Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts

NY Baking Examiner

A few years ago, I was bored and, like many others, I started googling to find some friends from high school (c’mon…admit it, you’ve done it too).  Obviously before Facebook made the world flat and small.

For some reason, whenever I looked for my friend (I say that with a weird feeling – I haven’t seen her in…11 years?) Bora Chang, I kept coming across someone who was writing articles for, I think, Sunset magazine.  About beauty products.  I couldn’t help but wonder how there could be such a highly visible other Bora Chang out there, and was certainly annoyed that it made it so hard to find my friend.

Turns out Bora Chang was…Bora Chang.  And now she’s doing freelance work for examiner.com.  So perhaps of all of us that graduated from high school between maybe 1995-1998 (wrapping around 1996, when I graduated), Bora might be the most published individual of all.

Kinda neat.  I know Bora Chang.  🙂

I’ve been wondering lately about whether I should start wearing a tie to work, or perhaps when in my career it would be appropriate to do so, if ever.  Please note that I work in academia, in administration (as compared to faculty) so it’s not the same as working in corporate.  And I’m in Silicon Valley, known for being a relatively laid-back work environment, in genera.

My motivations for asking myself this question are two fold.  The first is the obvious – formality, title, how I present myself, etc.  The second is a bit more subtle.  Every time I change jobs, I utilize clothing as one way to kind of “reinvent” myself.  When I first started working, shorts, t-shirts and sandals were fine.  Next job, I decided shorts weren’t quite right.  After that, I moved away from t-shirts.  Then it became polos or buttoned shirts only, though many of the latter were quite informal.  

When I came to Santa Clara, I switched over to dress shirts and nice (I hope) slacks every day.  I don’t wear jeans, I don’t wear even polo shirts.  It helped me feel like I had moved onto something different, and perhaps something more “official.”  

But I was meeting with someone yesterday whom I realized generally wears a tie.  At least, I can’t think of an example when I have met with him and he wasn’t wearing one.  It’s not a really fancy shirt with a really fancy tie, but there is certainly a different look.  

I wonder if there is some confluence of timing, events, title, etc that suggests I should start wearing a tie.  Random thoughts, I know.

When I worked at Stanford, I can’t think of a single conference that I attended alone.  There was always one or two other Stanford colleagues there at over a dozen trips.  In addition, because of how I started at Stanford, where I got to know a lot of other people very quickly and then built upon that base over time, I often was attending those conferences with people I knew fairly well.

Now, for a number of reasons, I have gone to conferences on my own (the rest of the staff go to their conferences on their own, too, FWIW – it’s a lot to do with lack of redundancy in our small department, perhaps more so than budget issues).  The change in the dynamics when one is at a conference solo has been quite surprising.  

At just about every moment – during sessions, between sessions, at meals, at special events – I am asking people if I can join them, introducing myself, and perhaps even insinuating myself into existing groups and conversations.  Each time, I am working to remember names, jobs, schools, interests, and trying hard to make myself memorable, to offer something valuable in return, etc.  

At times, the groups that I am trying to “infiltrate” are cliques of people who have known and worked with each other through these conferences for years.  They have served as officers of the organization, presented together, etc.  They are not exclusive in the sense that they shun interactions from others (a la high school or something like that), but there is an undeniable “wall” that exists when a group of people know each other that well and you’re looking in from the outside.  It’s there, implicitly.  And it’s daunting to ignore that sensation, even if it is all in my head.  And overall, this is just simply tiring.

In reality, I am not really alone at these conferences – at each one, I have known people.  But they are often there with colleagues of their own. 

This is not one of my most articulate posts, but I am sitting here, in my hotel room, having retired earlier than I would like, having not gotten up the energy to break down the wall that I perceive in my head that holds me back from making that extra effort to say hello to people.