “keep working with Dr. Wang” until things settle, the course gets offered and I get to formally learn what I informally know.
“Excuse me, Professor Brainiac, but I worked in a nuclear power plant for ten years, and, uh, I think I know how a proton accelerator works.”
[maintainers needed for snpp.com. ooh....]
So everything feels more like I’m just another student. But I get paid. I am not taking any classes. I pay none of that ridiculous tuition that Pitt charges. $12k/semester for out-of-state residents and international students. Christ.
I deserve better. I’m special, dammit. I’ve been special all my life. Went to a magnet elementary school for gifted students (it was one of the few bright spots of the Chicago Public Schools system at the time, and I’m sure still is). Was good enough to skip freshman year of high school and go straight to the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a three-year residential high school that caters to the best and brightest of Illinois. We’ve got Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman as our Resident Scholar, for cryin’ out loud. Went to Cooper, one of the best engineering schools on the eastern seaboard where every student gets a full-tuition scholarship. I deserve better.
However humbling it might be to work in the presence of medical doctors and Ph.D.’s (dammit, the title “doctor” should be reserved for MDs only–when I get my Ph.D. I’m not going to make anyone call me “Doctor”), I’m still smart and special. I am not one of the commonfolk. I don’t deserve this.
This is why I wasn’t going to deny being prick-ish in attitude. I smiled throughout and thanked the research administrator for her helpful information. Call me passive-aggressive, I guess, but there isn’t much else you can do, especially when you understand the other person’s point of view, no matter how you perceive their delivery.
Whatever. I’m still getting paid, scanner access or no scanner access. And I’ll keep my holier-than-thou attitude for right now, thanks.
Does religion have no place even in a pluralist society?
This country is based upon plurality–plurality of beliefs, of ideas, of heritages, of opinions. And yet, somehow, we manage to form a consensus regarding certain important topics. Humans have inherent inalienable rights. Pretty much everyone agrees on that.
Anything beyond that, and you get hotly debated issues wherein no progress is made toward consensus but you do get inflamed tensions, righteousness, and anger. Laws are enacted by our representative government that hopefully reflect the correct decision, or at the very least, the majority opinion; minority groups disagreeing with such laws tend to be vocal enough to seem that they speak for a majority; laws get overturned; and the cycle continues. People continue to argue to no end.
(I heard a joke about the Soviet concept of perestroika that went something like this: A visitor to the Soviet Union asked a man what perestroika was. The man took out two pails and some potatoes and started exchanging them back and forth between the pails. “Do you see anything changing?” asked the man. “No,” said the visitor. “Correct, but you hear the noise it makes.”)
Spinning our wheels…spinning our wheels.
This is, of course, a feature and not a bug in Democracy v2.1. We encourage many opinions, and we encourage the freedom to voice those opinions. With technology aiding the mass media, we are aware of the prevailing winds almost instantly. But when you’re trapped in the midst of the argument, it’s not unusual to feel as if something’s broken.
When there are a number of interests to be served, is not the correct action one of compromise? To be sure, each law on the books represents some sort of compromise–otherwise it would never have been ratified. That’s what happens when democracy is working.
But laws have been passed that lead me to believe that compromises were not sought. In some cases, it even seems that common sense has gone right out the window. This can’t be traced to any one person, since it takes many people to ratify a bill into law. I like to think that all of them couldn’t have had a simultaneous brain fart that made them lose their senses.
All this has served to shed some light on my own personal views, to which I realize I haven’t given much thought, but they exist nonetheless.
I get lopsided commentary on current events from the friends around me, who share some but not all of my political views and opinions. And it’s hard, because often times they will make a remark on some subject or issue and while I can understand where they’re coming from, I hear the multitude of voices echoing that remark as ridiculing my own beliefs.
I like to believe that some intelligent thought processes have informed my values and opinions. I also know that intelligent thought process have informed my friends’ values. I can’t subscribe to relativism, moral or otherwise, because that would ultimately deem my own values to be hypocritical. So what’s a guy to do?
Sometimes, it seems that my claim to follow Catholic teachings sets me apart from others. I become an anachronism, an unenlightened relic from another time. And because I let such teachings inform my point of view, I am unable to defend my opinions in even casual settings because not all the participants subscribe to the same axioms.
The odd part is that I think that everyone is motivated from the same core belief structure, that we all have an inherent idea of what is good and what is bad. Whether one takes the religious dogma route, or one free of such trappings, it seems that our conclusions ought to be the same. But then we get mired in the details, and all pretense to civility goes out the window.
If we would take some time to just see it from the other person’s point of view, if we could just suppress that reflex to instantly label the other person’s opinion as worthless, I think we would finally be able to get past this stage of merely spinning our wheels. ‘Cos, if you haven’t noticed, we’re kicking up a lot of mud and we’re just getting dirtier.