Which got me thinking about the social organization of undergraduate students in dormitory communities. Who you live with, who you choose to be friends with, will affect you a LOT. So when I’m looking at study abroad programs, the first thing I do is check housing options. My top priority is to live near local students or in a homestay. Everything else (course offerings, cultural excursions, etc) comes after.

I think it’s this insight that is also behind why “customer development” is a hot topic within startups now. The following is an excerpt from a Fast Company article, “Want To Sell Product? Sleep With Your Customers”, which describes why consumer insight in adapting products across cultures is so important:

Here’s the truth: I have come to spend a large part of my time living in consumers’ homes. It began a few years ago when I was asked to the Philippines to help an ailing coffee brand. For years the major coffee manufacturer in the region had attempted to run an advertising campaign during the rainy season. It’s traditionally a time of celebration, and if a coffee brand could “own” this, it would be a license to print money. The coffee company had run an expensive television campaign featuring smiling people drinking the brew in the shelter of their homes while rain pitter-pattered down on the roof. To everyone’s surprise, it seemed the association with the rainy season was a major turn-off. Sales decreased, and in turn left everyone baffled. Just before the annual rains were due, I headed off to Manila to work out why.

To everyone’s surprise, the first thing I requested was to move in with a local family. Over the next 10 days I spent time in five different family homes, singing, talking, eating and, of course, drinking a lot of coffee. My agenda was to understand the psychology of the rainy season.

One night, as the rain hammered against the tin roof, it occurred to me that the sound of the rain in the commercials had been misrepresented. In the ads that went to air, the rain was created from stock sounds, great in Hollywood movie, but far removed from the realities of the average Filipino family. The sound wasn’t right, and so the emotional stirrings the brand had hoped to evoke, simply did not occur.

I immediately set out to record the very sound I was hearing beating against the tin roof. I emailed it to the production company and played the revised commercial for the next family. It brought them to tears. Sound was the missing piece in the emotional puzzle, and the following rainy season, coffee sales increased by 19%.

I regularly ask CEOs when they’ve last spent a day in the homes of their core consumers. The best I can usually hope for is that they’ve intended to but have never found the time. In reality, most executives operate from large offices where they function with all the information that technology can provide. This was the experience of a CEO running one of the largest hi-fi manufacturers in the world. He was having doubts about a new product that had been in development for years. He showed me a prototype of this product–a stealth remote control he planned to unleash on the Chinese market.

I was curious about the reasons for targeting China. He had done his research, and it showed that Chinese families embrace new technology, have the resources to purchase it, and generally like to impress friends and family. I inquired if he or any member of his team had spent any time in a Chinese home. As I predicted, not a single member of the development and marketing teams had even spent 10 minutes in the field. If they had, they would have learned that Chinese families tend to wrap their remote controls in transparent plastic to keep out dust. So, under layers of protective plastic, one remote looks just like another.

The planned release of the product in China was cancelled. The money was moved to Northern Europe, where the new remote proved to be hugely successful. But success aside, the organization now demands that everyone involved in the development and marketing of a product must spend at least two days in a consumer’s home.

This is a lesson that Procter & Gamble learned quite some time ago. Before they came up with one of the world’s most popular stain removers they spent months observing women tackling their laundry. They discovered that it wasn’t the big stains that disturbed, because they could be tackled head on. It was the tiny small obsequious stains that were most feared, the insignificant ones that can fly under the radar and then be noticed by the world at large. This became the foundation for Procter & Gamble’s next big stain-removal innovation: “Tide to Go” Instant Stain Remover.

This article really spoke to me because my long-term career goal is to work internationally in the private sector. Sometimes I meet professionals who do that, I hear them speak about locals where they work and I can tell that they spend their time looking up market research reports instead of talking to customers.

Wherever you go (not only outside the US, within as well), take every opportunity to surround yourself with locals. If your organization is trying to target youth in South Bronx, figure out a way to get involved in which you’re there solely as a “student” and a “learner”, not a “tutor” and being praised often for “being such a good helper”. Think of it as culture shadowing, the anthropological sibling of job shadowing. Before we can even begin to advise organizations on how to reach out to communities, we have to learn from those communities. Before we teach, we have to learn.

*This post is inspired by a conversation I had with my friend Ruben, who is working on starting a charter school in Holyoke, MA.

An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

19 years old. Chinese-American, born to Chinese immigrant parents. Rebellious, wanted something different than everyone else at school, loved adventure.

If you have not yet read about Danny Chen, do (Life and Death of Private Danny Chen & Why Black America Should Care About Danny Chen). Private Danny Chen served in the US Army but on October 3, 2011 he shot himself. That day, his superior “forced him to crawl, with all his equipment, across some 100 meters of gravel in order to return to the tower so he could start his shift. While he was on the ground, two other superiors pelted him with rocks. And once he reached the tower, a superior grabbed him by his body armor and dragged him up the steps.”

Danny was in Afghanistan and miles away from home, and the men who were supposed to lead him instead “tormented Chen on an almost daily basis over the course of about six weeks in Afghanistan last fall. They singled him out, their only Chinese-American soldier, and spit racial slurs at him: “gook,” “chink,” “dragon lady.” They forced him to do sprints while carrying a sandbag. They ordered him to crawl along gravel-covered ground while they flung rocks at him. And one day, when his unit was assembling a tent, he was forced to wear a green hard-hat and shout out instructions to his fellow soldiers in Chinese.”

Danny’s story is similar to Harry Lew‘s and Brushaun Anderson‘s, a 20-year-old African-American soldier who served in Iraq: “[his superiors were constantly] overpunishing him for even the smallest mistakes; ordering him to put on his body armor and do extreme physical exercises; calling him “dirty” and forcing him to wear a plastic trash bag. His tour of duty ended in 2010, inside a portable toilet in Iraq, when he fired a bullet into his forehead.”

I’m taking an interterm course on the Psychology of Good and Evil, and our class on Tuesday focused on the learning of evil. People learn to mimic aggressive behavior (see Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment), can be primed with aggressive thoughts and feelings, and indeed, most of this has very little to do with personality (see Milgram’s obedience experiment). The foundation of systems of oppression is creating a culture of obedience.

But what about inaction? Standing idly by. Because what defines the character of an individual is just as much what they didn’t do as what they did do. For institutional cultures of the establishment, there is the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility (see Kitty Genovese murder). There is deindividuation, because the 8 men who are being charged with negligent homicide and manslaughter in Danny’s case saw their actions and inactions as actions and inactions of Army men, not John, Bill, George, etc. For a culture that relies on discipline, the line between discipline and race-based hazing gets fuzzy and military men become disinhibited after being exposed to violence so often (see Rodney King).

Why did the Ku Klux Klan have masks? Deindividuation. Why did more than 900 people drink the kool-aid in Jonestown? Disinhibition. If our men and women in the military are supposed to be men and women of honor, then why did Danny, Brushaun, and Harry die the way they did? Why did their own team find it easier to either humiliate them or do nothing about what was happening instead of speaking up? It may be personality, it may be obedience, it may be any number of terms the field of psychology has come up with.

Either way, this is hazing that has gone too far and for too long. An Army spokesman said there had been “regulations and policies against hazing and bullying…we inculcate our soldiers with the need to treat all with dignity and respect.” Establishing a corporate culture and a system of values that will guide every member of the organization is critical, but this needs to go beyond spending hours in a room dreaming up a sexy mission statement. The Army needs to step it up, and soon.

“Find life experiences and swallow them whole. Travel. Meet many people. Go down some dead ends and explore dark alleys. Try everything. Exhaust yourself in the glorious pursuit of life.” -Lawrence K. Fish

For anyone looking to work at a startup or start one, I thought I’d share some insights from my experience thus far on why working for a startup is awesome and what I’ve learned so far.

Reason #1: There’s no work for work’s sake, you get to do more in less time, every time.

My second day on the job, I sent out some emails and mentioned to the founders that we should have a demo video to keep our emails from being too long. So one of them said, “Great, go for it”. On my third day, I wrote a script and pulled together a powerpoint with screenshots. I asked Rick, the UX advisor for 500 Startups, to help me edit the script, and he even helped with the voiceover. By the end of the fourth day, a1-minute demo video was ready to go and was on every individual lunch club’s landing page.

Tip: When you’re really early stage or pressed for time, a powerpoint, with audio recorded on the slides, saved as a movie file is a MVP demo video that will do the trick until you can pull together something fancier is. I put together a detailed how-to on what we did to make our video here.

Reason #2: There’s a culture of people believing in you even when you don’t believe in yourself, instead of a culture of people seeing you as “just an intern”.

One morning, Hong, a 500 Startups advisor, looked at our stats for the Bay Area Interns Lunch Club. We were at 50 members, and I was pretty excited. Then Hong said, “Okay, great, now double that”. “What? Oh, I can try…” I said. He looked at me, “No, you won’t try. You’ll just do it.” The clock was ticking and I went on a community management frenzy. That day, I sent “thanks for signing up, invite a friend!” emails out like crazy and watched as the numbers climbed from 50, to 63, to 76, 86, then at midnight, 94. The next morning, I got to the office early to do some last-minute hustling. In 24 hours, I had gone from 50 members…to 96. And a few minutes later, 102.

Though I missed the initial goal by just a bit, I grew the group’s user base by 100% in just over 24 hours. I never would have believed that I could do that, but sometimes you just have to be the person who says,“Challenge Accepted!”

Tip: It’s a mistake to think you can do everything alone. The best way to be SuperIntern is to thank your existing users and ask them to help you out: “Hey, thanks for having us! If we’ve helped you, please invite a friend!”

Reason #3: You’re always surrounded by smart, creative and passionate people.

Over one weekend, my desk disappeared, so the Monday after, while rolling over a desk to replace it, I had the chance to chat with Tara, a designer sitting nearby, who told me about how she got to work internationally (she did web development in Italy): she bought a one-way ticket to where she studied abroad and figured it out when she got there. And when I wrote a random blog post about a mystery in the office parking lot, you would not believe how many people on the 500 Startups mailing list had such strong opinions on parking etiquette. The 500 Startups family is a community like no other.

Tip: I was stumped on how to respond to a bunch of people I contacted (HR at companies, leaders of professional associations and alumni organizations) when they said they were too busy and wanted to talk later. Andy and Hugh helped me see their needs, to see the situation from their perspective and come up with a way to explain that we’ve made the process as hands-off as possible. They explained that when I could clarify that we would allow them to get credit for starting a really valuable program but we would do all the work, they would be much more likely to send an email and restart the conversation.

Reason #4: You actually know upper management.

Hugh and Andy are the cofounders, and I’m the first intern. The founders aren’t just names to you, lecturing you from afar, they’re people you get to know. For example, I know that we usually forget to eat unless Andy reminds us. And I know that Hugh enjoys making those obscure math jokes that nobody understands until he explains them.

But really, it’s not about silly things like that. It’s about how knowing the silly things makes it not scary at all to ask them why they started Wednesdays, what they did in their past life at PayPal, which translates really well to it not being scary to ask about an unfamiliar acronym or why a feature is set up a certain way or why we’re assuming something about a user.

Even if you’re sitting in a meeting and feeling lost, try to ask a good question.

UPDATE:
“The only thing I’d add—in case I haven’t said it yet—you are making a very real impact on our tiny little company and the customers we serve.  Thanks again for the great post.” -Hugh Olliphant, Co-founder of Wednesdays.com

This post was originally featured on the Women 2.0 blog.

This year’s graduates face a brutal job market. In the U.S, Millennials have been hit hard by the economic downturn. For the few jobs that are available, Millennials often have to compete against older, more experienced workers, as well as many applicants from their own generation. The Economic Policy Institute stated that last year “the unemployment rate for workers age 16 to 24 was 18.4% — the worst on record in 60 years.” Though Millennials with college degrees often fare better in the job market, many are also facing significant student loan debt. Experts speculate that this makes them more likely to consider high-paying jobs over ones they’re truly passionate about or more likely to take the first (or only) offer they get. However, some students believe otherwise.

Akhila Kolisetty, who graduated from Northwestern University last year and is pursuing a career in human rights law, says, “In my opinion, Millennials are MORE interested in public service work than ever. Because of the recession, opportunities in the corporate sector — whether it’s finance or law — are dwindling. More and more students have begun volunteering with non-profits to bolster their resumes, and finding out they truly enjoy working in the non-profit sector… As students are becoming more aware of the world beyond our borders, as they are studying abroad and working abroad in increasing numbers, they are also being called to service work, at home, and abroad, after gaining a broader perspective on life and work… Every day, I see more and more programs at universities focusing on service work, non-profits, and international development. I think it’s now up to us to make jobs in this sector available for young people and to ensure this passion is not lost as young graduates enter the real world.”

Indeed, often the situation depends on the student. Some students decide to escape the U.S. job market by going to straight to grad school, others by packing up and going to another country. In any case, no matter where students go, whether to succeed to in a corporate career or at a small non-profit, a recruiter we interviewed says it always pays to be the guy who starts stuff. “I went from being the guy who got rejected for a position initially to being the guy running the entire organization. How? I offered to make t-shirts for other employees the year I eventually got in, and when they were figuring out who to replace the executive director, they looked to the guy who went beyond his job description. Be that guy,” was his advice.

So was the recruiter we interviewed a corporate executive? No, he’s actually the director of a non-profit. Clearly, the skills it takes for millennials to succeed in today’s workplace for are quite similar in both the for-profit and non-profit industries. To all the students and new grads out there, raise your hand to volunteer to make t-shirts, start a lunch club for your company, be the one who brings in bagels, or organize a fantasy sports league for employees. If you do that, you just might beat the statistics and be one of the few Millenials who are able to snag and keep a job you’re truly passionate about, regardless of whatever industry it’s in and what the papers on unemployment rates say.

This post was originally featured in YPulse.

Six Simple Steps: Let’s Go Make a Movie!

1. Take or design some product screenshots
Our features are working for our private beta membership, so Hugh and Andy just went in and took screenshots of what the landing page looks like, what an email invite would look like, and what the reminders would look like.
If you’re still in the idea stage, try some of the prototyping and wire-framing online tools out there to design what your product would look like.

Bay Area Interns Lunch Club page

2. Use the user experience flow to draft a script
This is when the order of the sketches of how the product works come into play. Rick was super helpful in making sure the script matched up with what would be logical to mention first, so I’d recommend having someone else look through the script and slides to make sure it would make sense to someone unfamiliar with the product.

3. Create an awesome slide deck
Put it all together and get feedback from someone who would be a target user. Does it make sense? Do they understand the call to action? Do they have questions that should be addressed in the video? Then go back to your script draft and edit, edit, edit.

4. Record narration on your slides
For Powerpoint: Go to the “Slides” tab, then the “Slide Show” menu, and click “Record Narration”. Speak as you click the right arrow button to advance to the next slide.
For Keynote: Open “File” and click “Record Slideshow”. Speak as you click the right arrow button to advance to the next slide.
Note: You won’t be able to see your script as you record, so you’ll either have to pull it up on another computer or memorize it.

5. Save and export as a video file
Press the “Escape” button and Click “Save As…” to save it as a movie file.

6. Post it online!
If you use Youtube or Vimeo, you can easily create shortlinks to track traffic and embed the video in blog posts and pages.

And voila, you’re done!

UPDATE:
Almost everything we do is a work in progress. Just had a great meeting with Dave, who offered some suggestions. Thought they’d be helpful to mention in order to clarify that we’re nowhere near perfect, so here goes:
-Try using a specific landing page, not a generic one. There may be some people who don’t like the organization whose landing page you choose to feature but a generic one is kind of confusing.
- The call to action here is to email us since this video is targeting staff at university alumni offices and career centers. Make some videos specifically for consumers in case end users stumble upon the video and clarify which videos are for which audience.

Anyway, I think second semester deserves a recap. So here goes!

ON CLASSES:

Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness: I’ve always wanted to take a class with a weird name, because how cool is it to say, “I’m studying Happiness”, right? (Last semester, my friend took a sociology course, “Drugs in History”, and kept on saying, “I’m taking Drugs”) But seriously, this was a great class, a mix of behavioral economics and psychology, with a dash of neuroscience. My professor was every bit that crazy, brilliant, forgetful type of professor, unmistakable mannerisms and all. An upperclassmen said of him, “he dresses like hippie, and grades like a Prussian”. He always taught us to think for ourselves. When I turned in a paper about the peak-end bias in medical procedures, he sent it back saying, “when you refer to it as a procedure, you’re making the assumption the author does that one way is in some way better or more accurate than the other. I don’t want to hear what the author thinks, I want to hear what you think”. I realized that during college admissions tours, the tour guides always say, “Oh, I’m taking a class with the professor who wrote the textbook”, and it’s a big deal, because you get to learn directly from the expert. What they never say is that if you learn from the professor who wrote the textbook, you would never get the learning experience I got, learning to question the author and question conventional wisdom. The drawbacks of elite colleges, especially elite research universities, is that they’re filled with experts, and if you take a class with the textbook author, you rarely learn to think for yourself, and you’re rarely encouraged to question the norm. Only from questioning the norm is innovation born. I’m grateful that I go to a college that is committed to faculty teaching in addition to research. Otherwise, we’d be failing students in creating a learning environment that encourages questioning teaching.

Racialization in the US: the Asian/Pacific/American Experience: The best kind of class not only teaches you about the world, but also teaches you about yourself. This is that kind of class. I went to a high school that was 77% Asian-American, and students joked about watching Bollywood movies or Korean dramas by saying “that’s so Asian”. Yet I never knew about the history of Asian-Americans, about the history of Chinese exclusion, or Vincent Chin, or the Postville raid, or how immigration law shaped the model minority myth. I never thought about the political or historical context of Asian-American identity, or how immigration is not just a Latino issue as the media would have you believe. This course opened my eyes to so many things, from the prison industrial complex to the relationship between race, class, and gender. If there is one class that should be required for everyone, it’s an ethnic studies class. Race is one of those things that rarely gets talked about, yet it affects so many of us.

Microeconomics: This course applied calculus to microeconomic theory and I found that I really enjoyed applied math. I’ve always been the type of person who loved problem-solving, but pure math was just never my calling. I always need to see how things I learn apply to things. My professor for this class was AWESOME, he was a great lecturer and incorporated fun stories about the history of the QWERTY keyboard and his antics in grad school into the lectures. And when my friends and I would go to office hours, not only would he be super helpful with problem set advice, he’d chat about his favorite video games and get really excited about showing us ancient stuff (floppy disks!). Most lecture classes it’s hard to feel like you have a community with your classmates, but we definitely got that with this class (well, we all suffered through ridiculously difficult problem sets together so I guess it was inevitable).

Modern China: I always wanted to learn more about Chinese history and specifically, relations between China and South Asia, China and Southeast Asia, and China and other East Asian nations. I think there is a lot of attention on US-China relations, but people are largely unaware of Chinese investment in Central and East Africa, or the history of China in the context of its relations with non-Western nations. This course allowed me to read primary source historical documents, and while through the process I learned I will never be a historian (even my final paper was more economic history than history), I’m glad I took it.

Chinese: I love the Chinese language, and it makes me so happy that it’s a language people really want to learn. I’m pretty sure I want to work in China at some point, so anything we do in this class is fun (especially watching Chinese movies). One of my best friends is going to China for the first time, and I’m SO excited for her and all the other students going.

ON WORK:
Center for Community Engagement (CCE): This semester, I went to Durham, North Carolina for the first time when I spoke at the AshokaU Conference at Duke University, helped run the Gumball Challenge, went to a public health conference and realized how interested in the field I was, helped plan the first ever pitch night (and pitched in it too!), and expanded my design portfolio a million times. I worked on fun guerrilla marketing campaigns, and am now planning for an exciting student-teaching program and our incubator program next year. Hooray!

Reader to Reader: I’ve continued my design work for event banners and updating program brochures. For next year, I’ll be helping with re-designing the website and working on some income generation programs. I’m really really psyched, this is a great non-profit and I’m so proud to be a part of the RTR family.

Career Center: I continued my work with the Career Center contributing to their new blog, and working with the staff to experiment in how new media tactics can better engage both students and alumni.

ON FUN STUFF:
Dance: This semester I was fortunate enough to perform with some friends in Jamboree, a show held by the Multicultural Resource Center and International Students Association. Watch out, Sheila Ki Jawani is a really catchy song. I also attended a hip-hop workshop and learned how to do a baby freeze. Can you say best party trick ever?

Hobbies: Recently I’ve gotten into designing jewelry with handmade Ugandan recycled paper beads. They’re really fun to make, and it’s remarkable how scraps of paper that would otherwise be discarded can be reworked into something new!

Spring Break: I went to New York City with some friends over spring break. The highlight of my trip was definitely the big piano at FAO Schwarz. Yes, I am a child at heart.

ON WHAT I’VE LEARNED:
1) I still miss Chinese food.
2) Sometimes you can learn more if your professor didn’t write the textbook.
3) Non-designers really misunderstand the timeline of the design process.

And of course, I love Amherst.

SO WHAT’S NEXT? (besides this that is) WELL…
-I’ll be in the SF Bay Area in May and June. I’m always interested in meeting up with interesting people, so drop me a line if you’re interested! I’m interning at Wednesdays.com and doing some independent artsy work.
-I’ll be in Benguluru (Bangalore), India from in July and August. If by any chance you’ll be in the area or if you know someone I should meet while I’m there, let me know!

It was: “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” -Neale Donald Walsch

I’d like to share with you a story of my personal growth and exploration of interdisciplinary awesomeness, which was all a result of my taking an opportunity that was beyond my comfort zone.

Several weeks ago, I attended the Nomadic Wax Media Camp sponsored by the Amherst College Department of Music. Nomadic Wax is a really cool hip-hop collective and they ran freestyling, breakdancing, DJing and beatmaking workshops for a small group of us undergrads. I learned how to (attempt to) rap, do a sometimes-impressive baby freeze, scratch, and make amazing beats. It was totally random, I had no experience in hip-hop and was not even in a music class. I thought it was a great moment of finding the courage to choose to embarrass myself, but didn’t quite realize that what Hired Gun, BGirl Frak, DJ Boo, and Ben had taught me would translate into my other work in the social enterprise space.

Then a few weekends ago, as part of my work for the Amherst College Center for Community Engagement (CCE) Social Innovation Leadership (SIL) Team, I spoke at the AshokaU Exchange Conference 2011 at Duke University, and on that Saturday, I led a workshop on guerrilla marketing for college student social entrepreneurship initiatives with some other students. I spoke on the principles of guerrilla marketing, cited case studies of good and bad examples, and then I worked with a small group of students, faculty, and higher ed administrators to consult them on their specific needs. As students told me what their issues were, my mind started racing and I felt the creeping sense of fear that I wouldn’t be able to give them relevant, actionable advice.

Suddenly, something remarkable happened.

One student, a senior at University of Pacific, explained he and his student organization were employing a freemium membership model and he needed to convey the benefits of the premium membership. He explained students paid a small amount, say $20, for more exclusive club opportunities: an intimate dinner with notable alumni, international summer fellowship funding opportunities worth $3000, etc. Okay, I thought to myself. He needs to convey the idea that this was a low-risk investment: you put in a little and get a lot out. So I immediately thought of the sticker statue at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (is it still there?). After every visitor leaves the museum, they get to slap their sticker on an ever-increasing blob of stickers, crowd-sourced art, if you will. I suggested that he put up something in the student center/dining hall (a space that all students go through often), and over time, have it grow larger and larger until students are curious, walk on over, and see posters with more information about his program. It could be an expanding rubber band ball, a trail of paper airplanes along the wall, anything that was made up of something small and simple.

Another student, a sophomore at Duke University, explained he needed to promote a social venture incubator program his student organization developed. I thought of the importance of his conveying the concept of their program addressing the pain points of student ventures. So I proposed making a game of darts with the “before” and “after” flyer materials of an organization in his program. The “after” flyer would be covered up, and he would invite students to play a game of darts with the “before” flyer, aiming for the five things wrong with the flyer. The game would create a lower barrier to entry and a more creative call to action than just “please stop by my table and pick up a brochure about my project”, and it would convey the idea of his program addressing pain points.

Somehow, I was able to wing it and come up with potential solutions that conveyed the values of these organization’s programs. Originally I thought it was dumb luck, but now, I can’t help but see how my thought process incorporated many of the same techniques I had learned in the freestyling workshop I attended the weekend prior. Who knows, maybe I will look into consulting…

So I encourage you to do something daring today, and to do something a little out of the ordinary more often. Remember: “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”

And if you’ve done something somewhat ridiculous lately, please share by commenting below or emailing me. I’d love to hear your story.

Disclaimer: I spoke at this conference with my expenses and time worked paid for by my employer, Amherst College. The views in this post are my own personal views and do not reflect the views of my employer.

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy; if the world were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I wake up each morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it very hard to plan the day.” — E. B. White

Don't you just love it?
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