The contents of this blog post is similar to how I feel as a mechatronics undergrad. You might be wondering, why MIT? Well I love MIT, that’s why (a long story on how we got here).
The idea here is being an INFJ—a people-driven being—I sometimes feel out of place in my department. I have mates doing some really cool stuffs, and while I do have an interest for the techy stuff (as my blog posts might tell), I crave more, something deeper. I want to see how those techy stuffs help other people (starting with myself, but more importantly others). I prefer to be “more descriptive and anthropological than technical.” I prefer “getting inside people’s minds to inform the later engineering steps.” I prefer “to figure out what to build, what kinds of concepts could effectively meet people’s needs, rather than how to build the hardware” (doesn’t mean I’m not excited to get my hands dirty when needed).
If I were to be in graduate school (which I hope to attend), I most likely would feel uneasy like Madison answering the question: “What’s your research area?” Because all I keep as a conclusion in my brain is, whatever it is I want to research, I want to see it’s results in the real world—in people’s day-to-day lives—and not have it be some fascinating thing only scientists, researchers, and other engineers are amazed by or care about.
(Maybe that’s why I prefer to identify myself as a—currently—student multi-disciplinary researcher.)
And even though I, a researcher-social scientist wanna-be, am not wholly invested/don’t understand all the nuances of embedded systems and programming, people in these fields don’t fully understand what I am invested in, either.
Taking solace in Madison’s words:
So, I’m not shying away from being a little different than everyone else, rather I’m empowered by the revelation that “my unique skillset does belong here. In fact, it is needed here.”
I don’t know you, but thank you Madison.