[mpw-staff] Fwd: Re: Thank you for coming to the workshop!

[Mel Chua]

Response #2.

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Thanks very much to you and your colleagues for offering this
opportunities to meet great people.

The topic I am thinking the most is about social support in academia. I
felt I was almost dying in my little office doing my little research,
and it was so nice to meet people in the workshop. I tend to
procrastinate a lot when do programming myself, it's so boring to do it
myself, esp. whenever think about my adviser's scary face, I don't want
to do it anymore... It was so nice to have encouraging and passionate
human beings around. Like [otherstudent said, it made her more 
comfortable to have [friend] who she knows well around, I am sort of 
thinking we need layers of layers of social support. We need close 
friends, friends, and new people. We need close conversations, and fresh 
ideas and encouragement to keep life moving. Having both close and loose 
relationships on casual collaborations makes things fun.

This workshop also makes me feel formal classroom is so boring and
informal learning is so much fun. If we cannot change the formal
education system in a short time, we can definitely do something in the
educational movement outside of the formal system.

You guys did a great job in introducing Python in such a short time! I
hope I could hear more about the big pictures of how things work (for
example, what each dependency we downloaded is for, and if we want to
use the API in our own project, what are things we need to download from 
Twitter, what are things we need to write ourselves), rather than having 
too many details about the syntax and having everything needs to be 
installed prepared for us.  But I understand all these cost time.

I am very interested in doing something to give back to the open source
community, and I would like to know more about it and participate in it.
If you need volunteers for organizing this kind of events in the future, 
do let me know. Thank you!