Yearly Note 2014: Competing Interests
2014 was the year my own breadth started to cost me.
I took an extra astrophysics course, worked on a situated memory project, and spent a lot of energy testing the edges of what the Srishti program could and couldn't give me. Srishti was built for exploration, but between the schedule I could afford as a student and my own scattered interests, going deep on any one thing was hard. For the first time I questioned the choice I'd made: so much range, so little depth.
The situated memory project was the part that paid off. It gave me practical skills and, more than that, an understanding of older people I hadn't had before. What I kept wishing for was a few peers aiming at the same things I was. And I noticed a frustrating pattern in myself: I wasn't carrying lessons from one experience cleanly into the next.
This was also a year I gave to Mathscapes, the research space I started back in 2008, imagining where it could go over the long term. 2014 wasn't my strongest year for growth. What it was good for was the question it left me holding: how to keep my breadth without letting it cost me the depth I also wanted.