Italics are mine

Utah

Back in late March I went to southern Utah - a trip that turned out to be life-changing, in a very good way - and I've meant to post a few pictures for a while but never got around to it for some reason. I had been in that area only once before, in May 2009, and this was even better, perhaps because of the contrast with the Northeast when I left. (This is not Salt Lake City at all. Temperatures when I was there averaged 85F.)

Here is a picture I particularly like.

The funny thing is, I love New York City and big, bustling metropolises with art, culture and a sense of excitement on the street, but my best trips have been long weekends spent far away from home in nature: Ojai, CA last year (alright, so I stopped by Santa Barbara on the way, but Ojai itself was very peaceful) and St George, UT this year. It quiets my mind in a way that even the most powerful meditation cannot, and I come back from every trip centered and poised and with great insights into the direction I'm taking. And more.  

I'm not sure when I'll get back to Utah, but hopefully I won't wait six years for my next trip. Here is another picture. Enjoy!

Thoughts for #MIT2015 graduates @MIT_alumni

I was asked by @MIT_alumni on Twitter if I had any words of advice for the graduates, who will be receiving their diploma at Commencement tomorrow. “Share and we’ll RT!” the message said. I was tempted to answer “beware of advice in less than 140 characters” or “never listen to advice from people you don’t know”, both making fair points, I think, but in the end I decided to give the request a longer and hopefully more thoughtful answer.

“What advice do you have for the graduates?” is a tricky question, because good advice is tailored to the case of the person who receives it, and the thousands of students – Bachelor’s, Master’s, PhD recipients – who will line up by the Commencement stage tomorrow are much too diverse for any words of advice to be equally applicable and thus meaningful to them. The best Commencement speakers share insights from their own life that will inspire listeners to pursue their own dreams with the knowledge that, if they fall, the skills they have earned in the pursuit of their degree will allow them to get up and dust themselves off. Having received my PhD from EECS only eleven years ago and being now a tenured Associate Professor at what is often referred to as a “New Ivy” school in Pennsylvania, I don’t have a tenth of the life experience and credibility that most Commencement speakers have. But I have kept in touch with many former students over the decade I have been on the other side of the student-faculty line, including nine as an academic advisor, and I have some ideas on what has made some fulfill their potential and others falter. (Sadly, I can’t include all of them in this post, but please let me know if you’d like me to write more on the topic.) So, here we go.

Life doesn’t owe you anything. It is tempting to think that, because you have a degree from one of the very best universities in the world, you have received a stamp of approval that will open door after door after door to lead you toward the career you have dreamed for yourself. (You may think that even if you’re not quite sure what career you want to pursue.) If someone from a less prestigious school gets a job or a fellowship you had applied for, you may take the news with disbelief and thoughts of unfairness. But life is more complicated than that. Your degree is a wonderful steppingstone, the sign you can successfully handle complex challenges and make a tremendous contribution to your workplace. Yet, the fact is that…

The people who succeed have good enough subject knowledge and excellent interpersonal skills. Of course we can argue for hours about the definition of success. Being of service to one’s community and raising thoughtful children matters tremendously. For this post, we will define success as success in the workforce, although I hope you’ll use your skills to solve important problems outside work too. And we can also argue about the definition of “good enough” subject knowledge. Some places hire only the best engineers, the best scientists, the best economists – no doubt about that. But among those engineers, scientists and economists who were best-in-class at the top university they graduated from, those who succeed have excellent interpersonal skills. To be honest, I’ve seen some of my doctoral students at the “New Ivy” school I teach land jobs (and subsequently thrive) that their peers at MIT would have been overjoyed with, and the undergraduate degree-holders from that same “New Ivy” school are known for their fast-ascending career trajectories at Fortune 100 companies. Why? Because of their interpersonal skills.

Coming from MIT, known for its quantitative rigor, some of you may believe that “interpersonal skills” is a code word for “schmoozing” and “office politics”. Or maybe it’s just me? I pursued an engineering degree because I liked that if I was asked a math or physics question at a test, the examiner could not use his own opinion to decide whether I was right or wrong. I didn’t have to depend on someone’s whim, the way I felt I would if I wrote essays. But as I grew older, I realized you always need other people to succeed. You need someone to put your name in for a coveted assignment or go to bat for you for promotion. You need people to try your new products. You need to understand how others perceive you and your ideas, and how to best work with them so that you can achieve your objectives and they theirs. This starts with excellent communication skills, and later extends to emotional intelligence and the ability to work with, for or lead other people. If you don’t know where to start, join Toastmasters and ask yourself of any person you interact with: “what are this person’s goals and how can I best help her achieve her objectives while I pursue mine?” But even interpersonal skills aren’t enough to guarantee success because... 

It is easy to go off-track if you don’t pay attention. My favorite life metaphor is that of the frog in hot water. If you put a frog into very warm water, it will jump right out. But if you put the frog into cold water and then progressively increase the temperature until the water boils, it will stay in the water until it is dead. That is because at every moment, the water is not that much hotter than it was a few seconds earlier. I think life is like that too. You look at very talented people stuck in dead-end jobs and wonder: why aren’t they running out of there screaming for their lives? But every day was not that much worse than the day before and so they stayed, until there was not much left to salvage from their career. So it helps if, maybe once a year or so, you picture your life as if you were an outsider observing the life of your best friend – not yours. Or imagine what an outsider would say (say, someone you strike up a conversation with, one day when you’re stuck at an airport) if you summarized your life for him. It is most helpful if you write this down in a notebook every year, so that you can compare your write-ups over several years. When you re-read your notes, you want to have the impression that…

Whatever you do, always go to your edge. You may decide to have a career in the field you earned your degree in, you may decide to use it as a steppingstone toward something else, or you may decide to completely change paths. That won’t mean your degree was time wasted: you have earned important skills, especially problem-solving skills, you can apply no matter where. But whatever you do, don’t settle for “good enough” (although it is tempting if you’re not quite sure what you want to do and are still evaluating your options). In any field, there will be people passionate about the topic and willing to do it full-out. If you are not passionate about your career path, you will find yourself beaten again and again by those competitors. That’s not why you went to MIT for, is it? Getting a degree from the ‘Tute is an enormous accomplishment, but it is only an intermediary milestone, a springboard toward better things. Some fellow graduates I thought were promised to great things have struggled or faded into oblivion. I personally owe my entire career and my Green Card to MIT. My whole life, you could say. I would not have become a professor if I hadn’t gone to MIT and met the peers and mentors I have along the way. Which brings me to my last point…

What makes MIT special is its people. You may (in fact, will probably) never find yourself again in a place where you can interact with so many talented, enthusiastic, smart people capable of changing the world. You will miss the feeling of impending intellectual discovery that is always in the air. After graduation, the lack of intense shared experiences will make it harder to strike meaningful friendships. This is a problem all college graduates the world over have, but it might be most acute here where solving a problem set late at night with a group of friends is one of the hallmark experiences of a MIT education. So try to meet as many people as you can when you still can, and keep an open mind. People change a lot after they graduate. Even the annoying kid down the hall may become the perfect best friend a few years from now. Keep in touch with as many classmates as you can – not as a way to practice shallow networking, but because these people, whether you feel you have much in common with them now or not, may inspire you like no other a few years hence.

The adventure, really, is only beginning.

"Crossing" by Matthew Aucoin

(Photo credit: A.R.T.) I find myself fortunate to have attended the premiere of Matthew Aucoin's (short) opera "Crossing" at the Citi Shubert Theatre in Boston on Friday. The Citi Shubert Theatre itself is a theatre that has seen better days and reminded me of Boston's faded glory in the gilded 1920s (can't they at least change the carpeting?), so the contrast between the location and the modern new opera that Wunderkind Matthew Aucoin, Harvard '12, has created. While Aucoin deserves much acclaim for the music, the remarkable visual experience is all to the credit of the very talented director Diane Paulus and the just as talented set designer Tom Pye. They make the hour and four minutes of performance absolutely riveting. 

The opera is about Walt Whitman's experience as a nurse in the Civil War for the Union side - a transformative experience for Whitman. As the war draws to an end, he meets a young, male soldier (who is actually a soldier from the Confederate side) he feels attracted to. The music is performed by chamber orchestra A Far Cry, which was a good choice (using a chamber orchestra) for an opera of that length, I thought. Whitman's role is performed by baritone Rod Gilfry, who was perfect in addition to being charismatic.

The crossing in the title occurs at several levels, as Aucoin writes in his program note: "between poet and reader, performer and audience, and between the contradictory elements of his own self." The role of the young soldier John Wormley is sung by tenor Alexander Lewis, to great effect. A key turning point of the play is when Whitman cannot resist his attraction for Wormley one night in Wormley's bed, to Wormley's disgust. (In real life, Wormley only made a brief appearance in Whitman's diaries, as explained here.) Another remarkable role, of a former slave who escaped and joined the Union forces, is sung with brilliance by bass-baritone Davone Tines, who received a highly-deserved ovation at curtain call.   

At only 25, Aucoin is often compared to Leonard Bernstein due to his prodigiously ascending trajectory, which has given him conducting roles at the Metropolitan Opera and the Chicago Symphony, as well as guest lecture opportunities at the Shakespeare Society of New York. He has been profiled in Opera News. WSJ doesn't hesitate to title its own profile of him: "Is Matthew Aucoin the new Leonard Bernstein?"

New York Times opera critic Anthony Tommasini found the opera "taut" and "inspired" and wrote of Aucoin that he "clearly has prodigious gifts". He assesses Aucoin's music as follows. "What he already brings to bear, though, is a powerful vision for what he wants opera to be, along with an instinctive way of melding words and music to tell a story. Mr. Aucoin, rather like Janacek in his operas, writes music that activates the text. In whole stretches, the orchestra almost hugs each word with some piercing harmony, or doubles a vocal line with instruments."

I'm glad I got to see it. Below, a short WBUR piece on Aucoin before the premiere. Crossing runs until June 6.

Writing Quote by Richard Toscan

Here is a great quote about writing that I found in Playwriting Seminars 2.0 by (former Dean of the School of Theatre at USC) Richard Toscan. While he refers specifically to playwriting and screenwriting, the quote is applicable to any writing endeavor (and the book is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in playwriting).

"Playwriting and screenwriting are not what you do after the dishes, walking the dog, feeding the fish, washing the car, and vacuuming the rug. All of that comes after writing. Or it should, but the discipline to do so takes practice for most people. Writing is hard work, so avoid falling into the trap of getting all the unimportant things out of the way first so that you can concentrate on writing. By then your back will hurt or you'll feel like going out to the local coffee shop. Make writing the most important thing you do and let it come first."