Alumni Focus:
Nathaniel D. Poor '92
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Nat writes... My first job after college was at Ziff-Davis Labs, now defunct, a computer hardware and software testing lab for the Ziff-Davis magazines. There were a bunch back then, even before the mad dot-com days. Since I was just out of college, I was the lowest type of full-time employee in the hierarchy, but that suited me fine. Many opportunities to learn, and not too much room to make mistakes (one always does, though). I felt I learned more this first year out of college than I had during all four years in college, but not just about computers. Yes I'd had jobs before, even in an office, but this was working for a division of a billion-dollar a year company, and life is very different out of college. After a while, even though the people were fantastic, the repetitive nature of the job became boring, and the industry seemed very superficial and incestuous, which was a sign of things to come during the later dot-com years. So I quit after a year. For a while I was in that unguided post-collegiate thing that some go through (avoid that at all costs, though), and after being a computer consultant I ended up as a sysadmin and webmaster at a small non-profit. This was pretty interesting, and I had a lot of responsibility for machines and thus people's ability to work. It was very different from the big corporate scene at Ziff-Davis. Learning in the structured atmosphere at HWS had always been challengingly enjoyable, and I had always thought about returning to school one day. The early dot-com thing and the growth of the web, along with all the hype, made me think more about graduate school. A friend of mine from HWS was working on his master's in cultural studies, and I got a Peterson's guide to graduate programs in the social sciences. I didn't really know what area to investigate, since I had done interdisciplinary work as an undergraduate (English, math, and computer science). Communication studies caught my eye, and I applied to three programs, Cornell, Boston University, and Michigan. I was accepted into all three, and turning down Cornell was difficult but their program wasn't what I wanted at the time. BU was too professional, but Michigan was interesting. I'd never been to the midwest, and the program was supposedly interdisciplinary (and it is). My department has been undergoing some changes, and it's been up and down, but I'm very happy currently and hope to defend my thesis in January, 2004 (famous last words). Some people say I might be too happy being a graduate student, but I'm working towards finishing, and if I wasn't happy then I'd be in the wrong place.
I'm glad HWS focuses on interdisciplinary work. Michigan, I'm told, is fairly unusual for a big university in that disciplinary lines are not often crossed. Here it is encouraged, although disciplines are still defined by journals, bodies of knowledge, and as faculty where your paycheck comes from. One professor of mine, in another highly interdisciplinary part of the University, used to work at Bell Labs. He once said that at the Labs, finding the answer to the question was the most important thing, and the disciplinary background didn't matter. The more approaches you have the better. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The world is more complex than that. (And a university with 36,000 students is more complex than a college of 1,800, but here you can barely get hold of faculty, whereas at HWS you can just walk into their office...) ---From Nat Poor,
June 12, 2003
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