Written by: Henry Lynch | Vanderbilt Junior | History and Economics Major
I grew up in a quaint little town in Wisconsin, took a gap year, spent a year at a Canadian university, and then transferred to Vanderbilt. My path here has been more of a wander than a plan, and this summer was no exception.
I came to the College of Connected Computing from a weird angle. An off-chance interaction with the Dean compelled me to see what was going on at this new institution, and I followed my gut all the way to a summer internship. I study economics and history, so having the future at front of mind was new to me here.
My job, at its core, was to give this new college some student energy. I strove to accomplish that in a variety of ways. I built small web tools that let the CCC tell its story in a way students would understand. I wrote features on students and faculty, trying to ask questions that get to the heart of why a person is researching what they’re researching or building what they’re building. I sat for a video with a graduate student and found out how much patience a single honest minute of footage costs. I even had a small hand in more unexpected projects, a little work alongside the Vanderbilt football team, the kind of sentence I did not expect to write when the summer began.
None of it was work a computer could have finished for me. A model can draft a paragraph. But it can’t get into the mind of a nervous freshman and know what really drives them beyond what they might write in an application essay. It can generate a hundred images of a college, but it can’t tell you which one is true.
That, I came to understand, is the core idea of this college. The CCC believes in a phrase: the answer is human. I didn’t think much of it for a while, but after months of being immersed in this environment, I learned it’s much deeper than I first thought. It means that technology doesn’t take the microphone out of the human’s hands, but rather it simply turns up the volume on what that human had to say. I truly believe this to be an accurate vision for how technology will drive innovation in our world.
I want to be careful now, because I’m about to praise the people I worked with, and praise is cheap. So let me be specific. The CCC team took a history major with certainly more curiosity than credentials and gave him meaningful projects to work on and room to execute them how he saw fit. They corrected my work without once making me feel small for needing it. They took my questions seriously in meetings that I was lucky to be in at all. I watched the Dean and the people around him make the case for a college the way you make the case for anything you really believe in, patiently, just out in the open. The work really felt like more than a line on a résumé. I am extremely lucky and grateful to have been a small part of this team this summer.
I am leaving with a strange kind of confidence, given where I started. Not because I’ve attained some mastery of technology, because I most certainly have not. Confidence, instead, in the thing I brought with me and nearly apologized for. A humanities education is a kind of training in meaning, in reading people and choosing words, and it turns out a college that teaches the most advanced tools in the world is hungry for exactly that. The machines are extraordinary. They are also, in the end, instruments, and an instrument waits for a hand.
I came to the College of Connected Computing from a weird angle. I am leaving fairly sure there is no such thing. The answer was human the whole time. My job was to help say so.