For the unprivy, I’m happy to announce that, yes, my Peace Corps experience will end someday; and yes, I’m on the road to something exciting. Much of the fortune of in-site solitude comes in the form of unavoidable, individual reflection. As an American I’m as good as any at occupying my mind with layer upon layer of tasks. Still, there come intermittent silences—even here, in the blasting-regatón-row-housing reality of Limon 2000—long enough to leave me with nothing but the bare view of the bottom of the pool. It could be the juxtaposition of such heavy moments against something as buoyant as a group of children coloring on the porch that dislodge the occasional self-realization. But I doubt that’s it; those heavy-light exchanges have always existed to some degree. It’s the time, the sustained frequency by which these silences occur here in my community. It’s all these flavors I’ve sampled in adulthood mixing on my tongue. It’s knowing that I have to grow up soon.
The idea of a graduate education was planted early by a mentor who to this day remains one of the greatest influences on my academic life. At the time he was the head of the Chemical Engineering Dept at UConn, where I was doing a summer research internship; and he called me into his office after the poster presentations on the last day. My mind was racing. I had slept little the night before as I finalized my presentation, and I was already late to meet Bec and cousin Joanna, who had flown into Boston to drive back to Indiana with me. Not only that, I was quickly coming into conflict with the very path I was on. Everything about chemical engineering at Purdue smelled of industrial profit. Even that which might have been of direct benefit to the environment appeared to answer first to corporate interest. Our professors would begin explanations with, “When you’re out there in industry….” This discontent manifested itself in a multitude of distractions I set up for myself while in Storrs: I traveled almost every weekend, I ushered at the local theater to take in free shows, I trained for a marathon. So on that Friday I was out the door and speeding down I-90 toward Fenway Park long before Professor Helble’s, “You should set your sights high,” had cleared the air.
The reminders never really went away; and the more I ignored them the more they would pull. One professor completely outside of my field dropped, “You’ll come back,” neatly into a conversation we were having two years after I graduated. Whenever a friend or acquaintance talked of school, I found myself filling up with questions and enthusiasm. So as the end of Peace Corps finally started coming into view, exploring graduate school was clearly the most natural option.
I really do miss engineering. There’s no shortage of challenging problems to solve here in Costa Rica, but I do miss the science. I miss the aggregate collecting of knowledge (here both knowledge and progress can slip away like sand through a sieve). What was really missing before was the X in, “I’m ready to dedicate myself to X.” Filling that void was a piecewise process that must have started long before Peace Corps, but I’m thankful for those opportunities this experience has allowed for uninhibited delves into my own heart, as well as the conversations with other volunteers that have punctuated them (special thanks to you, Chris); for together with that reflection, with Lilly, and with the time I’ve spent on the ground here contributing in a resource-challenged environment, my past floated the answer up easier than I ever expected it to.
What’s X? I guess I can best explain it with a snippet of my statement of purpose, which will be shortly shipped off with a hefty check to several environmental engineering programs around the country:
The breadth of these experiences has given me a deep appreciation of the connectedness of the scientific and societal problems in the world today. As my focus shifts to graduate school I seek to study a scientific problem set that will allow me to better integrate human society with the natural environment for the benefit of both. I cannot think of a field that better achieves this objective than water engineering.There’s a lot more than these few sentences that attract me to water—for starters, its tangible ubiquity. Anyone with a concern for both the planet and for mankind will realize how easily water sits at the nexus of these two arenas. My experiences in Costa Rica have only strengthened this opinion. I serve in a country hailed as an example for its dedication to environmental conservation and the provision of public services, while I live in a community with a different reality: children playing in the street jump over raw sewage as it flows untreated to the nearby river; water cuts out for several hours unannounced, taxed by a growing population and poor conservation practices; and as I have recently experienced, outbreaks of dengue fever are an ever-present risk.
Some of my favorite projects have gotten me excited, as well. The scouts have done several water-related activities, the biggest being a month of workshops to celebrate World Water Day last March. The workshops culminated in a two-week tree planting activity to protect the district’s water supply from encroachment by a rapidly-eroding riverbank. The planting yielded not a single tree, but the project has since extended to the grade school, and students and teachers have planted nearly a thousand additional saplings on the same property.
And there’s just something pervasively beautiful about the stuff that touches the full spectrum of minds. In an interview, one professor whom I’m highly interested in stated that it was an undergraduate class that led her to the physics of fluids. “We got to put some dye into water and see how the water moves. I thought ‘This is beautiful!’ To this day, I love to throw a little dye in and see what it does.” Last February I was walking in the rain on the Puerto Viejo beach with Joe, one of my best friends in Costa Rica and a poet in economist’s clothing. He stopped in his tracks in front of an improvised delta, stormwater runoff fanning out into the sand: “I could just sit here for hours and watch this.”
Something else kept me away from engineering for a while. There’s perhaps no better way to describe it than to say I’ve fallen prey to the all-too-human fear of disappearing without leaving one permanent mark behind—not of death, but of being forgotten. When the ‘life goal’ question came up, I’d instinctively answer, “I want to create something.” It really is the simplest path to immortality; and if I’m honest with myself I’ll admit that it will forever remain one of the cornerstones of my worldview.
Where the disconnect between creativity and engineering happened, I can’t really say. Perhaps I’ll lay blame on a very encouraging high school English teacher, who let me fall in love with words. A lot of it had to do with the doors I would hear faintly shutting with each school year I completed at Purdue. My parents had instilled in me the confidence that I could do anything I set my mind to, and two years into college I was hit by the reality that I had never really evaluated that 'anything'. The decision to pursue a ChemE degree went something like: I like math and science, I’m good at math and science, I have an uncle who’s a chemical engineer and who seems happy, engineers make enough to live well, it’s one of the most challenging majors offered at Purdue, punto. As a kid I fiendishly collected baseball cards, and now I was realizing I couldn’t do the same thing with professions. In the throes of Heat & Mass Transfer and Senior Lab projects, I found myself longing to spend an equal amount of time in my creative writing elective. It really was a childish tug-of-war by a kid who wanted everything.
Those thoughts have had their time to evolve, a process that I'm confident starts and ends with my talented friends. Perhaps the smartest, most creative person I know works as a power engineer, a kid who used to dream up answers to complex engineering problems at night, and whose wit and verve surprise us all at the most opportune of moments. If the trajectory of his thoughts at all resemble mine, I doubt there’s much difference between the creative energy he puts into a complex engineering problem and that which he puts into one of his stellar Halloween costumes. He’s probably inspired me more than any fiction writer or photographer I've ever come across, so it's time to scrap this engineering-creativity mutual exclusivity theory.
I’m in a good place. Embracing a career in engineering does not preclude creative thought, just as art doesn't end in a swirl of words on a page or a closed lens shutter. I know that now, and I’ve had enough projects both at Lilly and here in Costa Rica to prove that creativity is always in high demand, regardless of the job; heck, my most inspired work here in Costa Rica has probably been on a Google spreadsheet, and I just might be ok with that. It really just boils down to how I choose to live my life. The developing world has taught me the importance of keeping happiness a top priority, and that just happens to be when I’m at my creative best.
