Because I was so eager to get ahead, I tried to spend as much time in university as early as possible. I participated in two programs designed by the University of Toronto to give bright and ambitious high school students a head start in their university careers.
The first was Computing Insights, which was a kind of computer science summer school. Now, I already knew that was was being taught in my high school “computer science” classes had very little in common with what academic computer scientists actually studied. The high school classes treated computer science as a vocational subject, and taught skills such as word processing, programming, and graphics. For the most part, they never introduced any abstract notions such as models of computation. So it was a very good experience to have been able to speak with actual professors and graduate students in computer science. The experience affirmed my view that my father had absolutely no idea what he was talking about when it came to what was or wasn’t computer science.
The other program that I was involved with created a lot of friction with my father. As I have already alluded to in previous posts, the University of Toronto ran a Mentorship Program to allow precocious high school students to participate in academic research in a university environment.
The Mentorship Program consisted of a number of different projects spanning various scientific disciplines. I applied for and was accepted into an astronomy project to study variable stars. During the application process, my father had told me to apply for a computer science project. I think I had selected one of them as my second choice, but that choice became moot when I was accepted into astronomy. In any case, when my father found out that I was going to study astronomy instead of computer science, he was furious.
I should perhaps go back a little bit to explain why I had chosen the astronomy project over the computer science ones. From my discussions with my teachers and some older students, as well as my own reading, I had learned about the concept of quantum information. At that time, the idea was quite in vogue that quantum information may be responsible for many features of the natural world which had defied explanation by classical models of computation, including — perhaps — even human consciousness. This latter thesis in particular was championed by Roger Penrose. Now, as someone with an interest in both computer science and physics, of course these ideas excited me a great deal. Furthermore, I noted that many of the people who were particularly interested in quantum information had backgrounds in astrophysics, because of its relevance to the quantisation of gravity (which has sometimes been called a “Holy Grail” of physics). Both Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne had mentioned the problems posed by quantum information for the theory of relativity in popular works. This was just a few years before the famous Thorne-Hawking-Preskill bet on the black hole information loss problem.
I felt that I already had a strong enough background in computer science and wanted to learn more about astrophysics in preparation for my future research in university. The Mentorship Program’s astronomy project seemed like an ideal way to do this, because it would give me access to the astronomy department at the University of Toronto as well as to the university’s library. Furthermore, the computer science projects seemed like they had more to do with the processing of data than with the theory of computation. (I guess it might have been too difficult to design a project on the latter suitable for high school students.) My father, however, saw things differently. He insisted that one of the computer science projects would be better for me, because it would “look better on [my] résumé” and future supervisors and employers “will not care” about any work I may have done in astronomy.
I disagreed with this and stood my ground. I maintained that the astronomy project was better for me precisely because it seemed so out of place at first glance; everyone would expect someone with my background and interests to apply for one of the computer science projects, and thus having the astronomy project on my résumé would, in fact, make it stand out from those of my peers. Furthemore, I believed that, since some rather prominent astrophysicists were paying a lot of attention to quantum information, I would be working with a lot of people trained either as or by astrophysicists in the future, even if I will be doing research in computer science. In fact, I told my father that I would one day be studying computer science in “a building full of astrophysicists”, a prediction which eventually came true (though it is, of course, a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy).
As was so often the case when my father had nothing to support his assertions, he retreated into asking rhetorical questions: “Who says that?”, “Why isn’t anyone else doing this?” (i.e., why weren’t any of my classmates who were also interested in computer science applying for the astronomy project?), and so on. He might as well have asked me why no one else had the highest marks in all of their science classes either.
Through the Mentorship Program and Dr. John Percy, who supervised the astronomy project, I obtained a University of Toronto library card, and thus acquired access to the University’s vast academic resources, including books and journals available neither in my high school library nor at any public library. But more importantly, I discovered the university’s electronic resources. Nowadays it seems that practically every resource is electronic in some way, but at that time most papers were still not available for downloading online, and certainly not easily. And that inspired me to think a lot about the future of electronic publishing. I also learned a lot about astrophysics, and especially about the problem of black hole information loss, and what I learned convinced me that I was on the right track for graduate school in theoretical computer science. Another benefit of the Mentorship Program unrelated to book learning was that some of Dr. Percy’s dedication to science education and outreach rubbed off on me.
While I was in the Mentorship Program, my father kept harrassing me while I was trying to do research. Every time he saw anything related to astronomy or astrophysics in the house, he would make disparaging remarks about it. The most grating comment (or rhetorical question, rather) was, “Why are you so interested in that Star Wars stuff?” It was one thing to hear him dismiss astronomy and astrophysics as “worthless”, because he dismissed practically everything as “worthless”; but it was quite another to see that he apparently actually believed that these subjects belonged in the same category of things as Star Wars.
The reason that he had made the reference to Star Wars was that I had a number of items related to Star Trek in my room, and he apparently did not know, or care to know, the difference. (That’s major minus points to his geek cred, right there.) Presumably he had intended to imply that astronomy and astrophysics belonged in the realm of science fiction; of course, Star Wars is not science fiction, but obviously someone who didn’t know the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek would not have had the sophistication to make that distinction.
(As an aside, the only Star Wars-related item I had during high school was the right half of a life-sized picture of Darth Vader’s helmet viewed from the front. It was joined to a life-sized picture of the left half of the front of David Duchovny’s face, and the entire construct was attached to the inside of my locker at school at about face level. For that reason, the area around my locker was referred to as “Darth Mulder’s”; people would say, “Let’s get together at Darth Mulder’s after school.” If I ever own a bar one day, that’s what it will be called.)
– davinci
0 Responses to “The causes of my depression, part 4: the Mentorship Program”