Raghav Sampangi Faculty, Computer Science Everyone has had experiences, terrible or fantastic. We share that and that creates friendships and communities. It was actually in the middle of Grade 11 that I met with an accident. I fell from a motorbike and I had a brain hemorrhage, so I was out cold for two days and in the ICU when I woke up. I had a feeding tube in my nose and my legs were tied because, apparently, I was irritable. I was hitting people. I was unconscious. I had no idea what I was doing. Still today I don’t remember what happened that day. A lot of things changed then. The aspect of contentment which I think was kind of just in the background during my teenage years and high school, that kind of came more to the foreground after. It was very interesting how I could observe that change myself. One of the things it also forced me to do was focus and understand human interactions, why we do certain things and why not. My parents have had me on a spiritual path since I was very young. Not necessarily religious path but a spiritual path so it’s been an interesting set of experiences and intuition is something that I tend to rely on quite a bit and it felt right. There were a lot of things that I felt that I had to do and this was one. It was a hard decision for sure, trying to leave a dad who’s had a heart attack in the past and it was really hard. The idea was for me to finish my PhD as soon as I could, maybe have a couple of years work experience and then return. A lot of where I learned my lessons are from my dad because he was a journalist by profession and he actively encouraged my mother to get an advanced degree in medicine and he encouraged her to go forth and get the experience and career. He made a choice to stay home and he said, “I’m going to look after the family, I’m going to look after the kids”. I learned a lot of lessons from this because, you know, the aspect of not sticking to conventions is something I learned from all of that because why should something be just because it’s been for so long? It’s systematic, it’s cultural sadly that there’s been a discouraging effort that prevents young women from choosing a career in computing but it doesn’t have to be that way, especially in computing. It’s one thing that is purely inclusive. There’s no necessary gender roles there in any way. Everybody has some sort of connection to music. It connects everybody, everywhere. I was frustrated one day, my students and I both were frustrated, trying to solve a problem in the class, and there was this song from Pitch Perfect, ‘Cheap Thrills,’ which was stuck in my head for more than 24 hours so I had to do something about it and I wrote a song which was about debugging and coding and the pains of it. Ultimately, it became a thing and I wrote another one and then another one, and parody songs became a thing in my class. I made a very conscious choice to not be the way I used to be, to not be closed up in a shell. To be here talking like this would have been impossible nine years ago, it would have been completely impossible. Other than music, the other thing that connects humans is experiences. Everyone has had experiences, terrible or fantastic. We share that and that creates friendships and communities. ← Tim ↑ Home Jason →
