1. i’m so ridiculously nervous about the outcome….
2. …yet i know that everything happens for a reason
3. i’m so ridiculously relieved that it’s all over…
4. …yet i still have 4 letters of recommendation to secure (they’re not due till 12/1)
5. i’m so ridiculously happy to have finally had the experience of writing a grant proposal
6. …yet i find myself sort of dreading having to do this sort of thing time and time again throughout my career
7. i know now that what i’m doing is absolutely the right thing for me to be doing!

(which is a pretty damn good feeling)

i’m applying for funding through NSF’s graduate research fellowship program (grfp) and the deadline was today. i submitted my whole application package last night at 9:30pm (yay!) but still have four letters of recommendation yet to be submitted. all of my recommenders wanted to have my whole application package before they started writing – which makes a lot of sense — but it just sort of prolongs the whole process. i know everyone will turn in everything on time and will do a fabulous job, but it ain’t over till it’s over, y’know?

i’ve met a striking number of people throughout this process of writing up my proposal essays. i can think of no fewer than 8 people who have been critically important to me. i’m just incredibly lucky to be plugged into the design scene around here. goodness knows how i would have pulled this off if i were a new student! it’s just amazing to me how willing everyone is to give advice. not just off-the-cuff advice, but really truly thoughtful and well-considered advice. these are busy people, and their generosity has blown me away. i hope i can give back to the community in the same way once i’m….. a professor…? well, whatever i end up as, i just hope it involves mentoring of some sort. this process, more than anything, has convinced me that mentoring is what i want to do in the future.

1. literature review about the use of prototyping as a communication tool
2. literature review about cross-disciplinary innovation
3. portfolio of work for my advisor
4. first drafts of my research proposal and previous research essay
5. second draft of my personal statement
6. solicit third letter of recommendation
7. laundry

sounds like fun! yay!! seriously though, i will be glad when this is all over…

1. the idea of “moments of opening“
2. a binary system for classifying idea receptiveness in groups
3. a method for graphing said idea acceptance vs time
4. brainstorming = trivializing (ooooh, i’m conflicted about this one!)
5. ignoring as a way to engage with ideas
6. the concept of computer software possessing “openness” (still having a hard time wrapping my head around exactly what this means)
7. the possibility of a correlation between “openness” and idea half-life

but perhaps what interested me most were larry leifer’s closing comments. he declared that this research, studying the interactions (specifically, the level of engagement) of designers given an innovation challenge, seemed on the surface to be more in the social sciences field than in that of engineering. i’ve been feeling the same way lately while trying to formulate my own research plan for NSF, so in that moment i experienced exactly what had been discussed all evening — a “moment of opening,” where a switch flips and a participant transitions from feeling disengaged to feeling engaged in a split second. i found it particularly fitting to end the night with such an experience. larry addressed the group and proclaimed that designers engage in ways specific to design challenges, that any other field will have its own nuances and that engineering design is in a league of its own, so to speak. he’s been studying this his whole life, so i have to trust his judgment to a certain degree, but i did find some relief in that a figure of academic prominence believes forcefully that studying interactions is a legitimate field of engineering.

let’s hope NSF agrees.