PointsSouth: Articles 2007

I was sitting at a picnic table at Albert Whitted Airport. I was there to help my teammate, Ashley, film a video on the Young Eagles program, where kids get to go up in a small plane for free. The organizers approached and asked who was ready to fly in the airplane. After a brief debate, we agreed that Ashley would go up first. It was her video. Moments after she left, a helicopter pilot came over and asked if anyone wanted a ride.

"Heck yes!" I blurted out.

I strapped in, put on the bulky headset, and listened to my pilot request permission to lift off. The chopper was nothing more than a bubble of glass in front and open air to the sides. As it rose straight up, I looked all around me and felt the wind rush by, slightly petrified that I was going to drop my video camera and kill some innocent sunbather. Mostly, though, I just had one thought.

Computer scientists don't do stuff like this.

Most of us spend our lives trying to figure out what to do. In my life, I have two warring influences. On the one hand, I could be a computer scientist, make a bunch of money and spend my life hanging out with total nerds. On the other hand, I could be a journalist, a poor crusader for truth who might get to sleep in until 10 and go to NFL games for free.

Money versus happiness, right? The classic debate.

Except I don't hate computer science - most of the time - I just like journalism a little bit more. But there's a lot to be said for a $70,000 starting salary, stock options and a nice signing bonus.

I blame my parents, who are so wildly talented in such different ways that I'm lucky their genes were capable of mixing. My dad is a rocket scientist who makes beautiful stained glass lamps in his spare time and could probably beat me in a footrace. My mom is a chief dietitian turned academic turned young-adult novelist, who routinely wakes up at 4 a.m. to work out.


My dad always helped me with math and science - or at least with the projects. He could never explain the theory behind anything, but he could tell me how to build a balsa wood bridge that would hold twice as much weight as any of my classmates' bridges.

When I had to make a trebuchet (a kind of medieval catapult) for a high school physics class, my dad looked at my ideas, nodded approvingly, and then disappeared into a closet. He came back out with a big grin and some surgical tubing. We spent about a week together in his workshop, and I don't think he stopped grinning once.

The rest of my class had trouble flinging a softball the 20 feet necessary to get an A. My catapult threw the ball 75 yards.

Another time, in an honors science class, I had to make a water-powered rocket out of 2-liter soda bottles. My partner and I came home with laborious plans for a 4-foot-long rocket with eight fins and a healthy smattering of duck tape for weight. My dad listened to our ideas, then smiled and quickly sketched a foot-long, four-fin model. We won the competition.

My dad never told me what I should do with my life, but I could tell what he was interested in. He always asked me what I was doing in my computer classes, what I thought of the operating-system wars, or what programming languages I was learning. We once had a three-day screaming match over whether or not centrifugal force is real (I still say it isn't).

My mom's work in my life was far less concrete. I would send her my papers before I turned them in, and she would e-mail them back to me a half-hour later full of red editing marks. I learned more about writing from my mom than from most of my teachers.

My parents weren't defined by their specialties, though. My dad will sit in front of a computer and hunt-and-peck the keyboard for an hour, then hand me a beautifully crafted paper. And every once in a while, my mom will casually drop some obscure bit of science knowledge, then smile craftily and say, "Hey, I know a thing or two."

My junior year of high school, I got into a computer science class with the seniors. I spent most of the class as an informal teaching assistant. I would finish my project in a day, then spend the rest of the week strolling around the classroom, perching behind my classmates, helping them fix their code. I made a whole group of older friends by explaining what "syntax error, line 42: 'reverse(sum, sheru)'" meant.

For our final project, we coded a pixel-by-pixel movie and played it for the class. Most of my peers made stick figures stroll across the screen. When my turn came, I grinned proudly as a flying saucer swooped in, picked up a man in a tractor beam, then spit out his bones as it flew away.

But I like writing a lot, too. Reporting takes me to places and people I would otherwise never encounter. Writing gives me a chance to share what I find interesting with others. Words were my handy extra skill, my backup talent. But it was never my intention to make them the main attraction of my career.

I chose the University of Illinois because it had strong programs in both journalism and computer science. My major was computer science. As a sophomore, I showed up to the Daily Illini office and asked to cover the tennis team. I thought it would give me the chance to watch sports and make money.

They sent me to the city council meeting instead.

I sat in the council chambers for two years, about one year and 10 months longer than anybody else had. I loved knowing what was going on in the city, quizzing the council members on their decisions, having the mayor in my speed dial.

By my junior year, I was straddling the fence between the two fields. I had picked up journalism as a second major. I frantically searched for internships in both journalism and computer science and picked up the first one that was offered, a programming job in Minnesota. I liked it well enough, but found myself sitting at my desk blogging during my free time, anxious to keep writing.

I was still torn.

During my senior year, computer job offers poured in. Journalism offers did not. But still, I couldn't commit. My favorite professor, the one who inspired me to get a journalism degree, recommended I check out the Poynter Institute's Summer Fellowship program. I applied.

I ducked out of my part-time job in the computer science department to take the phone interview. A couple of weeks later, another call came in. I got in, and managed once again to forestall making a final decision.

Now, with the fellowship ending, it seems my time is up.

Poynter has been a revelation of sorts for me. It's been a whirlwind, but I've never felt out of place or panicked. I always felt very much at home. I met plane crash survivors, fake pirates and a former mayor who decided to build boats instead. I worked with men and women who could carry on conversations and had lives outside of work. And I was outside all the time.

In short, my summer in journalism has been engaging, interesting, even fun. The previous summer in computer science didn't suck. But it was not engaging, interesting or fun.

Somehow, Poynter had a way of convincing me that I could survive in journalism. Once, after a particularly depressing lecture about the job market, Jacqui Banaszynski pulled me aside to edit my second story. Jacqui had already butchered my first story, vomiting blue ink on the page until it was all but unreadable. And I had just spent an hour with my chin on my fist, listening to Kelly McBride talk about making $24,000 a year, moving constantly and sending out 50 resumes to get one interview.

I was more than a little down.

I braced for my second round of editing with Jacqui. I didn't even have a chance to sit down. She looked at me and said "I just changed a couple of things. You did a really good job, Eric."

I'm a person who thrives on reinforcement. How could I be down when I'm getting compliments from Pulitzer-winners?

Now Poynter is over, and it's time to finally make a choice. I have that big offer on the table from Cisco Systems, which is like getting a job from the Washington Post straight out of college.

Yet, I really like the little quirks writers discover. I like hearing about the time a superstar athlete tried and failed to pick up a girl. Or when a girl's dad took her MySpace profile away because she was using scientific terms and he didn't know what they meant. And I'm afraid that I won't find those things at Cisco Systems, sitting at a desk all day.

People encourage me to look to try to combine journalism and computer science, to work for EveryBlock or NewsU, programming the future of journalism. But will that be more interesting? The appeal of journalism is getting out and meeting new people all the time, and sharing their stories with others. Would I get that at a computer journalism job?

I just don't know.

Like my mom, I'm a storyteller. When we talk on the phone, we don't so much have conversations as swap stories. But like my dad, I can hack it in science. I don't mind it and I can make money in it. But I don't love it.

My parents paid for my entire college education, a tremendous gift, and I want to be able to do that for my kids. I want to have the hot laptop and big Christmases.

When I get home from Poynter, my parents are getting me a car. Before I left, my dad and I sat down, looking through a car guide, trying to figure out what to buy. I wanted a hybrid, but he was worried about whether the new technology would last. We talked about features, price, gas mileage.

He always thinks things like that through, every scientific step of the way. Me, I'm just excited that my parents are buying me a car.

And I can't help but think - journalists can't do stuff like this.