I don't doubt my ability to do the Media Lab. I know that my acceptance wasn't a mistake. They accepted me because they liked what I had done before and knew that I have what it takes to succeed here. My problem is that just because I can doesn't mean I should. Each day I have wondered if I wouldn't be better off somewhere else.

At the ETC I would have my friends in Pittsburgh. I think those students are more like me, I know what that program involves and that I would not only succeed but also enjoy it. Of course I question what value it would have for me but that is a different issue.

Here at the Media Lab I don't feel like I fit in. I haven't done as intellectual stuff as other first years. I've never been published, I came straight from my undergrad, and I wasn't doing real research. In this context the stuff I've done before seems even more childish. I wasn't doing research I was just a programmer. And I don't think there is anything wrong with making games, maybe that's what I should be doing.

The realness of this place scares me. I have always been good at coming up with clever solutions to problems. I feel I would have an adequate ability to perform experiments on the solutions to measure their impact or to iteratively improve them. Within a give domain I could probably even identify what might be needing an improvement. But what I am not good at is coming up, out of thin air, "interesting" problems to work on. This is a factor both in my research, where we need to decide what to work on, and in my classes, where my first assignments have been to come up with ideas for class projects with no further guidance.

I come home and I worry about these things. It reminds me of all the worrying I often do about pending classwork. I have all my neat side projects that I want to work on, but I can't because of the class work which I am reluctant to do, yet I have a good enough ethic to prevent me from doing fun things instead. I think maybe I would have been happier just getting a job, where what I do during the day is up to my boss and what I do after the end of the day is up to me. None of this having to figure out for myself how I'm going to earn my paycheck, and none of this guilt about enjoying my evenings.

I wonder if perhaps I chose to go to grad school for the wrong reasons. Is it possible that I applied and enrolled at grad school for fear of change? I have gone to school all my life. I have previous experience with applying to college. Applying to and going to grad school was something I knew how to do. It was continuing the way I had been going. By contrast, I've never really applied for a job in the traditional manner. Stage3 I just talked to Randy and he had a unique method of hiring people. At John Hancock I got the interview through a connection so I didn't actually apply though I did have to interview, submit a resume, etc. Prior to that all the jobs I had held were the types of high school jobs that are set up for high schoolers to apply for. Walk in get the application and turn it in, not like the process for finding a real job. But even if I wasn't ready to apply for a job in the spring, would I have been better off graduating with nothing to do except full-time job hunting? I likely could have stayed on as staff for Stage3 to at least collect a meager sallary while doing it, too.

Finally, of course, there is the social issue. I haven't quite made friend yet. There are some people that I would consider friends but it really isn't the same thing. I don't have anyone to hang out with, do stuff with, invite over, etc. I have the people that are my friends when I go to work or when I bump into them, but when I'm not explicitly doing something else, I'm in my room by myself. This is only the third week so I do expect things to get better. Still, I have my doubts. In the past my friends that I hung out with were AEPi and I lived with them. If I had come from a dorm setting with a roommate I'd probably think of the transition as living with 1 other person to 2 other people only now we have our own rooms. However, AEPi, though dorm style was more like a large apartment (house) with many individual rooms (some having multiple people), rather than a dorm building with multiple livings spaces. Therefor, this transition feels like going from living with 30 people to 2. Unlike the downstairs at AEPi where I could always go to find people to talk and hang out with, the downstairs of this apartment is always empty. I'm not sure I know how to make friends in the traditional way or how that kind of friendship is facilitated if I do develope a traditional friend group.