Loser Like Me

I am a nerd.

Not in a cool "Glee" cheerleader kind of way, but really really nerdy.

Oh sure, it was more obvious when I was a slightly chubby kid with braces, odd little haircuts and big coke bottle glasses. But despite my straight teeth, decent hair and LASIK-tuned eyes, I still love math and corny music, I'm still not really athletically inclined (really!), and I still get awkwardly shy around people I don't know.

Yup, that's me!

OK, OK.  I know I left engineering and (sort of) came back, but let's be honest...I've always been a geek deep down.  Even when I was working at LLS, I was WAY more into the budget numbers, scheduling and coordination that most of my co-workers.  Truth be told, I enjoyed it when they asked me about the construction sequencing of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge project, as we gazed out of the windows from our office on Route 1 in Alexandria. When we would go out to training runs, I would tsk tsk at the poor drainage on some of the trails and point out how a very simple grading modification would eliminate all the ponding.  So while I never thought I'd be back in the engineering world, I can't say I ever stayed TOO far away from it.

Route 1/495/95 interchange from the LLS side of the Potomac

One of the things that is cool about working with engineering students is that I see myself in a lot of them.  Going back for my Duke reunion this past weekend brought back so many of these feelings, and I was glad my "partner in crime" Cat was there too.  We were alike in many ways...we were female civil engineering students who excelled in high school but felt very middle-of-the-road at Duke.

We were still fairly motivated, but became beaten down by the ultra-competitive nature of our fellow students.  We called each other "slacker," killed time in class by making up games (remember, this was before laptops!), and slept through more classes than we cared to admit to our parents (sorry mom!).  We even calculated how much of our parents' money we wasted every time we skipped class.  We joked about it a lot, but secretly, I think we were both pretty disappointed that we weren't getting straight A's with one or two B's anymore.

Two "slackers" and a classy wine cooler - camping out for the Carolina game in 1996.

 Cat was going to do anything BUT engineering and I was going to grad school because I had no idea what to do next and I wanted to put off the "real world" for a little bit longer.  Fast forward 15 years, and she's the only one of our friends who is still a design engineer and I am teaching a civil engineering class at a Top 10 university.

Believe me, NONE of our friends in college would've called that!

The two slackers are now a professor and a project engineer.
Amstel Light has replaced Bartles & James. Upgrade!

So what I really want to tell these students is that it's OK to have no idea what to do with your life.  Embrace your inner nerd!  Have confidence in your intelligence...it won't let you down.

I'm not saying that it will always be an easy road.  Please...did you see that first picture?  How could you NOT make fun of that kid?!  But being a geek is kinda cool. Really! I feel like people told me that in high school and college, but it's something that I never really truly believed.

Trust me.  "Soon enough you'll figure out, you wanna be...a loser like ME!"