So, what are you doing with your year off?

The worst part about being a LOAner (one of my goals this term is to get an arbitrary term into the common lexicon) is constantly answering the question “So, what are you doing with your year off?” and its variants “What have you been up to?” and “Which one of your family members is going to support you when you’re unemployed and living on the street?”

It’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask. If I tell someone that I’m studying Systems engineering (“It’s a combination of mechanical and electrical- sort of half a double major”) at a small but respectable accredited engineering college in Massachusetts, they would have a concrete, albeit probably inaccurate, concept of my past, present, and future. There are even some year off options that are pretty well understood, like doing an internship or traveling. They are considered intrinsically noble pursuits, and don’t require too much more explanation.

Because I don’t have any one theme to tie up the semester, my answer becomes a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. Like all chaotic systems, the conversation is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. If I’m feeling up to a longer conversation, the mention the web startup that I’m currently working on. Naturally, this leads to endless questions about what it does and how (I will be posting about it as soon as I get some of the final basics settled.) The medium-length solution is to get into the Solar Decathlon, and hope that if I tell them enough stories about things I have done, they’ll forget to ask about what I’m currently doing. Finally, I could deflect the question by saying “Oh, pretty much just hanging around”. In my experience, this will generally kill the conversation after a few more awkward exchanges .

It’s still better than having to lay out why I was in Washington DC on the MIT Solar Decathlon team, at which point I generally have to remind them that I don’t attend MIT- I just live there and build altfuel cars and houses with them. Then it turns into a discussion of why I chose Olin, and what Olin is in the first place. Which defeats the purpose of a medium-length solution.

I do enjoy telling people about what I’m doing, where I’m staying (I ❤ pika), and why attending Olin while taking advantage of the extracurriculars at MIT is the best deal in the world. But I’ve found that coming home has required me to repeatedly tell the story from the beginning (“I was at my high school college fair, and there was this one little college that nobody was paying attention to, so we went over to check it out….”) It gets old after a while. But I guess that if you wander a bit off the beaten path, everyone’s going to wonder where you’ve been, and if you fought an angry bear.

For the record, I haven’t fought any bears, but I met a massive (or, as Ben would suggest, giant) beaver…