My Evolving Philosophy of Writing
Writing has felt like a necessity, rather than an opportunity. I haven’t documented many of my thoughts simply because it takes time and energy. These are valuable and scarce resources I have come to treasure as a student. I want to write when I want to – when I have something to say, rather than when I feel like I need to get something out.
Claire is Doing Things. Claire has Done Things. Claire will continue to Do Things for a while so these Things might as well be documented. I need to get a head start on my autobiography. I also have way too many thoughts bouncing around in my head that my loved ones certainly cannot keep up with, my journal doesn’t need to hear, and that can’t stay in my head forever. I might as well use this space as an outlet for some of the aspects of my life I want to be included in the social media and background check that my future employers will conduct.
Looking back at my old blog posts, I feel an overwhelming sense of love for the person who was writing these on her first laptop (a $200 Dell Inspiron with 4 GB of RAM that would sound like a rocket was taking off when using it). I don’t think this person ever wrote a bad review about any food.
Though my days as a 12-year-old food critic and wannabe baker are over, I am taking inspiration from her as I move forward with this project. I still love to write and I aspire to improve my writing skills, especially the ability to articulate what’s in my brain into a sentence on the page. It doesn’t even have to be a coherent sentence though that could be nice. Maybe I will get to a point where I feel that what I write is meaningful and deserves to stay on the page as-is rather than immediately deleted. While reading about strategies for scientific writing, one idea in particular stood out to me: writing is never “complete,” a writer just decides there is a point in which the writing is good enough or done enough to send out into the world. Maybe, with time, the writing I decide to send out into the world will continue to improve until I reach the point where I decide that my writing is good writing.
What’s new?
Ever since I turned 13, my blog – From the Taste Buds of a 12-Year Old – has grown more and more obsolete. Clearly my business model was not resistant to change. In 2015, I revamped my blog, giving it an updated look and name, calling it Claire Doing Things. If you’ve stuck around this long, I am not only impressed, but I wonder who is paying you to do so. Moving forward, I plan to keep the narrative that change is welcome; I might not always be Claire nor might I always be Doing Things, but change need not be avoided.
I am now in college – my senior year at Amherst College in Massachusetts. I’m a geology and computer science double major and I’m writing a senior honors thesis in geology. My thesis, which takes up more of my personality than time I actually spend working on it, is about the stability of Dome A in East Antarctica for containing an uninterrupted ice record from which scientists could drill a long ice core to find the oldest ice. The thesis is a void. I’ll probably write a second post about this.
After I graduate in May, I’ll likely go to graduate school for a PhD in geoscience. I have applied to labs that study similar ice dynamics research that I am working on and that I’m interested in. I am also waiting to hear back from Google about a full-time offer for a software engineer position. They’re already months behind schedule and I don’t have much faith in them getting back to me before I have to commit to a graduate school.
I took some time studying abroad in New Zealand (which I’ll write more about later), gained a couple of DSM-5 diagnoses, made some friends, lost some loved ones, decided to be obsessed with one or more new hobbies, and did a bit of studying in between. During the summers, I’ve moved around the United States working as a software engineer at Google in various locations. College has been awesome. Certainly life-changing, though I suppose almost everything is life-changing before my brain develops.
Claire does what?
I don’t have a concrete plan for this blog, other than sharing my thoughts and opinions as I continue to become a Human Being. I plan to write critically about topics that are interesting to me, which my therapist calls my “special interests” (she thinks I am autistic). Here’s a non-encompassing list:
- Study abroad in NZ
- Politics of the oldest ice
- Why I’m restarting my blog
- Grad school applications
- How to get a tech internship
- My experience at Google
- AGU Chapman conference
- Being queer and Black in geoscience and computer science
- Girls Inc. experience + brand ambassadoring
- Book reviews
- Why glaciers are so cool
- Music I’ve been listening to
- Goodreads year-long reading goal
- Work-life balance
- Senior spring plans
- Relationship to food
- Thesis process
My superiority complex requires me to not be able to take suggestions but, for the sake of inclusivity, I am open to suggestions. I’ll hear them but I may not obey.
Lastly, I want to say that I am proud of myself. I’m not a big fan of tooting my own horn but perhaps this is something worth telling myself every once in a while. Reader, whoever you are, I hope you read this blog carefully. I don’t mean tread lightly, I mean read with care. This blog counts as a Vulnerable Space for me and I have intentionally never told any of my friends the title of this blog so it is essentially hidden to them. Maybe no one will read this and maybe I’ll get views from people I would prefer do not see this (if you are my ex-anything, you can close the tab now), but regardless, I write on.
Until next time,
Claire