Musings on adult education

I graduated from the University of Calgary with a B.Sc. a long time ago. I swotted for years and even went through their internship program. I can remember my thoughts after I finished my last exam there in the Gold Gym of the then-Phys. Ed. building: I'm done, I'll never have to write another bleeping exam again!

That, of course, was wishful thinking.

Over the intervening years, I've gone back to school and did graduate courses, wrote more exams, researched more papers and learnt more about astrophysics than I expected. It was rewarding, even though I've suspended my M.Sc. due to financial considerations. Astrophysics wasn't something I expected to fall in love with but there you go. Of course, this was a distance learning online program, albeit from a reputable university - no one was more surprised than I was to find out that that particular university ranked in the top 10 centers for computational astrophysics (simulations, etc). It seriously reset my views and expectations of what distance learning could offer. Mind you, I'm being careful here - I said distance learning, not "online university". There's quite a few online universities out there. They're not brick-and-mortar institutions but exists purely as a virtual learning center. I'm sure there are quite a few online universities that are genuinely good. Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to determine how good they are when the instructors' credentials can't be verified. Likewise, I'd be concerned about accreditation concerns if that virtual institution that the degree came out of suddenly disappeared - websites disappear all the time, e-mail accounts can be closed out at a click of a button. Without someone or something to attest to the authenticity of an accreditation, it's no longer an accreditation but merely an unsupported assertion. Not the best thing to take to a job interview. Likewise, if a virtual university disappeared, anyone can claim that they've graduated from there. If they're good, experienced people, great. Otherwise, you'll find that degree's value depreciated by charlatans who don't have the training to do what they claim to be able to do.

Of the three post-secondary institutions I've learnt from, all of them are brick-and-mortar institutions officially recognized by its provincial education ministry as having the right to issue degrees and other accreditations. Over the years, I've also had to take courses paid for by my employers and given by learning institutions that are really companies whose goal is to promote one methodology or another. I'm not sure what the experience is for the online-only universities though. I do shake my head when they offer "Learn how to get in just !!!" programs. I'm very skeptical about both the methods and the results of trying to pack a full 4-year degree into just 6 months. I've seen advertisements that claim they can pack a full degree in just 3 months. I can believe them if they offer certificates instead of a degree though, as the requirements and burden of knowledge is much lower in those cases. Still, it makes one wonder.

I'm going for my PMP accreditation next year, which was why I was away this past week. It's a graduate certificate program in project management geared towards people who want to get their PMP certification. I could take the exam on my own without going through this program but now that I'm in it, I'm very glad I enrolled as there's a lot more to it than I expected. Yes, I probably could have passed the exam on my own but I wouldn't actually have learnt much from that. Here, in this program, I'm learning project management done right, sometimes in excruciating detail. The PMP exam only focuses on the methodology; it tests people on whether they know the processes and the steps, documents and end results of all those processes as per their specifications. There's nothing wrong with the processes as they were originally designed by people who knew what they were doing. Unfortunately, what the PMI can't test for is whether people know why those processes are needed and why they're done that specific way. To use a cooking analogy, it's the difference between adding salt to a dish because a book told you so vs. knowing what the dish is supposed to taste like and adding salt if and only if it's needed. Project management gets a bad rap because people learn it from a book, usually minus the context and reasoning behind those processes.

This past week was a full immersion experience - classes began early in the morning and ran through the entire day, after which we went back to our dorm and studied some more either quietly in our rooms or as a group in the kitchen/lounge. We were taught the material that is needed for the PMP exam but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that their focus was on interpersonal skills and people management. As what the instructor said, project managers don't really manage projects, they manage the people who will make the project either a success or a failure. In short, this past week was a crash course on leadership and people management. Now that were in the distance learning component of the program, we're expected to take what we've learnt and apply it to managing the teams that we were assigned to. If we hadn't had that face-to-face time and the leadership training, I can see teams coming apart easily during the online component. Indeed, even with that face time some teams are already coming apart. I don't envy the instructors, who have to ensure that these teams stay on track over the next half year.

Now that I've had some time to decompress after that full immersion experience, I'm realizing that there are many areas at work that I could do a lot better in so I'm kind of looking forward to Monday as well. To reuse my analogy, it's a little humbling when you have an Aha! moment that you've been robotically salting a dish for years that didn't need salt because you never understood what the dish was supposed to taste like. Of course, I have to deal with some cultural issues at work, where project management isn't very well regarded even though it's desperately needed.

Skool Daze (days 4 & 5)

I'm home. It's been one long, exhausting week of project management studies where it became very evident to me that while I did some things right, there were a lot more others that I either wasn't aware needed to be done or I had done them incorrectly. It's been a very humbling experience...but I've learnt a lot.

We're grouped into teams of 5-6 students each and it's these other folks that I'll be spending the next 6 months working together on team assignments. I'm fortunate as I have a pretty good team of driven people but who also get along with one another. Some of the other teams weren't so fortunate.

The amount of homework will be crippling. I'm scheduled to read three major chapters of one of my textbooks plus a thick stack of articles in the next two weeks and the workload increases from there. Funny thing is, I'm really excited about it as opposed to dreading it. I think this is because this past week has been such an eyeopener that I'm looking forward to learning more.

Skool Daze (days 2 and 3)

Yesterday was a jam-packed day that we spent learning about stakeholder management. I've been working on projects for decades now and I never realized just how much there was to this topic alone. We went deep and I was quite glad for it. At the end, I was so exhausted that I pretty much collapsed into bed and didn't have the energy to even get up, so no posting yesterday.

Today was spent on brain theory and communications models. This isn't a part of PMI's curriculum, or at least it isn't to the best of my knowledge. It was quite interesting and although I don't buy all of it, there's certainly quite a few points worth looking at. What I wasn't expecting and realized with a start halfway through today is that we're being taught not just the PMP curriculum but also how to lead. Not just lead a homogeneous group of people but how to motivate and lead a diverse group of people, which is what we'd find in our workplace anyway.

I grew up in a very traditional lead-from-the-front paradigm and have been doing that for most of my life. Today, I'm starting to learn how to lead my team effectively from any configuration. It'll take some getting used to as there's a lot of variance but I think I'm starting to understand the difference between an ineffective leader vs an effective one. It's...a little mindbending to say the least. We're also starting to get into leadership ethics, which I think should be taught in all management classes.

All in all, I'm really glad I took this route instead of learning on my own off a book or via one of those cram-everything-in-a-week courses. The university's heritage of having being a naval academy is coming through really clearly and it's resonating strongly with me. I wrote in my personal statement that the university required for admission into any of their postgraduate programs that I didn't just want an accreditation, I wanted to learn how to lead and manage project teams well. Looks like I chose wisely.

Skool Daze (day 1)

Hectic day. Lots of info crammed into a very very VERY full day. I got my student ID today, gods do I look old.

Also got sorted into our houses teams today: 4 women + 2 men, all from very diverse backgrounds.

More later, have to cram for finals at the end of this week.

Skool Daze (day 0)

After a night of frantic packing, I finally arrived at my dormitories this morning after a short flight and a green taxi driver who got lost. The room is pretty large with many windows; one whole wall is pretty much glass paneled windows. It's nice. :)

It's been a pretty long day. I hiked (slowly) to the local grocery store which is quite a bit away and bought some groceries to help with the food costs. Got my reading list and also a nifty vest as it's surprisingly cold here.

I had pipers and drummers march under my dorm window this afternoon - that was nifty. Oh, and peacocks sound like Jurassic Park velociraptors when they're calling. That was...unnerving.

I'm tired and looking forward to tomorrow.

World deformation activities

As children, we rarely planned our days. Most of the time, our days were planned by our caretakers, be they our parents or teachers. During the moments when we had free time, we filled it with play, laughter and joy most of the time. As we get older and begin to be loaded down by responsibilities and duties, our free time starts shrinking to the point where if we had any free time, it'd be spent doing something "useful". Oh, I'm not saying that us grown-ups don't have any fun but that fun takes a secondary or even tertiary prioritization to the Things We Have To Do Or Civilization Crumbles (tm).

I spend a lot of my time surfing. Sometimes, it's purpose-driven (read: not an utter waste of time) but oftentimes it's random surfing. A thought occurred to me this morning: if there were no Internet, what would I be doing? Simple, I thought - I'd be reading a book. However, I know that there are times when I don't want to be reading so what would I be doing then? Probably something else, something tangible that will have some impression on the real world that shows that I've Been There and Done That.

Instead, I spend my time shuffling electrons from one place to another.

Don't get me wrong, I do believe that surfing (a.k.a. self-directed impulse-based educational activity) has some value. However, for a knowledge worker like myself, I'm not really leaving much of an impact on this world we live in. If I shuffled off the mortal coil right now, what will I really be leaving behind? Not a lot, I can tell you that.

So, I resolve to do more things in this real, tangible world of ours. Exactly what, I'm not sure quite yet but I think I'll pollute brighten my family's day with some bleating music from my chanter.

Typos

If you're finding any typos in my recent entries, it's because I'm using MacSpeech Dictate to write my blog entries now and it's still not properly trained yet. Apologies.

The politics of clothing

Two posts in one day - wow, I must be really bored today! :)

Before I started going to school, I used to pay a lot of attention to clothes. But then again, I was also a very bored child as I had no siblings close to my age to play with. So I played dress up a lot, looting the laundry basket and the wardrobes for material. I remember dressing up in the most outlandish outfits, often eliciting an amused chuckle from my mother. I loved hats; I still do, as matter of fact. Then I started attending school, where I had to wear uniforms. As my mother was overprotective and never let me leave the house to play with the neighbourhood children, coupled with a very heavy load of homework, opportunities to explore fashion ended rather abruptly.

By the time I arrived in Canada, my sense of fashion (such that it is) had been so deeply suppressed that I dressed most frugally. Looking back, I think that I had a very hard time adjusting to my high school experiences in Canada as I started dressing subconsciously to avoid attention. In retrospect, I suppose I could have made dressing well a priority of some kind back then. However, dire admonitions from my father to watch my dwindling funds made me extremely paranoid so I bought the cheapest clothes I could find. After I graduated, I did dress better but it still wasn't a priority. Of course, I was a different person back then. It wasn't until I had a life-changing experience a few years back that I started paying attention to how I looked again.

I shifted from being just a software developer to a lead and then on to a manager in just the last few years. It's fine to dress casually if you just deal with developers and managers everyday. I started having to deal with senior executives, board members and customers directly, which meant that I had to dress more appropriately. It's easier for guys - you can just wear polo shirts, dress slacks and dress shoes to work everyday and no one would think it odd. I could wear the same thing to work everyday… actually, no I can't. How I dress has a direct impact on how people respond to me. It's not a decisive factor by any means but it is a factor nonetheless, as any woman in the IT business will tell you.

So why am I blogging about something as mundane as this? Well, I went from manager to senior architect in my current position because I saw most of my friends who were in junior to middle management lose their jobs left, right and centre in the current economy. I'd rather go back to working in the trenches as a developer than get shot as a manager.

I hated it. Simply coding to someone else's tune just wasn't interesting enough any longer. Don't get me wrong, a great developer is part artist, part scientist. There is beauty and elegance in good code. Unfortunately, after doing it for so long, I was thoroughly sick of it. Nowadays, I love working with people, nurturing a product from inception to delivery, watching it grow from the seed of an idea into something that brought in seven or eight figures to the company's bottom line.

What has all this got to do with clothing? Simple: I now dressed like a manager and that made me stick out like a sore thumb among the other developers. Yes, I could go back to dressing casually but… I don't want to. Here's the funny thing: people started treating me like a manager because I dressed like one. I was worried about resentment from the managers but to my surprise, they welcomed me as one of their own probably because they desperately needed my help in managing things. So, I evolved my role into one with managerial responsibilities partly due to how I dressed. Of course, that wasn't all of it but again, it was a factor.

This is interesting to me from an anthropological perspective. It brings to mind the protective camouflage of moths or the brilliant plumage of peacocks. Yes, these are things that nature has bestowed upon the males of those species for the purposes of attraction and intimidation; remember that the IT industry is still very much a male-dominated sector and being excessively feminine gets me into trouble faster than you can stick a “Kick Me” sign on my back. We often hear the saying, “dress for success” but that's usually in the context of dressing snappier to give a good first impression. This wasn't just a first impression in my case; this was a sustained campaign on my part, albeit an unplanned one.

What does all this mean? Well, nothing really. I'm not really going to change anything in my work life as I don't need to. Mind you, doesn't the first time this has happened either - I'm blogging this because that's what I wanted to talk about right now, nothing more. I am, however, going to tweak my non-work wardrobe somewhat in the next few months as I have a corollary to test out. Should be interesting, I think - assuming I don't get shot or worse, that is. :)

Smells of a distant past

Every now and then, I get some very vivid dreams about growing up in my birth country (not Canada). A little over a decade ago, I went back to that country but this time as an adult. It's interesting what you observe as a grown-up that you miss being immersed in that culture as a child. One of my personal favourites is when we went out grocery shopping. As mundane as that chore may be, I've always loved it even when I was a wee child.

You see, the grocers in their country aren't the tidy little supermarkets that we find in North America. No, these are mom and pop shops scattered all over the neighbourhoods. As you entered the store, you will find yourself confronted by a bewildering montage of ordinary household items, stacked away in ordered chaos into every nook and cranny that merchandise can be crammed into. About the only way you can ever find anything in this glorious mess is to either know where it is because you've found it once before to ask the proprietor (or more commonly, his wife) where things are. Going to the grocers has a full spectrum experience where your senses are bombarded not just by clashing colours but by remarkable scents. Even now when I close my eyes, I can smell the very odd mixture of spices and detergent, of dried fish and deodorant, smells that float above the background smell of years of mixed storage.

When I do groceries here, it's often an in and out affair. We don't really chat with anyone any more, we just go in and get our things then head out as quickly as we can because that's our culture nowadays. We just don't take time to chat with the proprietor any more, to catch up on the goings-on in our neighbourhood. For most supermarkets, there's simply no such person as a proprietor any more as they are all chainstores with managers and employees instead of an owner, his wife and children. I don't know about you but I think that's a little sad. Oh, don't get me wrong-I'm fully cognisant of the economic realities these days that brought about such changes. As a working parent I'm subject to the same monetary pressures as everyone else. But still, I think that we as a culture have died a little when we lost these mom and pop shops. You see, what we call customer service these days was simply good manners and sociability back then. These days, we have to teach people how to be polite and nice to customers.

Yes, I think that we have truly lost a part of our souls when we stopped being nice to each other because we should instead of being told to do so.

Stellar cartography

We've all seen or read science fiction tales of ships "warping" through space, of being instantaneously transported to somewhere very far away through some kind of wormhole or tunnel in space. It's pretty far-fetched and unless if someone can definitively find such a method of traversing vast distances in a blink of an eye, I'll put my money on good old-fashioned sublight travel.

But what if there were traversable wormholes? Hypothetically, if you were in a sublight ship that somehow entered one end of the wormhole at just the right vector and managed to survive the stresses of passing through that bridge, how would you know where you were? Science fiction writers typically get around that prickly problem by sidestepping it with powerful computers that could calculate position based on the stars.

You know what? That's not that easy. You see, in order to triangulate positioning using the stars, we'd need to know several things:

1. How far the star is from Earth (or some other known reference point)
2. How to identify the star from all the other stars out there

We have an idea of how far the stars are from Earth but we don't know for sure, especially for the really distant stars. We can measure distances to the stars using the parallax method for the nearer stars but as things get farther away, our measurements get progressively wobblier in precision. In fact, our distances could be out by as much as several orders of magnitude. So, if we don't know how far things are, we can't really triangulate at all. That, and in order to use the parallax method, that starship will have to take a measurement, travel a great distance, take another measurement and then it can do its calculations. In short, it takes time and even then, there's no guarantee it'll work.

We can identify stars here on Earth primarily by where it is on the celestial sphere. You can't really do that if you're somewhere else, especially if it's somewhere else very far away. But what if we can identify individual stars based not on their positioning as seen on Earth but by some other intrinsic property, perhaps through spectrographic analysis of the known stars? Well, that does have some merit...except for one tiny problem: here on Earth, we don't really see the stars as they are right now. What we are seeing is the light from the stars as they arrive here on Earth, which means that the farther away the star is, the larger the time delay will be. In other words, we're seeing what the star was, not what it currently is and that time delay is directly dependent on how far away the star is, as light travels. That's a bit of a problem because any spectrograph we have of the star will be wrong because as the star ages, its composition changes as it burns through its nuclear fuel. We can extrapolate what its current composition will be...but then we'd need to know how far away it was from Earth. Oops.

It's a bit more complex than that, actually. You see, in theory, wormholes don't just link two points in space - they might link two points in space and time. What that means is that when you pop out the other end of the wormhole, you will not only be somewhere else, you might be somewhen else too. Which tosses yet another wrinkle on the whole "figure out where you are by watching the stars" method.

Don't get me wrong. You can figure out where you are...roughly. Depending on the density of visible stars, you can probably figure out where you are in terms of being above or below the galactic plane. Likewise, you can probably figure out where you are in terms of distance to the galactic center, which is a pretty good reference point. Heck, if you had enough data, you can probably figure out which arm of the galaxy you're in. All of that gives you a decent picture of where you might be. Well, except for one small thing: this all presupposes you pop out in the same galaxy. If you popped out in another galaxy...all bets are off. Oops.

Stellar navigation is tricky because there's so much space (sic) out there. More than that, once you toss in wormholes, you now potentially have all of time to play in too. Which means that if you get lost, you're really lost. Does this mean we can never ever figure out where we are? Yes...and no. Given what we currently have, the short answer is no. What might be our saving grace is if we manage to figure out faster-than-light (FTL) communications, perhaps via communications devices that use quantum entanglement to provide a bearing to a beacon. We need FTL beacons because otherwise, you'd die waiting for the signal to reach you as it may take a very very VERY long time before it gets to you even if the signal travels at the speed of light. The first ship through the wormhole will have a really tough time of it but once you have a series of beacons scattered through space, triangulation becomes easier. Heck, you can even figure out when you are if you know when the beacons came online. Of course, if you jumped to a time before the beacons were deployed...you're still hooped.

Interesting problem. Sometimes, I think that being grounded on Earth due to physical frailty isn't such a bad thing.

Superstition

I don't think any of us have progressed completely beyond our fear of the unknown. In everyone that I have known, there exists some form of superstition that they follow. I think it's part of human nature for us to have rituals, albeit very private ones when we run into things that are beyond our control. I, for example, don't like to talk about jobs have applied for for fear that I might “jinx” it.

I'm a planner by nature so it's rather ironic that when I run into the really big life challenges, I have a great deal of the reluctance to plan for it for fear of, you guessed it-jinxing it.

For most of my life, my environment wasn't something I had much control over, nor was my living conditions. For a while there, I had a pretty decent illusion that I had control. It lasted less than a decade as life took a very strange turn and brought me, eventually, to where I am now.

I like where I am. I like me, which is a big improvement from how I felt before.

Every choice I made had a cost, and one of the costs was to give up a very large chunk of my life. I never thought that that was a fair choice but that was the price society imposed upon me. I can live with that. What is truly unfair is when life throws you a curveball, one that results in nothing but bad choices. My health, for example. Most of my difficulties did not arise from choices I've made but rather things that happened nonconsensually to me. That's the way it is for everyone. Nobody chooses to be sick or to be handicapped.

I never did used to subscribe to the idea that life is suffering. I do now. Most adherants to that view work towards escaping that suffering. Buddhism pushes the concept of “do no harm”. Other religions and beliefs push other concepts ranging from the benign to the downright parasitic. I can't escape that suffering. I don't believe in reincarnation so this life is all I've got and by extension, all the ailments I have things I had to deal with, now, in this life. What I intend to do a slightly different from the norm. If I can alleviate some of my suffering, of course I'd definitely pursue that option. However, what I also intend to do is to bring joy, and love, and laughter, and delight into the lives of those I care about.

I can focus on all the bad things that are happening to me and I'm going to have to because of I don't, they'll never go away. That's not all I'm going to focus on though. I intend to help my kids learn about the world that surrounds us, to discover the amazing beauty in everyday life if only we knew where to look. I intend to support my sister realise her dreams, to surprise her with new positive experiences. I intend to be a sympathetic ear, strong shoulder and an active helper to my friends as best I can. I intend to do what I can to bring the light of knowledge into our schools, to help nurture that ember of curiosity within every child that teachers try so very hard to keep alive.

I'm no saint. I'll probably fail, and fail horribly in most of these things. But I'll try anyway because the alternative is to be all alone in the dark with my pain. If I can transmute their pain into something positive, then perhaps my life, however short in might be, will not have been an utter waste.