[who is ronjie?] defining moment #2

I was in college, in my senior year, and I started taking one of these required courses that everyone seemed to hate. There was a "terror" teacher who gave you one of three marks: just-passing, do-more-work, or absolutely-failed. I was challenged.

In one of the homeworks/assignments given to us, we were asked to derive an equation. Loving math since a kid, I played around with what was given, and finally came up with the solution. As is usual custom in college, we'd usually look at each other's work. Or actually, I was probably one of a very few who did try to answer the home exercises, and so my classmates asked to see what I did.

Basically, this is what I did.

If I have an equation like

2 = 2

I just changed it to

2 = 2 + 1 - 1

which is exactly the same as the first one above. The guy who asked to see my assignment work went back to me and was like, "Whoa! How the hell did you come up with that? Clever!" Something like that.

I was quite impressed at myself. And I got the best mark I could get from that "terror" teacher - a just-passing mark. There were only 25% of us in class who got that. And I was probably #1 or #2 in class. And I have been arrogant ever since...NOT! You wanna talk about arrogant people lower life forms? I'll probably talk about those in a later blog post.

But anyway, here was another affirmation about my love for math, deriving equations and what not, becoming a scientist, and discovering stuff that would hopefully be for man's good.

Fast forward to today, and now that's sort of exactly what I'm doing. I'm not in the area of technology that makes a ton of headlines today, though - i.e. computers, the web, and so on.

But this "defining moment," is probably one that made me eventually become a civil/structural engineer, a career that I nor my parents did not know nothing about and did and still do not have as much love for. You know why? See, that guy who borrowed my work - he's rich now. He's in the computer (i.e. applied mathematics) industry that was really my first love. It's time again to watch Steve Jobs' 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford.

But, damn. I'm 12 years older than those guys he was addressing! So, now what! Does +1 and -1 still matter? Steve Jobs' Apple promoted the iPad by contrasting it against competitors' marketing pitch by saying something like, "Who cares about faster processors and more memory and better tech specs? It's when technology goes out of the way and let us do the things we love to do, that's what matters." That's what he would probably tell me. "Do what you love." That's what he told Stanford's class of 2005. All that's left now is.. execution.