Yes, the NSF ITR request for proposal is out! I don't know if I should be happy or sad about it. First deadline is January 14 and then the proposal deadline is February 24. I have gone through it and it is still applicable to my research, so I guess I will be working on this proposal for a while.

This morning I woke up from a dream that (I still don't quite understand how) made me spend the whole early morning (until I got to the office and got back to my good and old work) thinking about what will happen after I graduate. I always try to run away from this subject, and actually that's one of the reasons I ended up here in Stillwater, but today I just decided to think a little bit more.

The problem is that my conclusion is always the same: there isn't anything I really like seeing myself doing for the rest of my life. At the same time, there is nothing that I can really say: "I would never even think about doing this one day." Life becomes hard when you can't even decide by cutting out what you don't want to do.

Cutting out was the way I chose to go for Engineering in my undergrad. For those who are not familiar with the higher education system in Brazil, just a short explanation (that will be useful to understand the need of a choice): most universities have an entrance examination. For you to take this exam, you have to define what is the major your are interested so that you compete with people with the same objective for the limited number of available seats. Some details and weighting of the exam can also change depending on the major selected. For example, if you choose engineering in Fuvest (one of the most important entrance examinations), in the second part of the exam (it is divided into two groups of days - the first group, currently divided into two weekends, is a multiple choice type of exam that covers all main school subjects: Portuguese, English, Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, History, and Geography; the second is divided into three or four days and contains essay-type questions) you take only Portuguese, Physics, Math, and Chemistry. If you choose history you have to take the Portuguese, History, and Geography exams. And so on.

For some majors there are some practical exams. For example, if you want to do your undergrad in Music you have to have an audition and take a music theory exam.

Anyway, this long explanation to talk about my choices when I was planning to go to college. In high-school I participated on a course (it was optional) to help deciding what I wanted to do. Everything was interesting because I love to study in general, but I had to start removing the things I didn't think I could do. Medicine was the first. My older sister was in med school and I saw how much she suffered memorizing all names and things like that. I couldn't see myself being able to memorize all this (my memory was always very bad - but this is a subject for another post). Because of memory issues I continued cutting out all subjects from humanities and biological sciences. I was left with Physics, Math and Engineering. The psychologist thought that I should go to physics. However, when my father (and electrical engineer) knew that I was thinking of going this way, he gathered his contacts and gave me a lecture showing that Physics in Brazil is not what I thought it was and that I would end up being a teacher (or not working with physics).

Being a teacher wasn't something I really thought I would be able to do. I always knew I had problems conveying the things I knew, and always thought I didn't know enough to teach people. This made me choose engineering. Inside engineering I ended up going to electrical engineering because of my fascination for computers (not something that my father was very happy about, because he always tried to convince me that computers were tools and not things to really specialize on - although his emphasis on his undergrad was computers and digital systems).

However, when I graduated I found out that, although I really liked computers, the only jobs I would ever find would be of programming. And I found it most of the times just plain boring... That's when this invitation to come to OSU came and I took it. It was something temporary again, and would give me time and more experience to think of what I really want to do for the rest of my life. And, well, I am getting to the decision point again. As time passes, decisions become more important, and much more difficult, in my opinion.

But, well, I wasn't going to post something this huge any more, I know... But I just felt like writing while I wait for my program to finish working on my homework. Today's plan is to finish this homework so that the only things I'll have left for the end of the semester (classes-wise) would be a final project and one final exam. Everything on track.