Author: e.pressner

For my monologue, I crafted five haikus about Baruch, its neighborhood, and me.

 

I see dogs around

And I say hello to them

As leaves fall to ground.

 

The crisp wind whistles

Flip flop flip flop, go my shoes

Don’t ask about it.

 

Flowers fade in place

Crap all over the sidewalk

And yet – I am home.

 

The birds have gone south

And yet I remain in place.

I ain’t got no wings.

 

Bernard Baruch – bronze

And yet chilling on a bench.

Afterlife? Not too bad.

I’m honestly not sure what to talk about here – so I’ll settle for my favorite part of the semester so far. I’ve got a pretty weird relationship with academics, so I’m as surprised as anyone to find a class that I actually love – Manuel Rodeiro’s Intro to Philosophy. Now, there’s a few factors here – I love theoretical nonsense, and philosophy’s practically nothing but. I hate busywork, and it’s really difficult to assign busywork if you don’t assign homework whatsoever – the only work needed for Philosophy is readings, which are barely work, considering I’m reading something I enjoy. My only complaint is the relative lack of discussion, but I guess it makes sense considering it’s more history-oriented, it’s an intro class, and the curriculum is time-limited enough as is, so with that in mind, I’m not sure I’ve got any complaints with it, actually. Of course, that’s balanced by the amount I could whine about the other classes, but I don’t think this is quite the time or place. Over all, the purpose of the class is just a historical overview of the more prominent/influential Western philosophers, segmented into bits by topic – we started out with metaphysics and ontology for the first half, and now we’re on to political philosophy. I was a bit more fond of the first half, so far, but we’re not quite done yet, so I suppose that could change. Still, though, in large part what I like about it is the professor’s lecture style – he doesn’t speak just to hear his own voice, and he’s good at explaining the stuff he’s teaching. Sounds like a bit of a low bar, I know, but it’s apparently very hard to meet, in my experience. Anyway, enough implicit ragging on my profs – I’m really happy with the class, like I said, and though I don’t think it’ll push me into a philosophy concentration, it’s really helpful to have a class like it to temper the flaws of my others.

So – career. I’ve got no clue what I want to do yet – or, more accurately, too many contradicting clues – so I’m gonna talk about something I’ve already done. Around the start of this year – I think that’s when it was, at least – I spent a few days in what was probably my most interesting job. I was a hand for the lighting crew on an exhibition held at Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey, which is, as the name might suggest, a sculpture park. It started as an atelier founded by Seward Johnson (of the Johnson and Johnson Johnsons, which is where most of the money came from), and the exhibition I worked on was about his history and, by extension, that of the space. It was the first serious lighting gig I’d worked – after a year or two of doing tech on and off in high school – and, while I can’t say it was fun (I spent a whole day cutting colored plastic into lens covers), it was definitely an interesting and rewarding experience. It really reinforced the value, to me, of learning through experience – all the how-tos and instruction manuals in the world mean nothing compared to an hour of expert-supervised practice. Obviously, there’s fields where theory and practice are one and the same, so this isn’t a universal truth, but more and more I find myself questioning the value of pure study.  Still, though, introspective crap aside, I’m really glad to have had the opportunity I did – it allowed me an entirely different perspective, and there’s nothing better than a new perspective to help you fill out your understanding of something. I’m pretty sure it’s not the career path I’d want to take in the true long-term, now, but some of the knowledge and skills involved are essentially universal – I learned a lot about working within a team & within the limitations of a space, and a little bit about social engineering – the subtle kind, the sort that’s present in any workplace, any unequal space.

Recently I went to a Hack4Baruch event – they’re a tech-focused club who’ve run a variety of events this semester, but the one I went to was a talk with Sean Reed. Mr. Reed was originally a physicist, but he’s worn a great many hats, and the one he discussed here was his recent forays into machine learning. Before I discuss the talk itself, I just want to say that the whole atmosphere of the event was really chill, which was nice, and there was just the right amount of people there that the room didn’t feel overcrowded, but it didn’t feel too empty either. As for the talk itself – I honestly can’t recall how long it went, which I guess is a testament to how natural it felt. Mr. Reed discussed his recent project, a neural network dedicated to language processing that he’d fed the entire text of Frankenstein – in order to do so, however, he first took an impromptu poll (vote by hands) of what kind of level of knowledge people had about neural networks, and spent a good while going through the concept from bottom to top – starting with the most basic programming frameworks and libraries involved. I appreciated this greatly, because while I’ve got cursory knowledge in programming and in AI, prior to this I was pretty much in the dark about the layer (or, as it turns out, layers) in between there. After the explanation, he showed us a couple interesting examples – his project’s development over generations, and an image-recognition network along with the specific workings of that. There was also a site that had a graphical representation/simulation of a small network, showing how various algorithms or numbers of active neurons/layers affected the outcome and generation of the network. Over all, I was really happy with how the event went, and signed up for their mailing list.

Last… I want to say Thursday? Well, the date doesn’t really matter – anyway, I hopped on down to the gameroom on the 3rd floor (mostly after Michelle’s sparkling recommendation in Comms). Unfortunately, I made a few mistakes in doing so – I didn’t have much time to spend there, and I stopped in when it was already pretty packed. The whole floor it’s on is painted in various bright colors that I’m sure are meant to look cheery and casual, but were honesty just kind of gaudy and depressing. As soon as I closed my eyes, though, the place gave off a much more favorable impression – there was the usual chatter that any significant crowd generates, the constant clattering that foosball tables in use tend to cause, and the clicking and occasional yelling of the ping-pong matches. Layered on that, there was a speaker somewhere playing what I assume was the school radio station – when I came in, they were talking about the past week’s NFL scores, so I didn’t pay too much attention to be quite honest, but I didn’t notice any issues in the sound quality, mic-based or otherwise, so I’ll probably check it out some time. Anyway – there was a really friendly aura throughout the whole place, so I relaxed there for a while. Didn’t talk to anyone, because, well, because. I never got the chance to play pool or anything either, as far as I could see all the tables were full up – it was a really nice place to just bask in the vibes, though. I think I’d go again, but probably some other time of day – I’d love to get in a good game of pool. I’m not really a foosball or ping-pong kind of guy, but I’m not opposed to giving at a shot, either. Over all, I’m not sure it’s my thing, but it’s a really nice space that I think contributes a lot in the way of stress relief for the student body (theoretically and anecdotally), and I’m really happy that it’s here as a resource.