Always Take Candy from Strangers

“Be safe! And remember, don’t talk to strangers.”

There are a lot of rules our parents give us as children that we grow out of. This one, though, most of us stick to. Why would we want to randomly talk to strangers? It’s usually safer to just avoid eye contact, and not talk to anyone.

But, don’t tell your mom, I’m here to tell you to break the rules.  Talk to strangers. 

Why? Because it will make your life so much richer, and you will learn far more, and smile far more, and reflect far more than if you stood, staring into the distance on the streetcorner, or sitting on the bus tip-tapping into your phone.

I’ve lived in San Francisco 7 months now. I’m leaving in 3 weeks. It’s the first time I’ve lived in a city (or really anywhere with over 700 people…) With Minerva’s “City as a Campus” philosophy, we are supposed to engage with the city — meaning we literally don’t have a campus. As soon as I step outside my apartment building downtown, I am guaranteed to be surrounded by strangers.There are so many strangers. There are people everywhere.  Everywhere I go. Everywhere. Ahhh! I’m used to stepping outside and disappearing into the forest of trees — now there is Powell Street and a Forest of People. Who I have to interact with. All the time. It’s so uncomfortable. I’ve never had social anxiety and I’m pretty talkative, but it’s really stressful for people to be everywhere.

So what do I do with all these strangers? Well, like the average person, I mostly don’t talk to them, and stick to socially-acceptable-polite-interactions-or-non-interactions. It’s been my goal this year though to talk to more strangers, and every time I have, I’ve been so glad I did.

I met a lot of interesting people this year. There was the first week I was here, when I chatted for 30 minutes with a guy in the subway station and learned all about the rave and Burning Man scene in the Bay Area. There was that time I watched the Supermoon rise above the Bay Bridge and ended up meeting a really amazing woman who happened to be working in the exact career field I want to get into.  The venture capital father with two beautiful little girls down by the Ferry Building. The two women in La Tacqeria also waiting for their burritos (who I almost ignored until I decided to put down my phone and just say “hi”), who shared all about the evolution of San Francisco over the past 50 years. There was the group of Swiss people at Delores Park I ended up playing football with (*after I had sufficiently convinced myself enough that their accent had to be from Zurich). When I offered to take a couple’s picture at the top of Coit tower and struck up a conversation, and later on the woman came up behind me, touched my back in the most tender exchange I have ever felt, and slipped chocolate into my hand. When I helped a homeless man get his wheelchair un-stuck from a sidewalk rut. When I struck up a conversation with two people on the bus just because their backpacks said MEC and I wanted to know if they were Canadian, and another random bus-person joined in, who I ended up swapping numbers and having breakfast with. There’s a member of my choir who gave me an entire tour of the Twin Peaks/Glen Park area and all the perfect places to sit at night and look at the stars. There’s every Uber and Lyft driver I quizzed up about their life outside of driving, and all the industries in SF I learned about I hadn’t thought existed.

I have to admit – I don’t know many people in San Francisco, and I regret that a lot: you don’t need a physical campus to have a social University Bubble. In the next 6 cities, I’m going to make an action plan ASAP to really get to know people. For now though, I just want to tell you to talk to strangers.

I can understand why you don’t want to. New places are scary. New people are scary. You don’t know who you will meet. You don’t know what they will be like. You don’t know what they’ll say. You don’t know how they’ll react to you. You don’t know if they’ll do something to you — “something” being vague, undefined, or perhaps very specific things. Sometimes, you talk to strangers and learn lessons that help you avoid similar creepy dudes in the future. In general, it’s almost guaranteed to be awkward and more uncomfortable than if you just didn’t make eye contact, acted extremely pre-occupied, or put in headphones.

For any chance you have to strike up a conversation, you could think “This might not go the way I want it. It’s just safer not to. Maybe some other time.” Playing the “next time game” though usually results in playing the “never” game.  By looking only at one encounter at a time, you’re narrow framing, which usually results in a risk-averse decision. What if though, you had a broader philosophy for talking to strangers? A strategy of bias-to-action? In general, if you think of all the opportunities you have to talk to strangers and the payoffs from doing so, you’ll likely come out with really rich experiences, even if not in every instance –you win some, and you lose some.

Talking to strangers will broaden your experiences, help you make new friends, and perhaps more importantly on a global scale, connect communities and people in a world where stereotypes, individualism, and in-group mindsets thrive. You gain new perspectives. You build empathy. You connect to humanity. You learn. If you play it safe every time, you’re missing out. Sure, it’s safer or more comfortable, but what is life about? Every time you are stuck with the do-I-talk-or-do-I-not, you can look at the broader picture of payoffs, and past the narrow framing of your immediate fear. (Also, remembering past positive experiences is useful!)

Start with “Hi.” Be authentic. Smile. Make someone feel like they matter as a person enough for someone to want to talk to them. Speaking from personal experience, I have pretty much never regretted striking up a conversation. And we all know the inductive generalizations based off small quantities of anecdotal evidence from a sample size of one in a specific geographical location, makes for a strong argument … (oops. There’s my empiricism kicking in.)

Go outside! Say hi to someone! Make a goal to meet one new person every week from a social group you don’t know well! And Happy April.

PS: if you want rules of thumb for taking candy from strangers, ask me about the summer I spent flagging traffic on the Alaska Highway 😀 #truckercandy (Thanks, Bill).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your One, Wild and Beautiful Life

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? – Mary Oliver

What are you doing with your life right now?

Stop and think about it.

– No, actually stop and think about it. I know you just kept scrolling.

What are you doing with your life? 

We rarely stop and think about this question, but it is one of the most important questions we can ask. Our lives are so busy doing things for us, that we don’t stop and thinking about what we’re doing with them, and why we’re even doing it in the first place.

Decide what living your life means to you. Then go do it. Then keep re-deciding. Then keep moving forward. This isn’t an incredibly novel blog post – but we often don’t pull the important things off the shelf enough and look through them. What do you want? Are you living that?

What are you doing with your life? There are one hundred things programming it right now. Is one of them you?

You have, one, wild, beautiful life. One — and you’re not going backwards in time. Go live it.

 

Thinking about Leaving, Thinking about Starting.

The title of this blog is the title of journal entries, a word document, a text document on my phone, scraps of paper floating around my apartment, and thoughts swirling around in my head. At the end of March I found out I was accepted to Minerva Schools (https://minerva.kgi.edu/). You could say I was quite distracted in April, then, as I made my decision to leave Quest and join the inaugural class at Minerva. It’s quite a story, so I am not going to put it all up. I do want to say that considered a lot of factors before I made my decision–obviously, it’s me!–but today I officially enrolled at Minerva. (I am, however, still very excited to do my final class at Quest in May, called Mathematical Problem Solving.) I have a lot of things I could say, and have thought about this post a lot, but finally just decided to put down what I have here.

One December night,as I was endlessly scrolling through my Facebook news feed (as all good stories begin), an ad popped up on the sidebar for school that was looking to educate global leaders, and revolutionize undergraduate education. I thought “hmm” and clicked on it.  And so it began.

In the end, I knew Minerva would turn my world upside-down, and so I said yes. It’s the challenge, the adventure, and the both exciting and scary prospect of violently popping my small town BC bubble. (Plus, my secret childhood dreams included going to an international boarding school as well as becoming the cool aunt that traveled, and this place walked in and combined both.)

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So: tiny, brand new, seminar-style liberal arts schools that seek to “revolutionize higher education”: I know how to pick ’em.

In some ways, Quest and Minerva are very similar. In some ways, they are very different. Both are suited to specific types of people. What attracted me to Minerva was their intentionality.

Here are some of the things I am most excited about:

a) Minerva’s Foundation Program is explicitly designed around habits of mind and foundational concepts, with relevant content built in to support them (rather than a content-centred approach, which hopes students pick up critical thinking skills and such through the process content), b) they hired back students in the summers to re-work the curriculum with faculty, c) students get to evaluate the teaching of potential faculty hires, d) for every academic change Minerva considers they use A/B testing methods (not too complicated, but something few schools seem to actually bother doing-having controls) e) students evaluate each class, and get evaluated each class- there are feedback metrics more than assignments! yay! f) Habits of mind are built upon and graded upon not just in the first year but throughout the entire education process –so you use and reinforce them, not forget what you learned in class g) Over 80% of the students are from outside the USA, and h) the admissions process is need-blind and the sticker price is set lower than most other institutions, so Minerva doesn’t have an incentive to preference wealthy students- but they also don’t accept federal financial aid, so don’t have an incentive to market to needy students either and pull in loan funding.

… I was pretty sold. There are some other really really cool things about their model and pedagogy: check out the website.

Oh, and did I mention that rather than investing in expensive buildings, they instead take advantage of cities and use them as campuses and learning tools? The Inaugural class will be living in San Francisco, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Bangaluru, Seoul, Istanbul, and London.

There are things I am less sold on- still not sure how I feel about the web-based platform model.  Additionally, one of Minerva’s “arms” is for-profit, which raises potential conflict-of-interest concerns, but I have to admit, it allows it to raise funding and make changes much more quickly than a non-profit. Plus, Minerva is new, and hasn’t even graduated a class yet. That is exciting for me, but also means a lot of work for both students and staff in terms of breaking grounds. A lot of things will have a lot of kinks.

I am going in with eyes wide open that it will not be perfect (something that would have served me well to have done with Quest). I still have a lot of questions.  However, overall I am incredibly excited to strike out on this new adventure of challenges and opportunity. So far, it’s meant my first use of the app Uber, meeting classmates from 50 different countries, eating Arabic food, studying art on Alcatraz, learning to code with Python, dusting off my Calculus, and setting myself up on a schedule to learn German, Spanish, Korean, Hindi, and Turkish…I’ll keep you updated on how that goes. I know it will be challenging (read: very very hard and exhausting), and sometimes suck, and I will cry. But overall I think I will emerge with amazing experiences, connections, skills, and stories. It will mean cooking, dressing, speaking, learning, communicating, traveling, and working in completely new ways.

As Mike, (a security guard at Quest) put it when I was trying to decide, “Wow, that’s a rare experience. You’d really come out as a different person.” And I looked out over my beautiful mountains and cozy campus community and thought, he’s right. Damn.

So blame him if you are mad at me for leaving.

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I feel incredibly privileged to have this opportunity. In fact, I don’t just “feel” that way- I am hugely privileged, and I know it. In many ways I have won the lottery of life– education privilege, intelligence privilege, supported by nationality and social class privilege. (Not that Minerva isn’t meritocratic in its selection process- just that I recognize these factors have given me support and opportunities which developed my abilities.) Once again, it has made me think a lot about my responsibility to the world, and to the other people in it bearing the weight of its broken system–from whom I have benefited from.

As Haziq (a Founding Class Minerva student) put it, “Ask yourself: what could you do with the resources of some of the world’s most accomplished + well-connected people behind you? Break traditional boundaries; don’t think about ‘career paths’, think about important problems you want to tackle. People might disagree with me in this, but you’ve got an incredible opportunity to give back to people who didn’t win the lottery of life – use it to move the world forward!”

Minerva is a new start-up. It has bold claims and big dreams. It is a risk, but it will be an adventure.

So watch out, world. September 2015: Esther’s undergraduate education revolution take 2, coming to a city near you.