So how on earth did I end up in computer science after studying comparative literature as an undergrad?

There are better questions to ask. For example: Why didn't I at least minor in computer science to begin with? Why didn't I take a single visual arts class at Princeton, traditional or otherwise? And, least obviously, how did hacking together code lead to any real aptitude for math? The two don't always go hand in hand.

I don't have short answers for any of the questions. But since this is my website rather than a cocktail party, I can give the long answers.

I always knew how to program, starting with Logo and Basic in elementary school. I taught myself HyperCard scripting on my first Mac, learned Pascal in AP Computer Science, C in Princeton's introductory computer science course, C++ on the job, and Java at GWU.

Writing code in and of itself is unbelievably boring. That was my position back at Princeton when it came time to pick a major, and it's still my position today.

Unfortunately, my timing at Princeton was terrible. Mosiac, the first web browser, came out in 1994, my freshman year. Toy Story came out in 1995, my sophomore year. Had I been a little bit more aware of the very early zeitgeist, I might have realized that there was far more to computer science than just writing code.

Just like that, I missed out on the Internet Revolution. While my Princeton classmates were starting their own companies, I was working a dead-end job at a small legal advocacy organization in DC. I have no complaints about that first job, because it got me out of the Ivory Tower and into the policy arena. It also led to my current job at The Urban Institute, which led to pretty much everything else. But that first year out of college was tough.

I got my job at Urban in mid-1999 because it was a jobseeker's market and everyone wanted to work for a startup. I didn't want to work for a startup, I wanted to work in public policy. So they took a chance and hired me as a programmer on a microsimulation model of welfare and tax policy.

A lot of things magically fell into place from there. I was a fish in water for the first time in a long time. I had, after all, always been a good coder. More importantly, I'd stumbled into an interesting domain, one that kept me interested in coding. Though I had no formal background in economics, I grew to know the field pretty well. I learned statistics against the day-to-day backdrop of constantly churning out numbers. My motto? Please, may your research finding not turn out to be my bug.

Demography is a strangely beautiful but often misunderstood science. For example, a commonly accepted statistic is that half of all married couples will end up getting divorced. This is incorrect. The correct statistic is that America's marriage rate is about twice its divorce rate. This means that every year, about twice as many people get married as get divorced. This says nothing about a newlywed couple's chances of getting divorced, because it says nothing about the vast number of Americans who stay married any given year, rather than changing their marital status.

I enjoy minor mind-benders like this. It's fascinating socially, because divorce changes our society so fundamentally, but it's also fascinating at some purely abstract level of mental gymnastics.

And there's key to my character. I majored in comparative literature because the social side of an equation mattered more to me than the abstract side. I wanted to study people, not numbers. I avoided computer science and avoided visual arts at Princeton at least in part because I thought I knew it all already. But as I got older, I discovered the synergy of putting the two together, the mathematical abstractions and the real-world entities they represent.

I have a personal Dream of the Unified Field. With my first graphics programming course, the math and the computers came together, like the strong and weak forces in physics. With my first animation course, the artwork joined the meld, like the electromagnetic force. What's the remaining holdout? Literature. Writing. Storytelling. Gravity. (9/1/04)