So a couple of interesting things went down today. A few year back, I interviewed with the CIA for a position under the Directorate of Science and Technology. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the internship. However, a new research group under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has formed called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. They do the type of work that the Directorate of Science and Technology would be doing, except IRAPA does it exclusively. So it’s pretty cool.
In any event, they got back in touch with me a few weeks ago and asked me to consider an internship there. It would have been an amazing opportunity, but I’ve committed to working for Boeing this summer. So I had to pass. There’s also not much draw for me to a government salary….especially when I could work in the private sector doing pretty much the same thing.
Yesterday, though, they sweetened the pot a bit more. Quite a bit more. As soon as I pass my SF86 check, I’ll be formally employed in a IARPA coop program. Here’s where it gets good though.
The next year of my school will be paid for along with the previous four years. They’ll move me out to Virgina at the end of the school year where I’ll complete the CIA field session. Over the summer, I’ll work as intern. When the school year resumes, my position will turn into a co-op and I will simultaneously complete my bachelors at Virginia Tech. Then, when I graduate, I’ll have a guaranteed job with a GS-12 step 6 pay grade (a little over $77k/year) plus full benefits.
I’m just over 80 episodes into Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and there’s a couple of episodes that I think people should watch because they offer a really great commentary on what I see in America today.
To me:
Duet is about a persons right to have a fair trial, no matter where they came from or what they did. It echoes some of my feelings about Guantanamo Bay detention camp. I also recommend listening to NPR’s This American Life: Habeas Schmabeas 2007.
In the Hands of the Prophets is about Christians demanding that religion be taught in schools and/or decrying the teaching of evolution.
Homefront and Paradise Lost are about power, fear, and control. They are about what happens when something you love so much (freedom and America) are taken away from you because a few people threaten you. It’s not a perfect analogy, yet there are definitely a lot of parallels to what has happened over the last six and half years. I think the best quote comes at the end: “If the Changelings want to destroy what we’ve built here, they’re going to have to do it themselves. We will not do it for them.” – Benjamin Sisko. Now, replace Changelings with terrorists.
What I think is interesting is that these episodes are about 12 years old. I don’t think the writers intended this as a commentary on the current events of the time. Yet, somehow, twelve years after their air dates, these shows provide such a great reflection of the current times!
Other thoughts I’m going to throw in:
There are a surprisingly large number of sci-fi TV shows with episodes named “Paradise Lost”.
I am now 51.59% the way through all the Star Trek episodes/movies made.
I have seen 372 episodes/movies with 364 (actually, 365 if you count the upcoming Star Trek movie) left.
I have watched about 286 hours of Star Trek thus far in this project.
Pretend you’re eight years old for a second. Now pretend you just got a photo in the mail from your new buddy in Finland.
Fantastic, right? Best mail ever!
Now here’s the secret: it’s still that much fun to get photos from around the world. And it’s super easy thanks to Postcrossing: send a postcard to somebody, and somebody sends you a postcard back.
So I signed up, had some custom made postcards printed by Moo and away I went.
Here’s my first card that I sent last Thursday:
Milla received the post card today:
Hello Andrew,
thank you for the card. I hope that you have a lot of fun with postcrossing!
Sweet deal. I have 18 more postcards left before I have to order another batch, so expect more updates.
With some help from Michael and Paul, I finally passed the lead climb test for the wall at Mines.
I think my next goal is going to be lead certified at ROCK’n & JAM’n. It’s going to be quite a bit more difficult since there’s an extensive overhang:
It starts in the middle of the image and goes to the upper right.
Ben recently told me that a casual acquaintance of ours, Sarah Plants, had recently passed away due to cancer. I didn’t know her very well, but saw her quite a bit since she played Ultimate Frisbee on the UW team. Doug, her husband, also lived at Your Mom’s House last year with Ben and Quinn, so she was over quite a bit. I last saw her at Thanksgiving and she seemed very happy.
Plants, 22, died Feb. 7 of a brain tumor linked to Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, the same rare hereditary disorder that claimed the lives of her father and brother. She was diagnosed with the disorder in October.
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Plants had survived cancer as a toddler. She suffered from adrenal cortical carcinoma, or cancer of the adrenal gland above the kidney, and went through chemotherapy at 16 months old.
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Plants was 29 credits short of earning a degree in Public Health. When she died, the University gave her an honorary degree. She had planned to go to graduate school to study nursing.
She was captain of the UW Element women’s Ultimate Frisbee team and the coach of an Ultimate team at Whitman Middle School.
Easter is very early this year, and here is a little explanation as to why.
Easter is always the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (which is March 20).
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Based on the above, Easter can actually be one day earlier (March 22) than it will be this year, but that is rare.
This year is the earliest Easter any of us will see for the rest of our lives. And only the most elderly (95 years and above) have ever seen it this early.
There’s a couple more tidbits on Rob’s blog about Easter that you might find interesting. Check ’em out.
Easter also reminds me of this little bit from Robin Williams’ Live on Broadway (which is hilarious, by the way, and has brought me much joy and laughter over the years): From www.script-o-rama.com:
For me, the one big question is: how do you get Crucifixion, Resurrection and then chocolate bunnies, colored eggs? How do you do that one? Even kids are going: “Rabbits don’t lay eggs. What is this?” And you don’t want a kid biting the head off a chocolate Jesus. You don’t want a cream filled cross going… You don’t wanna put raspberry jam in the grass going: “We’re looking for Jesus, kids, come on!”
One of my favorite professors here says that discernment is about the intersection of three things. Discover what brings you joy. Discover what you’re good at. Discover what the world needs. The intersection of those three things at any given moment is your calling. If (as I think you might be) you’re choosing between two good options, listen to where your desires are strongest and deepest. I think God wants us to be most fully ourselves, so I think that for some people emotion may play a significant role in the decision-making process, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
At the end of the day, knowing what you’re called to do means knowing who you are. It’s not a one-time deal, based on an isolated decision that impacts the rest of your life. It’s about living in a way that is in touch with your real identity, and the more you understand about that the more all of your actions and decisions are just an extension of yourself.
Kind of a ramble, let me know what you think or if it was helpful (or not).
I read the web page and I requested the book be sent over from Regis (they were the only library which had the book which makes it rather fitting I think).
I really like the concept of Three Keys to Intersection. I’ve know what I wanted to do for a long time now. It what brings me joy, which Himes differentiates from happiness because “[joy]comes from within and has to do with a deep and abiding sense of the rightness, the goodness, the fruitfulness of what you do with your life” whereas happiness “often depends on external things, your physical well being, the weather, whether you had a good night’s sleep or a good meal.” I think the joy/happiness differentiation also helps explain my love/hate paradox of Mines. In any event, the current thing that brings me joy is working on space exploration and that’s what I am doing and that’s what I’m going to continue to do for now.
I suppose it helps that I’m good at what I do, at least in theory. Himes also notes that knowing what I’m good at may not be a cut-and-dried answer and that there are people in my life who might be able to use to act as a mirror.
The final key to the puzzle is need. Not what I need, but what others need. To me, this seems like a “no duh” point, but I see people making this same mistake all the time and I pretty sure I’m not immune to it either. You could probably fill entire encyclopedias with stories of young and hot programmers who couldn’t just wait to code something, only to find out that it was something that nobody wanted.
That brings me to the Venn diagram I made up and included above. It has all three aspects: Joy, Ability, and Need. The intersection of those three circles is my target — my calling.
There’s a fourth point worth noting as well. What brings me joy, the abilities I have, and what the world need are all constantly changing. “We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives, day by day.” 1
There’s a reflection part of the Three Keys to Intersection. One of the questions asks:
Perhaps you now find yourself entertaining several life choices. That would not be surprising at all. Vocational discernment is an evolving process, a journey. Your goals may change several times as you try out some choices and learn more about the match between your passions and the world’s needs. But do you feel that you are growing in possession of the kind of knowledge that will enable you eventually to narrow down these choices in the future or to figure out how to combine them?
