I just got back from a special lecture my university hosted. It was special as in I paid $20 to attend it.
Jokes aside, this was a very special lecture. It featured Hugh Herr from MIT, double amputee turned engineer/researcher/entrepreneur. He talked about bionics, which is the field of applying biology to design and design to biology. It's a field that I've been very interested in for a while, as I originally was a biomedical engineering major. He, among other sources, inspired the topic of my rhetoric research paper last semester on the ethics of advancing cyborg technology.
Anyway, he lectured about his own research in the field and how it's advancing. It is incredible what is being done. Paralysis, hearing, blindness--almost every disability you can think of has radical research underway that is counteracting these effects. I can't tell you the exact specifics, because he used a lot of jargon he didn't bother to explain, so I only understood about 20% of what he was doing, but even then it was truly incredible.
About 3/4 of the way through the lecture, I teared up. Why? Because what he is doing is so enchanting. It reminded me why I want to be an engineer: to advance technology to benefit humankind. To improve lives. To save lives.
As a student, you tend to focus only on the short term. On the class you're in right now, the difficult homework you're working on right now. The test you have next week, the classes you have to register for next semester. There's just so much stuff that needs to be done in an incredibly finite amount of time that you can only afford to expend your energy on the short term.
So as you sit in your mechanics class with your incoherent, half-dead professor droning on about something that you stopped paying attention to 20 minutes ago, you lose sight of the long term. You forget the fundamental reason why you are in that class. You become bored, worried, and completely unenthusiastic. All you're focused on is getting an A (or just passing) the class. You forget the amazing things you can accomplish with what you're learning.
But sometimes you get a glimpse of what inspires you. Very rarely, you see the big picture again. It rekindles that passionate fire inside you that almost got burned out. And it makes everything seem worth it again--that you can face anything you're dealing with now in the short term, because it will be really, really worth it in the long term.
This has only happened to me twice in my short college experience. Once, of course was tonight. The other time was during a lecture given by a faculty member in my engineering club on fluid dynamics research. It was fascinating what was being done. And again, I felt that fire being ignited, reminding me that that impending computer science test was really not part of the big picture. This feeling truly gives you a sense that everything will be okay if you focus on your dreams.
I feel like this is the key to not getting burned out. I need to continually see the big picture--see it in its entirety, its beautiful, mesmerizing, inspirational self. In essence, I'm going to use the long term to drive the short term.
No comments:
Post a Comment