Reading over my more recent blog entries, I see that my summer has taken a nosedive into... well, I don't exactly know into what. So I wanted to write today about something good.
I have a student working with me for the summer. He is a rising sophomore, in the Honors program, and almost delightful to have around. I say almost delightful because, in the course of our day-to-day interactions, I have learned that he is completely incapable of perceiving when I am busy and when I am not. He will hover in my office doorway for extended periods of time, even when I am deep in discussion with someone wearing shiny shoes and carrying a briefcase. Similarly, he is incapable of distinguishing between problems I am interested in (e.g., "If we implement a model of the process in this way, I can't fit the data any more") and problems that I am not ("The program stalls at about this point in the code and I don't know why"). Oftentimes the hovering is only to report that one of these uninteresting problems has been solved.
I overlook these annoyances because he's really and truly brilliant, one of the few really brilliant people I've ever met. Over the past 6 months or so he has taught himself parallel programming in Fortran 90 and how to use R. He has learned some really difficult stuff involving stochastic processes and Bayesian modeling and implemented the stuff in raw F90 code. (Note that he's only taken introductory-level statistics.) He programmed up a model and had it working (fitted to data) in about a month, after I myself had tried for six months to do exactly the same thing and failed.
Like most geniuses, he is pure geek. When he first showed up on my doorstep, I handed him an old but serviceable computer and a Fedora distro. By the end of the afternoon he had his own workstation connected to the lab LAN. I must note here that he didn't know a thing about Linux or Unix. I had to tell him how to create a file. "This is a terminal window," I said. "Type 'xemacs.'" Now when I go in the lab he has a million xemacs windows up, some containing little bits of code, some of them running R, others editing data.*
Now if only he would stop locking himself out of the lab.
*Of course I would never choose my friends by their choice of text processing application, but if you happen to use an emacsen, well, I'll just be that much more willing to buy you beer.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
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5 comments:
How much have you helped him learn to be better at being aware of and responding to your social situations and cues?
No need for that. He's fine: he's 18 years old. He'll come around.
not necessarily.... looking at the social skills in a wide array of faculty should indicate that some people never get it.
I'm with anonymous. Many if not most 18-year-olds would have the social skills to either never cause such problems, or quickly realize and correct such problems.
While I don't want to make any assumptions about this individual or your social interaction with him, I can't help but wonder what "I overlook these annoyances because he's really and truly brilliant..." means as far as what social skills he will learn from you.
His social skills are a function of enthusiasm and unfamiliarity with my world. If "correction" means that I run the risk of dampening his enthusiasm, then I will not do it. As he becomes more familiar with life in the Academy, he will learn social boundaries.
And if you're implying that I'm a socially inept geek myself, well, you're probably right. But give me a geeky professor to hang out with over a slick sales manager any time.
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