5.5.02 – little white lies

oh man, the Society of Women Engineers is after me again. see, way back when i was a wee high school student, i thought that i wanted to be a computer programmer/engineer/guru, and so i applied for and received several college scholarships on that basis. the local chapter of the Society of Women Engineers gave me $300, which just about covered the cost of my books for my first term at Stanford. as it turns out, computers are a nice toy (and were once an excellent way to meet boys), but i have absolutely no interest in working with them for a living. the problem is, the nice lady who runs the boise chapter of SWE and gave me my scholarship tracks me down every spring and invites me to the scholarship awards ceremony and asks for an update as to what exciting things i’m doing in the engineering world. and i just don’t have the guts to tell her that i took their money and used it on a drama degree. my mother suggested that i tell her about the engineering-related things i’ve done since college and skim over the part where i never actually studied engineering.

Dear Barbara,

Thank you for the invitation to the SWE scholarship awards ceremony. I will not be able to attend, but wanted to take a quick moment to send an update, as you requested. In college (Stanford, ’00) I studied Computer Science and also Drama (directing). [Once I got to college I took a couple of programming classes and then tossed the engineering plan out the window and spent the rest of my four years being in a lot of school plays.] My senior honors thesis was a wonderful combination of my two interests: I developed computer software for stage managers. The beta version was available to my drama department when I graduated, and since then writing further versions of it have been a pet project of mine. [I barely cranked out something that my thesis advisor was willing to sign off on, burned a couple of copies to file away with every other undergraduate thesis that will never be read again, and since then I haven’t touched it.]

Since graduation I have been pursuing a career in theatre, but I have found that my technical background is extremely valuable – writing code is certainly better than waiting tables between jobs. :) [I find that my technical background is very useful – I’m the only stage manager I know that can work both PCs and Macs and when the copier eats the script, I’m not afraid to open up the doors and start taking the machine apart. Also, I can plug the sound equipment in all by my self.] I worked as a web designer for a startup in Silicon Valley during the big tech boom, and since then have done web design and development for several small businesses. [Back in the good ol’ days when startups were so desperate for staff that they’d hire a drama major, I was a web designer for a vaporware company. Eventually, they went belly-up like everyone else and I got laid off the day before Christmas. But that’s okay because I hated them anyway and went to work full time at a theatre.] My theatre work takes me all over the country – this year I’ve been in New York, the previous year I was in San Francisco, and this summer I will be returning to Boise to work with the Shakespeare Festival for a while. [Now that I’m a theatre professional, I’m homeless. After a year in San Francisco and one in Buffalo, New York, I’m back here in Boise, Idaho, living with my parents and feeling really lame because I’m twenty-four years old and I can’t afford my own apartment.]

Best of luck, [Please stop calling me. I’m sorry I spent your scholarship money on books about Brecht]

-jcg