the sphere and the schedule
so, I’m drawing near one of those big life-changing forks in the road. Last one I hit was probably the first one I hit: the end of high school, going to college, picking a major. It’s depressing to think that I’m in a mindset not particularly dissimilar to the one I was in eight years ago around this time. But at least this time I think I have a direction.
(below, I’ll descend into the depths of nerddom, and outline the plan to avoid stagnating. And I’ll probably wander in and out of a couple other thoughts and end up nowhere. It’ll be long, either way. You’ve been warned)
Picture, if you will, a horizontal mathematical plane (say z=0). To give things a bit of meaning, factor in uniform gravity in the -z direction. Now, add a sphere, and draw a large number of points at random very large, varying distances away from the sphere in random directions. Let’s make the points at a height z=1, and give them an orange glow. The sphere is mirror-finished and metallic, sky’s a deep blue-black, and the plane is a matte charcoal color. Cameras from the perspective of the sphere. (Ok, so my description of the image is a lot more detailed than it was, and I could probably model it in Max or Autocad pretty easily).
Now, consider time to be a very light force pulling in the X direction, fluctuating, but always just slightly higher than the friction a rolling sphere on the plane would undergo.
That’s pretty much it. I am the sphere. I’m on the plane. I’m moving, but I don’t really have a grasp of where I’m going other than that I’m moving in the X direction. I know at some point I need to pick a vector and move there, and that’ll mean imparting some new Y component. But I don’t know where I want to go.
Getting away from the abstraction a little bit, I’m graduating in May. I don’t have a job offer yet. I’ve barely even looked, barely scratched the surface of possibilities. The way I see it right now, I am probably going to end up sysadminning. I could go program, but I don’t really have the code-lust to be a coder, and the only language I’m really conversant in is J2SE. Most Java positions are J2EE (involving frameworks and structures that I’m completely unexperienced with), and most other programming jobs these days tend to revolve around .NET (C#, VB, ASP) or C++ in nasty legacy systems. I’m conversant in C, but bear an ingrained revulsion for C++ and want nothing to do with it. I don’t have the desire to be a webdev working in PHP significantly either, and I’ve been very unmotivated about picking up anything to do with ruby. So yeah, other than J2SE-java and SQL, I’ve got no easy-to-hire programming skills.
Other paths I can and can’t take … I can’t immediately pursue grad school. I haven’t taken the GRE yet, and I don’t see it happening in the immediate future. Not to mention my GPA is crap and I’ve done no research work.
I can’t really stay where I am. I am not making any progress in the financial realm, and class progress is crawling. Taking two classes a semester while not getting ahead in the money department is a pain. But this is it, and I’m done. I need to get a full time job with decent pay.
So yeah, looks like I’m looking for sysadmin positions. But what do I want to look for? I could be a unix/linux sysadmin, I could be a windows sysadmin. Either way would work, I’ve got the skills to do both (or to do both at the same time, like I am now). But doing one or the other means specializing and limiting myself quite a bit. If I specialize on unix/linux, does that mean I won’t have anything to do with windows at all? If I specialize on windows, am I going to be stuck with vista and with vbscript and batch for everything? I like having both worlds, but in a pond small enough for me to be in both worlds I’m probably going to end up bored and underutilized, which isn’t fun either.
For that matter, should I (can I?) stay here at Purdue? Are the few personal and professional relationships I’ve built here worth a damn? Or should I decide that being here is pretty much a pointless endeavor, and move elsewhere in the country? If so, where? Should I tap friends looking for sysadmin positions with their companies? Should I just start spamming applications at whoever I think I might get hired at? Should I aim for Silicon Valley, or for someplace on the East Coast? Maybe I can get into someplace that’ll have interesting things to do involving supercomputing.
So yeah, I’m all over the place. I want to do everything. I want to be a coder. I want to write java code. I want to write jdbc code and do neat SQL queries to do interesting things. I want to do data mining. I want to do sysadminning. I want to go to grad school. I want to go somewhere else. I want to stay here.
I’m making a mistake. I’m considering too many things. Economists weigh opportunity cost not as the cost of all opportunities missed by taking an option, but only the best missed opportunity. In other words, I should only be thinking about a scope of two things: what I am going to do and what I’m going to do if what I’m going to do doesn’t work out.
In that sense… Today, go see CLA advising. Bring a copy of my transcript, and the graduation requirements. Tell them I’m graduating from psych and that I’m already done with it. Ask them what I need to do.
March, we’ll say the 22nd. It’s a Thursday, so Sandy will be around, I guess. Ask Sandy if there’s a full-time offer forthcoming, or not. At the same time, update the resume copy to include “Objective: to obtain a permanent position as a system administrator”, and file a job app with each interesting-sounding posting on the HR page.
April 15th: if no job offer, then I’ve got 6 weeks before my lease is up. Find a June->August sublease. If job offer, then I’ve got 6 weeks to find a place to live. Find a June->August sublease or a June->May lease. Possibly re-spam HR. Re-post couches, post table and chairs on craigslist, purdue.forsale. Not taking that stuff with me.
May: graduate. If job offer: start new job, else continue working at current position, begin training people to take over for me, continue job hunt by expanding to friends, associates, miscellaneous contacts. Refine resume to include final GPA.
June: if new job, move into new place. If no new job, move to temporary new place and step up the job hunt.
August: if new job and sublease, move into permanent new place. If no new job and sublease, figure it out from there.
So why do I feel conflicted about all of this? I guess it’s because I don’t see a future in sysadminning, beyond 5 or 10 years from now. I just don’t think it’s going to be valuable past a certain point, and I also don’t think it’s big enough to be my final career. But I wonder if anything fits that bill. I also can’t see myself coding in 5 or 10 years. I guess the problem is I just can’t see myself in 5 or 10 years. At all. I have no concept of where I want to be or where I will be when I’m 36. Is the opportunity cost of getting a sysadmin job now going to be that I won’t be able to pursue the course I want to pursue? Or is it that the things I really want to do are on the other side of doors I’ve already let close?
Bah! There’s no point in any of this. Except the schedule outline. Which I need to follow. That’s all there is to it. Let time do its thing, do my things as I need to, and keep on keeping on. All there is to it.