“Talent = the desire to Practice” : Gladwell

I did not start out ever thinking I would be involved in any way with anything remotely associated with science or technology. I thought I was going to be a painter.

I grew up on the West Side in Manhattan, and my early education took place in NYC public schools through high school. I was two years ahead, 15 and a senior at the High School of Art & Design when I became ill. I did not graduate with my class, but obtained my GED the following semester.

I went into theater, dance and art with passion and some skill, and was well into a career in the performing arts when I was injured, ending my dreams of becoming a famous dancer. I moved to Brooklyn, and redirected my efforts into my education, enrolling at Pratt School of Architecture, while keeping up full time employment in Real Estate. I did well, won prizes, and received a small scholarship for being a woman in a non-traditional field. In placing 1st runner up in a contest for the reclamation of the Gowanus, I thought for sure I would be a new age rebel architect, building geodesic domes in Brooklyn and Alaska.

In my fourth year, I took an early class in what was then referred to as CAD for Architecture. This course required that I learn Assembler, Fortran and Basic, and learn how to plot pixels on a television screen, to render an elevation of a simple structure. This was my first experience with computer programming, and it changed the course of my life.

I fell in love with my computer, an Apple 2e. It seemed a mystery and a promise of such extraordinary dimensions. I had no conflict at all as to what I wanted to do, and I left school. Of course, I was not in Computer science, or math, and I did not believe I had any future in earning a living in computers. It was my good fortune to have arrived on the scene at the birth of the PC revolution, providing me an entrance into what would become my work for the next twenty years.

Technology still fires me in this elemental way, and the state of the art, as it is today, is something I have witnessed from it’s beginning first hand. I do have many stories. Due to my studies at Pratt, I have always been aware that the principals and structures in physical Architecture, Morphology and aesthetics relate to the cyberland that computer technology embodies. In essence, ‘Form follows Function’ and ‘God/the Devil is in the Details’ are still guiding principals for me. I find many predecessors for technology in art, philosophy and human studies. For instance, object-oriented programming clearly resembles the structure of language, and the study of artificial intelligence is born out of biology. I think this is what one studies at the higher levels in universities.

Alas, I have had not time or money to ensconce myself in the ivory towers, but I have worked for over twenty years, raised a beautiful child, and retained my passion for learning. >>>my linkedIn