Q4: Do you persevere with your interests?

Having a wide variety of constantly changing interests, at first glance, this question intuitively felt like a resounding “yes”, but I had to think intently before answering it specifically. The most consistent examples involve people, the world, and school.

People:
As a result of my deep emotional attachments to people, anything that helps me to understand others or myself better is a tremendous interest to me. Being an engineer, I generally have to live up to my stereotype, and laugh at psychology as a “soft” science. Truth be told however, I possess a strong interest in psychology and anything that helps me to understand people. One shortcoming of psychology is that not everyone fits neatly into a clearly defined classification or “bin”. My passion is to understand how others see the world, how they form ideas and make decisions, and what makes them the way that they are. My biggest drive to understand people is to enable deeper and more quality relationships, and to allow me to better add value to the lives of others.

The World:
It has always been important to me to understand how the world works. What causes stark cultural differences? Why does the world always seem to be unable to learn from history? What are the intricacies that cause events to transpire one way or another? I feel that in order to gain a small understanding of these questions, it’s important to understand a little bit of every country’s culture and history. Specifically, how has the country’s history formed their culture? What is the legacy that their history has left with the culture? It’s also important to me to understand the typical perspective of the culture. Seeing the world through another’s eyes is a crucial step in avoiding imperialism and gaining a broad understanding of the world. It requires much perseverance to continually be learning in these areas. A culture is dynamic and constantly changing, and the outsider’s perspective is by default biased toward their own culture. This introduces a level of uncertainty and error into one’s ability to “know” and “understand” the world as a whole. It is virtually impossible to understand the individual parts, how can we understand the whole world?

School:
It was a long road for me through college. It has always been my impression that I was lazier than I cared to let others know. I’ve began to realize that this was probably not the case. I did tend to procrastinate when it came to homework and what I viewed as “busywork”, but I never ceased hanging out in the library studying the particular subject matter. In retrospect, I just never delved deeply into detail, but rather an increasingly broad understanding of the topic. When I was taking basic engineering statics, I spent a lot of time learning to design steel and concrete beams. When I was taking thermodynamics, I spent more time studying gas turbine design. When I was struggling in calculus I, I spent a lot of time reading about fractal mathematics and chaos theory. When I was struggling in basic mechanics, I spent a lot of time studying relativity and modern physics. These are the topics that captured my interest, and they were obviously more advanced than the coursework I was neglecting.