These pages are ubiquitous on the web these days, and about 90% of them are just plain dull. Crafting a page all about yourself is difficult, be it because we’re trying to be humble, or because we figure no one really reads these pages after all. But, considering my experience in web design and statistics monitoring has shown that the ‘about’ page is the highest trafficked, I figure I should give this page a fair amount of thought and effort.
About this website
I have put this website together for several purposes: immediately, I will be using the blog (seriously, we haven’t come up with a more elegant term for this yet?) to discuss my courses and how they are relevant to either daily life, my professional aims or both. Really, I realize now, I should have been doing this from the beginning, but no time for regrets now. These posts will be for myself as well as for future employers to get a feel of how I have been using my time in school and just how it relates to the field of Voice User Interface Design. This is my next goal: To find a job. And once I have a job, to continue to write on the topic of Voice User Interface Design.
Insert some witty title here to get at who exactly I am.
Okay, so I’m not off to such a great start on the ‘interesting’ front, but I feel establishing audience and purpose is important. After all, as terrible as it may sound, we are never our full selves at any given time, but rather, a carefully crafted persona to fit a situation. However, that said, there are a few constants in terms of characteristics and personality traits from persona to persona. The first is that I’m honest. I don’t believe in wasting people’s time with fluffy non-truths and I believe that being upfront is the most efficient way to achieve the most desirable result. I’m honest about my flaws, I’m honest about things I’ve screwed up, and I’m also honest about things I’m good at and the things I’ve achieved. The same goes for any given project I’m working on.
I’m a problem solver. One of those people who latches onto a good puzzle and won’t abandon it until it’s solved or someone has reminded me I should eat or sleep. There’s something about working through a problem and searching for the most elegant and efficient solution possible that gets me excited. On a related note, I’m a compulsive organizer. I make insanely detailed to-do lists, I create mind-maps and have meticulous filing patterns. Part of it is that organization is a constant problem that can be solved over and over again — there’s always a more elegant, more efficient solution out there.
I’m a thinker. I deal in abstractions. Particularly, I thoroughly enjoy mastering a complicated theory well enough to be able to explain in simple terms. What gets me even more excited is finding ways to take theory to application (which is part of my giddiness about problem solving).
Really though, I’m a pretty big believer in the Myers-Briggs types, and I turn out to be a pretty accurate INTP (though I just barely score that over an INTJ). I highly recommending reading those links if you aren’t familiar with the types — I identify with both of them pretty exactly.
Okay, you’ve gotta explain this Russian thing.
Since I was fifteen I’ve been asked “Why Russian? What are you going to do with a degree in Russian?” Really, I think it’s the curse of all Russian majors to face this question frequently. To be honest, I still don’t know, fundamentally, what it was that drew me to Russian. And I think that’s a common trait among Russian majors. There is something inexplicable about the language and culture that just sucks some of us right in. I was one of ‘em. But now, three years in, I can tell you one thing: Nothing in my life has been as simultaneously challenging and rewarding as studying Russian. For me, someone for whom school was always easy and required relatively no work, the feeling of failing every day in a class was mind-blowing. But there is something important I have gained from the experience: True perseverance. I could have quit. I very nearly did at one point. But I now know that I am capable of facing a struggle on a daily basis head-on and, more importantly, that I am able to turn it around and fully succeed. In the professional sense, this has obvious implications — there will be projects which, for one reason or another, are entirely difficult, where you feel like you’re running up against a brick wall day in and day out, but you must push through and make the most of it, and do one better. A major in Russian has, at least for me, proven that ability more than anything else I have yet encountered.
And how about Voice User Interface Design?
I fell upon this field entirely by chance. Following high school, through a teacher whose wife worked for VoiceBox Technologies, I was offered an internship in usability which was supposed to just be for the summer before I went off to college in Pennsylvania. After a serious financial setback, I discovered that I would not be able to attend school that year and I was promoted to full-time status as a Junior Voice User Interaction Designer. While at the time I did not appreciate the job as much (still being stubborn and convinced I would not end up in the tech industry, and being focused entirely on Russian and government-related jobs), as time passed I realized how great a fit this job is for me. It provides opportunity for research, a wonderful balance between creativity and technicality, the chance to work both alone and in a team, and career advancement into project or team management. On top of it all, it’s a relatively new field which is doubly exciting for me, and I feel privileged to already have substantially significant work experience as I prepare to exit college.
With all of this in mind, I pursued my minor in Linguistics, focusing on classes I believe will be most immediately beneficial to the design side of computational linguistics, which at this point, is entirely underdeveloped in academia. The truth is, there are no perfect match majors for this field. I think it takes passion, knack, ingenuity and willingness to take risks, all of which I have and can’t wait to make use of in the professional world.