Graduation Year: '95

address: 46 Quincy St.
North Adams, MA 01247

occupation: Chief Technical Officer

Email address: nick@radiovoodoo.com

As I completed my junior year at Williams, my intent was to pursue an advanced degree in philosophy, though I can't claim that I knew what exactly I would do with it!
Going through my senior year, it slowly dawned on me that the market for philosophy professors is an extremely tight and difficult one, and that perhaps I ought to examine other, more practical extensions of philosophy.

I looked around, and decided that law might be the right thing to do - a philosophical basis, huge emphasis on logic, and plenty of demand for the services.
Entranced by the newly-developing World Wide Web, I decided to study law as it related to the Internet where possible. I applied to a number of schools, found that it was pretty easy to get accepted, and chose to head down to the Apple to attend NYU.

Law school proved to be less philosophically-oriented than I had hoped. Well, let me be more specific: my leanings are towards epistemology and philosophy of emotion. These have some bearing on criminal law - state of mind is a big deal - but not so much so as I might have hoped.
More, the style of teaching was not what I had expected; while the application of logic was very rigorous and extremely helpful, the goal was not so much deep questioning or the attempt to construct philosophical groundwork, but rather the application of an existing structure to your own ends.
Of course it was naive of me to expect otherwise, and that practice can itself be exhilarating, but it wasn't what I wanted.

I took a leave of absence from the school after my first year to consider other possibilities. While at school, I had been doing some work on the side doing Web design, and found that this was closer to what I really enjoyed. So at the start of that year off, I spoke with some job recruiters about technical and design positions in the city. Well, to make a long story short, I ended up with a couple of friends back in Williastown, where Tripod was just beginning to really take off. There I was a programmer, returning to my computer hobbyist roots. I've been working as a techie in various capacities for four years now, and just recently left Tripod (now Lycos) to begin work as the Chief Technical Officer for a new Internet startup in town.

While I was at Tripod, my philosophy background was enormously useful. The training in logic is invaluable for evaluating no products and technologies, for architecting good software that will stand the test of time. More, Tripod presented endless ethical and moral conflicts. Given, for example, that you produce a publishing platform that many people use for good or at least neutral purposes, but which a few use for questionable or blatantly problematic ends, what do you do? Do you condemn the whole enterprise? Do you do as we did, and construct tools which help to limit the bad stuff? What is the bad stuff, anyway? Is porn bad? What is porn? Is hate speech bad? Is a publisher responsible for the bad content that it enables? All old questions, but new in the context of the Web and our enterprise, and new as immediate, real concerns, not theoretical playthings.

Moral(s) of the story? I think there are a few, but the only one that I would be comfortable espousing universally is that it is a Good Idea to take time off if you are not sure whether you should be pursuing a given advanced degree program, or suspect that you may be "burning out" in some sense. There are always great things to do with your time that do not have to do with school. When I was at law school, many of the other students had taken time off before going, and they clearly benefited - they were more relaxed, more organized, and had a clearer sense of why they were there in the first place. That's enormously beneficial.

I guess I would also note that philosophy finds its way into the practice of your everyday life if you want it to - one does not have to pursue a clearly philosophical profession for this to be the case. So students who are looking to incorporate philosophy into their post-Williams lives need not despair that the only way they can do so is to go the hard and not-always-appropriate route of philosophy graduate school. Whether you run a philosophy 'zine, or talk on philosophy newsgroups, or just try to nourish your own philosophy through the practicum of everyday life, you have not necessarily abandoned philosophy if you do not continue with it in an academic context. Choose what is right for you.