engineering

i made all those graphs myself.

we built that together. with three other amazing people—my friends—and a professor, one of the people i love most in my life.

thinking about creating value

when i said i was quitting engineering to go into journalism, a senior journalist where i was interning, attacked my decision, very harshly. said:

sayısal her zaman sözelden daha değerli olacaktır.
physical sciences will always be more valuable than social sciences.

I really battled hard against that, back then.

Is my perspective beginning to shift?

it makes even more sense in english: physical vs social. one has real physical value, a presence.

i thought, well if i end up telling stories all my life, journalism all my life, civil life, will i ever be creating value? because i was thinking about creating value. about joining civil life.

will i ever be adding value to the construction of our civilizations?

who are some who did?

physical scientists. euclid did.

but also plato did.

plato was a word crafter, right? or an educator. right? he taught everyone, though. it was a teaching of life, right?

…

i have all this technical knowledge.

what do i do now?

time… i think what scares me most is time.

i really enjoyed my time at njit, where i worked on this project.

i loved the people i was with.

it didn’t feel like what i was making amounted to anything;

but at the same time, as i go through all the old documents, i realize that it did. prof. s., who was grading our project. it’s all about the people. the people invested so much time and effort into it. that something was really created. a real value, a real thing was there, it was working, we were generating electricity by cycling and we were measuring it.

it took us so much time. we spent so many hours on it.

america wasn’t too harsh on its students. so i didn’t need to break myself down psychologically, to make it past the class. we did the work, we showed up, we talked and presented it, and it happened. we were successful. the teachers didn’t make it any harder for us than it had to be. we worked together. the professor who was checking our project spent countless hours himself (by countless, i mean more than he was required to), and we emailed back and forth, back and forth, making it better until it satisfied his criteria, and we passed.

and there was the professor, who we did the project with. whose lab we did it in.

he who changed my whole life.

he who showed me we can love each other much more than is apparent at face value.

showed me that time exists. that life passes.

what a deep creature. what a beautiful, amazing human being.

there is someone, who was born in china, and arrived in america, and is now running a lab, with white walls, and red doors, and he is full of grace. he shines. i would love to see him again.

he opened my eyes to so many things.

he let me see what i really want to do—he held my hand to help me face it.

i want to write. i want to create stories, and i want to witness the people of this world.

i want to be creating technology too. that’s exciting. to be part of the construction of civilizations is so exciting.

what’s also very very exciting is the people.

the people are so valuable.

and i want to keep searching them. i want to not stop looking for them.

so that comes first.

i just want to do enough technology that enables me to still keep looking for people.

i want to create some value. i want to put stone on top of stone, too.

as i grow, i want to grow a business with me. just anything. just business. let’s grow it together.

and i want tech to be a part of it. just develop tech, even in some minute, minor way. but at the same time, keep collecting the stories, keep witnessing the people, and write about that. that really is my passion.

i really do stand in awe, when i read the work of a “dancehall researcher”. they open up so much of life for me.

i think, somewhere in there, recording a certain human element IS art. just recording it. just writing about it and putting it down into words, into recordings, creating containers carrying the voices, the words, the meaning—that is ‘life’s work’.