Thoughts at 30 000 feet

Thoughts at 30 000 feet.

6:00pm – in flight. We took off about a ½ hour late at 3:30 so we are about halfway there. Thinking about the journey that has brought me this far. It really started 10 years ago. I had been ruminating about my future in medicine and how long I could handle doing on-call every third night and every third weekend. You would be surprised about how stressful this is. Surprisingly, it’s not so much getting called out in the middle of the night for an emergency (but that does happen) so much as it is just long stretches of work days with never ending demands. When we work the weekend on-call we wind up working 12 consecutive days in a row before we get a day off. So, I figured I could probably do this until my mid-fifties before I would just run out of steam. Then what? I mentally cast about for a “next” career: Hospital Administration? Big Pharma? Managed Care/Insurance? Academia? None of these held much appeal. What I knew about myself is that I like working with my brain and my hands; that I like to answer to myself and be my own boss, and that I like to fix or solve problems definitively. I had a basic understanding of the engineering and plumbing of the dialysis circuit and I understood the processes involved in water treatment for the water used in dialysis. So, some form of engineering seemed a good fit, but there seemed to be a number of different pathways within engineering to consider. So, some form of engineering seemed to fit the bill. Further exploration narrowed it to civil or environmental engineering. I didn’t need to come up with the choice right away – I had preliminary work to do. The first step was the rehabilitation of my antiquated and shaky math skills, last used in 1979-1980. So, in December of 2004 I called the Math Department in New Paltz and asked for a list of staff members who could tutor Calc I and Calc II and was given a short list with the name “Gail Young” at the top. I called her, she seemed agreeable enough, but indicated that she might not be the ideal candidate for me as she sees herself as a “pure” mathematician while I would benefit from an “applied” mathematician. Right of the bat this caught my eye. Someone who was honest enough to pass up a tutoring opportunity in order to do the right thing by the student. This is precisely who I wanted as my tutor. We exchanged emails in late December 2004 and early January 2005 and made arrangements to meet in mid-to-late January. I recall our first meeting as January 19^th, but I may be off. We meet on a grey, cold January afternoon but I could sense that Gail was possessed of a vibrant energy and a love for teaching that I knew I would flourish under. We negotiated the tutoring schedule and the payment scale and set to work. For me, it was doubly exhilarating: I was relearning long dormant math skills under the guidance of a woman I felt strongly attracted to and wanted to please. So that really was the beginning, ten years ago. The year of tutoring was followed by 9 years of taking classes, one or two at a time. Math prerequisites at SUNY New Paltz (the legendary Sunday Chickwendu, the gentle but oblique Larry and the little Greek firecracker Christina Benecki), followed by Engineering basic course at SUNY  Ulster, all taught by Steve Plumb – the man who told us that we sent a man to the moon on slide rule technology. Then the string of unmatriculated classes at RPI, each one individually approved by Jason in the Office of Graduate Education. The limit was two or three courses under the rules. With a wink and a nod, I was graced through to 5 classes before it became time to formally apply for matriculation; I really worried that they would not open a spot for me, as why should they waste a space on some old guy who might never use it. But grant me the spot they did and I took the opportunity and ran with it. At the end of my program I surprised myself with a much higher GPA than I had ever imagined for myself. So, ten years later I am sitting in a 737 at 30 000 feet heading to Panama to build and implement a community clean water catchment system on an island in the gulf coast. This is really what I saw myself doing – being part of a team that flys in and develops a solution that is coherent with the culture and the needs of the community.

And what I team I have flung in among! My travelling companions on this leg of the trip are Kyle Geissler, a junior civil engineering student, who was the former project leader last year, and Scott Underhill, a practicing civil-environmental engineer with AECOM who is our lead mentor engineer. He is a really neat guy with a string of projects like this in remote parts of the globe including Haiti, Dubai and the Phillipines.  As I am writing this I am eavesdropping on the conversation between Scott and Kyle who are engaged in an earnest discussion about how to improve the socioeconomic conditions on the island. This is the kind of place I wanted to be at the heart of. A place where ideas are advanced and shot down and revisited and reapplied until the best working solution emerges; a procession where egos and grandstanding take a back seat to providing a solution to the problem. I hear terms like “community buy in”, “having skin in the game”, “not a handout or a gift”. This is so where I want to be…