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Surendra Singh
Piping Design Engineer
Bechtel India, Knowledge Park, Udyog Vihar Phase 4
Gurgaon, Delhi (INDIA)
The O&G, Petrochemical
Subject: To seek the position of Piping Design Engineer
Dear Sir,
I am currently working with a leading EPC Giant Bechtel Corporation as a piping Design engineer, and I am looking for a change in job. Since From 11Aug, 2008 to Present I have completed almost 10 years.
I am writing this letter to applying for the position of piping design Engineer in your organization. My experience matches your requirements and I am willing to work with your organization. My creativity and in-depth knowledge of designing using various software tools will surely make a positive contribution for your company.
I am willing to work in a fast paced work environment where my designing skills will be helpful in designing efficient piping structures for the oil and gas industries. I am familiar with the ASME/API codes and standards of designing and can make efficient use of available resources. Can work with software like SP3D, PDS, Microstation & Smart sketch and develop 3D and 2D designs with perfection.
To know more about my qualifications and experience as a piping designer you can review my resume attached with this mail. Hope you will value my credentials and arrange a meeting to discuss about the position personally.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Yours sincerely,
Surendra Singh
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Market Watch
Headline crude prices for the week beginning 18 March 2019 – Brent: US$67/b; WTI: US$58/b
Headlines of the week
Midstream & Downstream
Natural Gas/LNG
Risk and reward – improving recovery rates versus exploration
A giant oil supply gap looms. If, as we expect, oil demand peaks at 110 million b/d in 2036, the inexorable decline of fields in production or under development today creates a yawning gap of 50 million b/d by the end of that decade.
How to fill it? It's the preoccupation of the E&P sector. Harry Paton, Senior Analyst, Global Oil Supply, identifies the contribution from each of the traditional four sources.
1. Reserve growth
An additional 12 million b/d, or 24%, will come from fields already in production or under development. These additional reserves are typically the lowest risk and among the lowest cost, readily tied-in to export infrastructure already in place. Around 90% of these future volumes break even below US$60 per barrel.
2. pre-drill tight oil inventory and conventional pre-FID projects
They will bring another 12 million b/d to the party. That's up on last year by 1.5 million b/d, reflecting the industry's success in beefing up the hopper. Nearly all the increase is from the Permian Basin. Tight oil plays in North America now account for over two-thirds of the pre-FID cost curve, though extraction costs increase over time. Conventional oil plays are a smaller part of the pre-FID wedge at 4 million b/d. Brazil deep water is amongst the lowest cost resource anywhere, with breakevens eclipsing the best tight oil plays. Certain mature areas like the North Sea have succeeded in getting lower down the cost curve although volumes are small. Guyana, an emerging low-cost producer, shows how new conventional basins can change the curve.
3. Contingent resource
These existing discoveries could deliver 11 million b/d, or 22%, of future supply. This cohort forms the next generation of pre-FID developments, but each must overcome challenges to achieve commerciality.
4. Yet-to-find
Last, but not least, yet-to-find. We calculate new discoveries bring in 16 million b/d, the biggest share and almost one-third of future supply. The number is based on empirical analysis of past discovery rates, future assumptions for exploration spend and prospectivity.
Can yet-to-find deliver this much oil at reasonable cost? It looks more realistic today than in the recent past. Liquids reserves discovered that are potentially commercial was around 5 billion barrels in 2017 and again in 2018, close to the late 2030s 'ask'. Moreover, exploration is creating value again, and we have argued consistently that more companies should be doing it.
But at the same time, it's the high-risk option, and usually last in the merit order – exploration is the final top-up to meet demand. There's a danger that new discoveries – higher cost ones at least – are squeezed out if demand's not there or new, lower-cost supplies emerge. Tight oil's rapid growth has disrupted the commercialisation of conventional discoveries this decade and is re-shaping future resource capture strategies.
To sustain portfolios, many companies have shifted away from exclusively relying on exploration to emphasising lower risk opportunities. These mostly revolve around commercialising existing reserves on the books, whether improving recovery rates from fields currently in production (reserves growth) or undeveloped discoveries (contingent resource).
Emerging technology may pose a greater threat to exploration in the future. Evolving technology has always played a central role in boosting expected reserves from known fields. What's different in 2019 is that the industry is on the cusp of what might be a technological revolution. Advanced seismic imaging, data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, the cloud and supercomputing will shine a light into sub-surface's dark corners.
Combining these and other new applications to enhance recovery beyond tried-and-tested means could unlock more reserves from existing discoveries – and more quickly than we assume. Equinor is now aspiring to 60% from its operated fields in Norway. Volume-wise, most upside may be in the giant, older, onshore accumulations with low recovery factors (think ExxonMobil and Chevron's latest Permian upgrades). In contrast, 21st century deepwater projects tend to start with high recovery factors.
If global recovery rates could be increased by a percentage or two from the average of around 30%, reserves growth might contribute another 5 to 6 million b/d in the 2030s. It's just a scenario, and perhaps makes sweeping assumptions. But it's one that should keep conventional explorers disciplined and focused only on the best new prospects.
Global oil supply through 2040
Things just keep getting more dire for Venezuela's PDVSA – once a crown jewel among state energy firms, and now buried under debt and a government in crisis. With new American sanctions weighing down on its operations, PDVSA is buckling. For now, with the support of Russia, China and India, Venezuelan crude keeps flowing. But a ghost from the past has now come back to haunt it.
In 2007, Venezuela embarked on a resource nationalisation programme under then-President Hugo Chavez. It was the largest example of an oil nationalisation drive since Iraq in 1972 or when the government of Saudi Arabia bought out its American partners in ARAMCO back in 1980. The edict then was to have all foreign firms restructure their holdings in Venezuela to favour PDVSA with a majority. Total, Chevron, Statoil (now Equinor) and BP agreed; ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips refused. Compensation was paid to ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, which was considered paltry. So the two American firms took PDVSA to international arbitration, seeking what they considered 'just value' for their erstwhile assets. In 2012, ExxonMobil was awarded some US$260 million in two arbitration awards. The dispute with ConocoPhillips took far longer.
In April 2018, the International Chamber of Commerce ruled in favour of ConocoPhillips, granting US$2.1 billion in recovery payments. Hemming and hawing on PDVSA's part forced ConocoPhillips' hand, and it began to seize control of terminals and cargo ships in the Caribbean operated by PDVSA or its American subsidiary Citgo. A tense standoff – where PDVSA's carriers were ordered to return to national waters immediately – was resolved when PDVSA reached a payment agreement in August. As part of the deal, ConocoPhillips agreed to suspend any future disputes over the matter with PDVSA.
The key word being 'future'. ConocoPhillips has an existing contractual arbitration – also at the ICC – relating to the separate Corocoro project. That decision is also expected to go towards the American firm. But more troubling is that a third dispute has just been settled by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes tribunal in favour of ConocoPhillips. This action was brought against the government of Venezuela for initiating the nationalisation process, and the 'unlawful expropriation' would require a US$8.7 billion payment. Though the action was brought against the government, its coffers are almost entirely stocked by sales of PDVSA crude, essentially placing further burden on an already beleaguered company. A similar action brought about by ExxonMobil resulted in a US$1.4 billion payout; however, that was overturned at the World Bank in 2017.
But it might not end there. The danger (at least on PDVSA's part) is that these decisions will open up floodgates for any creditors seeking damages against Venezuela. And there are quite a few, including several smaller oil firms and players such as gold miner Crystallex, who is owed US$1.2 billion after the gold industry was nationalised in 2011. If the situation snowballs, there is a very tempting target for creditors to seize – Citgo, PDVSA's crown jewel that operates downstream in the USA, which remains profitable. And that would be an even bigger disaster for PDVSA, even by current standards.
Infographic: Venezuela oil nationalisation dispute timeline


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Halak set to return as Blues host Kingsby Davis Harper
KINGS (3-5-2) at BLUES (6-4-1)
Last 10: St. Louis 5-4-1.
Season series: This is the first of three meetings. The Kings won three of four last season.
Big story: Jaroslav Halak is back. The goalie has been activated after missing three games with a groin strain, and it couldn't have come at a better time for the Blues. St. Louis went 0-2-1 without Halak, conceding 17 goals. Halak's return is bad news for Los Angeles, however, as the Kings' offensive struggles leave them tied for the fewest points (eight) in the Western Conference.
Team scope:
Kings: With their goal-scoring woes so far this season, the Kings were likely hoping Halak would remain sidelined just a little longer. Los Angeles ranks 25th in goals per game (2.10) and is tied for the League-low in goals scored (21). Offensive inefficiencies were apparent in the Kings' last two outings, a 3-0 shutout at the hands of Nashville and a 3-2 nail-biter against Detroit.
Against the Red Wings, the Kings looked better offensively, firing 47 shots on goalie Jimmy Howard, but managing only two goals. The second came from Alec Martinez in the final minute to tie the game at two, but the Red Wings responded with the winner with 4.5 seconds left on the clock.
"That was our best game of the year," Kopitar said. "Playing like that, you're going to win more times than not."
Blues: It's been a rough February for St. Louis. After winning six of their first seven to open the season, the Blues have gone zero-for-February, taking just one point from four games. After three lopsided divisional losses – two to Detroit and one to Nashville – St. Louis welcomed surging Anaheim to the Scottrade Center on Saturday. The Blues trailed after two periods but got goals from T.J. Oshie and Chris Stewart to send the game to overtime tied 5-5. They ultimately fell in the shootout when Anaheim converted four of six chances. Brian Elliott conceded four or more goals for the third straight game.
"A goalie's no different than a defenseman or a forward," Hitchcock said. "Guys come in and out of the lineup based on their performance. You can't stay in the lineup if you don't play well. I don't care who you are. He's got to play better."
Who's hot: Stewart got off to a hot start this season, but faded along with his teammates in February. He raised his game against Anaheim, scoring a goal and two assists as well as converting in the shootout.
Injury report: For Los Angeles, Willie Mitchell is day-to-day with a knee injury and Matt Greene is out indefinitely with a back injury. … Blues forward Jamie Langenbrunner has been playing through hip pain this season and decided over the weekend he would undergo surgery. He is out indefinitely.

subset: commoncrawl


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Lightning Deals Artyukhin to Anaheim
The Tampa Bay Lightning have dealt long-time project forward Evgeny Artyukhin to the Anaheim Ducks in exchange for prospect forward Drew Miller and a 2010 3rd round pick.
"In acquiring Drew Miller today, we were able to add a character individual, a versatile player with good size and the ability to kill penalties," said Lawton upon making the announcement. "Drew finished the season nicely in Anaheim a year ago and he has played well for the Ducks in the postseason over his career. We'd like to thank Evgeny for his hard work in Tampa Bay and his diligence to improve as a player. We wish him all the best moving forward."
Miller, 6-foot-2, 185 pounds, has played in 53 NHL games in his career, all with the Ducks. He has recorded six goals and 15 points in those games. Miller made his NHL regular season debut on October 6, 2007 and netted his first NHL goal on October 17, 2007. He has played in 16 career Stanley Cup Playoff games with Anaheim, recording two goals and three points. He made his playoff debut in the 2007 NHL Playoffs, including Games 1 and 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals against Ottawa as Anaheim went on to win the Stanley Cup.
A native of Dover, New Jersey, Miller played in 27 games with the Ducks in 2008-09, recording four goals and 10 points. He appeared in a career high 13 playoff games, recording two goals and three points. He also spent 53 games with the Iowa Chops of the American Hockey League, recording 23 goals and 38 points. He was tied for the team lead in goals and was fourth in points.
Miller has played in 163 career AHL games with Iowa and the Portland Pirates, recording 55 goals and 110 points. In 2007-08 he helped Portland to the Eastern Conference Finals by registering a goal and eight points in 16 games. Miller made his professional hockey debut with the Pirates in 2006-07, finishing tied for first on the team in rookie scoring and tied for third in overall scoring.
The 25-year-old played his college hockey at Michigan State University, where he was the 10th member of his family to play for the Spartans, including brother Ryan Miller of the Buffalo Sabres. He amassed 39 goals and 86 points in 125 career games with the Spartans. Miller served as team captain during his junior year while leading the club in scoring with 18 goals and 43 points. He was also named Michigan State's Most Valuable Player and was honored as the CCHA's Best Defensive Forward. He was recognized as the CCHA's 2006 Illitch Humanitarian Award winner and was nominated for the Hockey Humanitarian Award in 2005 and 2006.
Artyukhin, scheduled to make $1M this season, has had a long and rocky history with the Lightning. First drafted by Rick Dudley at the insistence of then AGM Jay Feaster, the 6.05 and 255lb winger is one of the fastest and hardest checking forwards in the league, but has struggled to secure a permanent role with the Lightning. After a few years of bouncing between the minor leagues and Feaster's Lightning roster, Artyukhin returned to Russia for a couple of seasons before being coaxed back to Tampa last summer by new Lightning owners Oren Koules and Len Barrie.
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Unit 1: Matter and the Rise of Atomic Theory—The Art of the Meticulous
- Calcination
- The process of heating an ore in the presence of air to decompose it.
- Compound
- A substance composed of two or more elements that are chemically combined in definite proportions. A compound's makeup never changes: For example, a molecule of carbon dioxide always contains one atom of carbon and two atoms of oxygen.
- Crystallization
- The process in which a material forms a solid whose atoms, molecules, or ions form a regularly repeating pattern.
- Distillation
- The process of purifying a liquid by evaporating it, then collecting and condensing the vapors.
- Element
- A substance that cannot be broken down into simpler substances through chemical processes.
- Mixture
- A combination of two or more substances in which each ingredient retains its own chemical identity. Unlike chemical compounds, the makeup of mixtures can vary: For example, air samples from a polluted city and a forest will have different compositions.
- Sublimation
- A process in which a substance changes directly from a solid phase to a gas phase without first becoming a liquid.
- Transmutation
- The conversion of an element into another element. Atoms of one element can be changed into atoms of another element. When the number of protons in an atom is changed, the atom is transmuted into an atom of another element.


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I was a good student growing up. I always got good grades so it was never really an issue. Same with my wife. And now (we're hoping), it's the same with our kids. At least so far.
My wife and I try to instill the importance of education in our kids. We try to show them that they need to go to school and learn as much as they can. How else are they ever going to become Video Game Makers when they're older?
We certainly encourage our kids to do well in school and praise them for working hard. But we've never rewarded them for a specific grade on their report card. I find it sad, actually, that some parents will pay their kids for every single A that they get on their report card. This is just all kinds of ridiculous to me.
I pay enough school taxes as it is already. I'm paying the teachers' salaries, but now I gotta pay the students to learn too? That just seems idiotic to me and a complete betrayal of the entire education system.
I'm all for encouragement and positive reinforcement. Your kid gets an A, that's fantastic. Let them know how proud you are. Heck, even if your kid gets a C, if they normally get Ds and worked their butt off to get a C, they deserve some praise. It's all about putting in the effort and doing your best. In the end, that's the ultimate take away from school.
You're also setting a horrific example by paying kids per letter grade. So what if they don't really care about the money at the moment? Maybe they just had a birthday and got a ton of dough. So now they don't bother putting in any effort and they get Ds. Oh, well. Too bad. Kids have a horrible sense of money to begin with, so you're not really helping at all.
The knowledge kids get and the self-confidence they nurture is the true reward of going to school. Yes you can do something nice or fun for your kids if they do something extremely well. Go out to dinner. See a movie. But don't make it a habit that's predicated on the exact letter grade he or she gets on a report card.
As for grading the parents, well if they're paying their kids to learn, I'd have to give them a big fat F!
Do you pay your kids for good grades?
Photo via Philip Taylor/Flickr


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Impostor Syndrome: Part 1 of 4Dec. 29th, 2012 06:10 pm
"Compare the best of their days
With the worst of your days
You won't win..." -- Morrissey
I can't remember exactly when I first encountered the term "impostor syndrome", but I know I was less than ten years old at the time, and I know where I read about it: a book called The Gifted Kid's Survival Guide. I don't think it made much of a mark on me. And knowing what it was early on didn't stop me from developing it later.
This essay is about my experiences with impostor syndrome. One of the reasons why I want to talk about these experiences is that I had them while most people in the world were seeing me as female, though I'm not female. Sometimes people tell me that my experiences are un-representative (of, I guess, anyone except me), but I think they're wrong. My experiences represent those of one person who spent 26 years moving through the world while generally being perceived to be female, albeit (often) gender-non-conforming. I say this not to lay claim to any sort of female socialization, which I didn't have; or to deny that I have male privilege (and probably had some even before I knew I was male); but because if I can say something that helps people understand what cis and trans women, as well as many trans men and genderqueer people, face in trying to find a place for themselves in male-dominated spaces (which is to say, in the world), I want that message to be understood. At the same time, I'm speaking from my position as a white trans man who doesn't have visible disabilities, was raised lower-class, and has a graduate degree and works as a software engineer. I've had it harder than some people and easier than many others, if it even makes sense to compare.
Ideally, I would like to change how historically male-dominated institutions -- specifically in this essay, computer science graduate programs -- try to integrate and welcome women as full participants. While one little blog post can't change the world, it might show a few people that the situation isn't as simple as it may look, and that has ripple effects. So I'm simply going to recount my personal history as a non-traditional learner, then undergraduate, then graduate student at Berkeley, and wherever possible try to draw connections between my experiences and larger social structures. If you remember nothing else from this essay, I hope you remember that when grad programs admit more women as students, it's not enough: to do so without extra attention to structural inequalities sets these students up for failure and actually reinforces sexism. I'll elaborate on that point in the rest of this essay.
I didn't go to elementary school, middle school, or high school. That's the best way I can think of to say it; saying I was homeschooled would imply too much organization, saying I was unschooled would imply too much freedom. I got really interested in animal rights when I was ten and that started a period of a couple years where I didn't do much except read about animal rights, environmentalist, and more generally, radical and progressive politics. A little bit later than that, I got interested in doing editorial cartoons. I had some good ideas, but I couldn't really draw. In retrospect, it's surprising to me that I had no doubt that I could become a cartoonist anyway. I guess I just assumed my drawing would catch up with my writing, and I would draw pictures that would unseat a government. 14-year-old me was pretty sure that was how it was going to go. Back then, I think I was pretty confident in who I was and what I could do. If anything, too confident, but that's what teenagers are supposed to be, right?
That same year -- 1995 -- I started taking classes at U/Mass Boston, and I got access to the Internet. This meant going to a terminal room in the basement of a library to use VT-220 terminals to connect to a VAX/VMS system and use gopher, lynx, and Usenet newsreaders to read stuff online. After reading artifacts like the Nerdity Test, the archives of the Internet Oracle, and the Jargon File, I decided geeks and hackers were probably my people, but I knew that to understand what they were talking about, I would have to learn to program.
This was, by the way, not that long after I had decided that math and science were tools of the Man and definitely not me. My conclusion from the reading I'd done about radical environmentalism, as well as about opposition to experimentation on animals, had led me to decide that you could be a scientist, or you could want to save animals and the environment, but not both. So I concluded that I had no use for math or science. Like lots of kids, I didn't understand that math wasn't just about rote calculations. It didn't make much difference that I wasn't in school -- I didn't have the benefit of parents who were particularly well-versed in math. Even though as a younger kid, I'd enjoyed combinatorics and logic in the form of books like The I Hate Mathematics! Book and Math for Smarty Pants, I saw "school math" as something totally different (and not fun).
All was not lost, of course, since at the time, I didn't think of computer science as being too intertwined with math or science. Sure, it had "science" in the name, but so did political science (which was, coincidentally, what I had been planning to major in). That fall, I started taking classes at Wellesley College -- from which I would later graduate, but at that point, I was still a "high school student" (who never set foot in a high school except to register to take college classes), taking an unreliable shuttle from nearby the mixed-income building where I lived with my mom to get to the College, all the way across town. The second day of CS 111 at Wellesley, I walked in, saw the source code for a program for the first time, and never looked back. Immediately, I felt that I had found my "calling", as I would have put it when I was 14 (and, to be honest, 21). By the time the semester was over, I knew I was going to major in computer science, and I was pretty sure I was going to go to grad school too, since I wanted to know as much about it as I possibly could. It might have occurred to me at some point that since what I liked was programming, maybe I would rather become a programmer. But by the time I was in college, I'd cast off my earlier belief in unschooling and independent learning, and picked up a bit of a credentialist mentality. It's not as if I came up with the desire to accumulate credentials for their own sake, of course -- there is plenty of cultural pressure to do that. Maybe it was that school had structure, which I thought I understood; I didn't know the rules of the game for employment, and suspected it would involve talking to people in a non-scripted way. Nobody had taught me the rules; I didn't grow up with an employed parent or parents, so I didn't spend my childhood hearing people talking about their jobs like work was just a normal thing. The long and the short of it was that I had fewer options than a lot of my peers did.
In retrospect, I was right about geeks and hackers being my people. Well, sort of right. Deciding to learn how to program was the biggest step I've ever taken, as someone who was born a misfit, towards finding community. Not just community, but a steady livelihood in a world where many of my friends (with or without formal education) can't find meaningful employment. But in exchange for that sense of community, I gave up some of the political passion that I felt as a teenager. Being financially comfortable, and being constantly around people who are mostly even more financially comfortable than I am, is hard to reconcile with being aware of, much less doing something about, the many injustices that keep the few of us comfortable at the expense of many who don't have enough. On an even more basic level, working 8 hours a day plus whenever I think about it in the shower at an intellectually demanding job doesn't leave a lot of time left for public involvement. If I hadn't discovered I loved to program, I might have become a full-time activist, or run for office, or even made those world-changing cartoons I wanted to make. But it seems like I would have had to do those things with less help and support than I got because I was doing computer science.
Of course, how supportive that community has been of me has varied wildly over time, and the roughest times have been times when people thought I was a woman.
At least for a while, I didn't have impostor syndrome when it came to computer science. I liked programming, and it was something I felt I could do. At least for the first few years, it didn't occur to me often, if ever, that it was possible for me to be bad at it. I did well in most of my undergrad classes, and the computer science department at Wellesley was small and friendly. Wellesley, being a historically women's college, wasn't full of CS majors who had been programming since they were in utero. I knew exactly one person who sort of fit that description; most of the other CS majors had come to it in college or just before, like I did. I had a few rough patches: algorithms class, for example, which was the first time I encountered the intersection of formal reasoning and computer science (something I've had a stormy relationship with since then) -- and the Computation Structures class I took at MIT, which had its moments where I wondered whether I'd made a mistake by not taking two years of physics first. But for the most part, computer science classes were where I went to rebuild my confidence. And they were super fun. When I think about the best times I've ever had writing code, I think about working on an extra-credit assignment to write an Eliza bot in Pascal, on my Performa 636 in 1996, while listening to Melissa Etheridge's album "Never Enough".
But I got a shadow of what was to come when I went to Berkeley in the summer before my junior year, to participate in the SUPERB REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates). SUPERB was specifically aimed at underrepresented minorities -- my "in" was that I went to an undergrad-only institution and at the time, people (including me) thought I was female -- so there were some workshops and events meant to encourage us to go to grad school, and so on. I don't remember much about those, the explicit curriculum. The hidden curriculum had more of an effect on me. I was assigned a faculty member, who I saw about twice during the summer, and a grad student mentor. At the time, I was petrified of asking for help and, for the most part, interacting with people (with the exception of a trusted few). I rarely sought out help from the grad student; while he was perfectly friendly and helpful when I did ask him questions, for the most part, I found it more comfortable to sit in my office and fumble around trying to figure out how to program in C (a language I'd never used before, since it wasn't taught at my school) and, of course, mess around on the Internet. Most of the other students in the REU were in areas of engineering other than computer science, so it wasn't like I had other undergrads to talk to (and I would have been too shy to approach them anyway). Moreover, I never felt like I really understood the content of the project I worked on. I hadn't gotten particularly interested in programming languages at this point; while I hadn't taken a class in it, I thought I really wanted to study AI. So that's what kind of project I said I wanted to work on. That summer, I learned that AI was no longer about trying to simulate cognition, and was about statistics. I hated statistics. (Still do.) At this time in my life, I'd been through a disastrous year and a half of calculus classes and I had some serious math anxiety going on. I was also minoring in math -- go figure. Anyway, for lots of that summer I felt like I was missing something really important, like I was manipulating symbols with no real understanding. This probably wasn't so. It would have helped me to see the quote that gets attributed to John von Neumann about how you never understand things in mathematics, you just get used to them. But in any case, neither of my mentors sought me out that summer to see how I was doing, at least not very often; I suppose they probably assumed that if I needed help, I would come to them, and they didn't want to be annoying. So here's the hidden curriculum: I learned that doing research was about fumbling cluelessly alone for extended periods of time, and not talking to other people about it. This is sort of true, but I don't think it has to involve as much isolation as it actually did for me.
I don't mean to question the good intentions of the university staff members who run programs like SUPERB, often for little reward, given how devalued undergraduates at research universities like Berkeley are. But structurally, what purpose do these programs for disadvantaged undergrads serve? Is it to get a few tokens into the system so that someone can say to their boss "look, we're doing okay, we got four students of color interested in research this year" (or whatever) and everyone will be happy? Or are they meant to bring about deep, structural change? I don't know the answer. I just know that I learned more from the hidden curriculum than the explicit one.
Despite that experience, I decided at some point during my junior year that I was going to apply to grad school. I think I was hoping that grad school would be less like my experience so far with research -- that is, sitting alone in a room not knowing how to do anything (and having to understand math that felt impossible to understand) and not being able to ask for help -- and more like my experience with programming for its own sake. I know, that wasn't a particularly realistic expectation, but I had to decide between grad school and working when I'd never experienced either -- do you blame me?. I applied to 20 schools, and to my surprise, was accepted to 18 of them. (This probably would have been 19 if one school hadn't messed up my fee waiver request. I wasn't particularly inclined to go to a school that (apparently) wouldn't have me because I didn't have $1000 for all those application fees, anyway. In case you're wondering, the only one that rejected me was Stanford.) I decided to go to Berkeley because my summer there had convinced me to want to live there, that life would be amazing if I got to walk past the tie-dyed T-shirt and bumper sticker vendors on Telegraph every day and drink boba tea while riding my bike. Also, because I visited Berkeley and Cornell in the same two-week period, during which it was snowing in Ithaca and about 70 degrees in Berkeley.
It's hard for me to remember exactly why I thought I had to go to grad school. Maybe it was because my partner (I got married immediately after graduating from undergrad) was going to grad school, and I didn't want to be the only one without a graduate degree in the relationship. Maybe I thought academia would be less sexist than industry, though I soon learned that it wasn't. Maybe it was that I grew up isolated and professors were some of the only models that I had for what I could be when I grew up -- I admired some of my professors in college a lot, and wanted to be like them. And I hadn't known enough other adults with jobs to be able to envision other possibilities for me. In particular, I didn't have role models who were programmers who worked outside of academia -- and any role models I would have found at the time probably wouldn't have looked much like me.
So despite the line from "The Simpsons" about how grad students aren't bad people, they just made terrible life decisions, personally I don't feel like I had much of a choice. If I'd grown up an upper-middle-class cis boy with a big family and lots of peers who I met through school and activities, I'd have lots of people I could model myself on in deciding what to do. But having grown up isolated, the only source of inspiration for me was school, and because college had been a way better place than anywhere I'd been in childhood, it made sense that I would want to stay in school forever.
And again, if my story had been exactly the same except for me being a cis boy -- or even me being a hetero cis girl, or my brain working in ways that were more typical, or me not being an abuse survivor -- the whole thing might have worked out for me without a hitch, assuming a sizable dose of luck. Maybe I'd be a tenure-track professor by now. But everything intersected to set me up for feeling the only place I'd be welcome was actually a place where I wouldn't be welcome at all.
To be continued!