Mike Oren.com

I'm not completely sure what to title this post, and I definitely should not be wasting the time writing it; however, sometimes you just have to sit down and write what's been on your mind (or at least I do--that's the former writing major in me perhaps). Lately I've found myself not so much in a rut, per se, as in a sort of weird place for me as I struggle with a couple of challenges I've been facing. Intellectually, I've found myself increasingly vexed by the fact that I simply can't learn everything it is that I want to know (which I've always known, but it is just striking me as more so than usual--especially now that I am adding additional academic areas into my knowledge base, now the social sciences with sociology to add to my engineering and humanities background). I am also very frustrated with the fact that I have all of these ideas swimming around my head for research I want to do and other side projects, but I just don't have the time to work on them--and I need to try to group together a couple of particularly strong ideas and form an actual research plan sooner rather than later so that I can graduate in 2011 as planned (I do have a general idea as to that, and I try to resist the temptation to think too much about side ideas not directly related to the research plan). As part of this frustration, it is becoming very clear to me that I do not have nearly the grounding in theory that I really should have when trying to cobble together a research plan--I know sometimes that can come from a major professor, but I really feel it is my job to try to frame my research plan within a theoretical framework first and then get feedback from my major professor and other members of my committee with suggestions.

My other great intellectual frustration is that I have found that I really enjoy teaching through my work as TA and creating the syllabus for the class I'm hoping to teach over the summer, but that it can be incredibly frustrating as well (not to mention time consuming and distracting from the research--which I also greatly enjoy doing). Finding the balance between research and teaching is one of the frustration points here. The other frustration point is semi-related to my rant in the previous paragraph, but instead of being concerned about my own inability to grasp everything, I find that I'm frustrated with my peers (who may read this, and I will say that this is nothing pesonal). The class I TA is a graduate level course required by the HCI program, and everybody in it (for the most part) is very bright both generally and in their own area of expertise. However, when reading some of the work I find myself frustrated with what I perceive as a lack of ability by some to write English properly and to perform proper critical analysis of ideas. If this were an introductory undergraduate course, I would expect that, but this is a graduate level course. To me, this says that not only are the nation's high school's failing to prepare students but many of our nation's universities are failing equally as much to impart critical thinking and writing skills. Our nation's higher education system has for the past few decades placed more and more emphasis on science and mathematics (generally I agree with this focus), but it has been sacrificing basic and critical skills that students also need to learn (e.g. how to write well). But then, I am probably coming at this with a bias as I do have a writing background and analytical writing was the part of the GRE that I scored best on (6 out of 6), so maybe my frustration is unjustified. I welcome comments on this debate if there are any dissenting opinions (or any nods of agreement). My other frustration with teaching is that I have a desire to cover a wide range of topics (again going into my interest in breadth), but I also want to go really deep into certain topics and I've found this sometimes frustrating to find the right balance (but then I am new to teaching and hopefully this will come with time)--the same is true for my desire to find a balance between imparting my knowledge of topics and encouraging discourse on topics within the class.

My last frustration lately and one that has, unfortunately, been permeating other aspects of my life by making me generally ill-tempered as of late is a relationship issue that I have no plans to discuss now or any time soon on this site.