| March 6, 2006 Vol. 77, no.
8S
 |
| MICHELLE
YONG
(Rachel
Shafer photo)
|
Off the
beat: “Engineering an opus”
A new column about the engineering life penned by and for students
Below is the first column in an occasional student perspective
series on the engineering life. “Off the beat” is written
by Engineering Physics junior Michelle Yong.
Now that I’m finally a junior, I’m starting to glimpse
the “Real World,” and it’s not the TV show. My senior
friends leave town for the weekend, not for Tahoe, but Chicago. Chicago?
Job interviews, they holler back to me.
Oh. Is that my future ahead? Suddenly, I’m facing a panel of
my very own phantom interviewers inspecting my resume. “So, I
see here that you’ve been playing the carillon for three years.
What is the carillon?” A cursory explanation follows, making
me sound like a modern female Quasimodo who enjoys playing the Campanile’s
bells. And then, the real question lurking behind the first: “If
you’re interested in becoming a physicist, why are you taking
music lessons?” The inquisitor might as well have asked, “So
what are you doing wasting time outside of physics? Hrmm? ”
These are my mental mock interviews/nightmares. I’m scared and
I’m stumped. But I know music has molded me, and there is something
I’ve gained from all those hours spent juggling tones and rhythms.
Here’s my something.
Precision and accuracy. Not only should each note be the correct pitch,
but it should be played with perfect timing, dynamics (volume), and
shape (a sharp accent versus a more rounded sound), melding mellifluously
with the rest of the musical phrase. Each note builds on a massive
musical structure that reinforces the import of the piece.
Decisions about visions. Achieving my acoustic vision for a piece
takes some creative problem-solving. How can I move my hands and arms
to
create the effects I envision? How can I categorize these movements
to duplicate them later? How will the audience be affected?
Observation. Analysis. Execution. I must be a detail-oriented
perfectionist who also see things holistically. (Is that a paradox?)
In striving for these qualities, I’ve learned to take what’s
on a sheet of paper, coax an extra dimension out of it, and let it
live. There are no equations to follow — I have to generate my
own. Sometimes I’ve flopped. But in the end, I’ve learned
a lot about trusting and working with myself.
I’m not alone in indulging in a benign, introverted pastime.
A number of my engineering friends make time to enjoy athletics, photography,
music, and English. Soon, we’ll all need to think about how to
persuade interviewers of the value of these extracurricular activities.
And it may be this: In the classroom, we can read detailed descriptions
of how to derive Clebsch-Gordan coefficients or deal with a fourth-rank
elastic compliance tensor. Those proliferate in academia. But step
outside the classroom and there’s no manual for how to keep moving
for 26 miles or how to start writing a column for Engineering News.
Any job consists of that all-important step over the threshold. What
we do with our time here determines whether we’ll stumble or
stride beyond college. For now, I’ll keep playing my tunes and
hope my interviewers will enjoy listening.
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