One of the best things that happened to me during college was that I discovered and got involved in the Women's and Gender Studies program at my school. Though I went to college very interested in gender and sexuality stuff I'm not sure that I ever really intended to come out of the experience with a second major in Women's Studies, but I did, and I think it was a really great thing.

Making sense of that experience, since graduation has been more difficult, as I'm probably not directly going to go work "in the field" (if there is even a thing there,) and I find my academic interests^methodology taking me elsewhere.

The thing that the bright eyed 18-year old tycho found so intriguing about women's studies is that on the first (or second) day of the first class, the professor handed us a packet of readings photo-copied from her books. And the readings weren't just "clever parsing of the literature in a forum even undergraduates could handle," but the key (or parts of the key) documents themselves. From the beginning I felt like a participant in a larger discussion, which is something that I didn't get from my other classes.

While in the end I learned that participating in these discourses is something that you sort of have to fight your way into, I also came to the conclusion that I didn't much want to be involved in a field that didn't value thought and participation of its students. And so I dove into Women's Studies and I don't regret it for an instant.

While I don't tend to buy into the software-is-freedom argument,^osf I think there is something very freeing about open source in the same way that I found Women's Studies so academically freeing. The invitation to participate in the software development progress that open source represents is really powerful and even if you're not a programer in the traditional sense, the invitation to participate in a serious discussion about the shape of the tools that we use is pretty powerful.

At least I think so.

Onward and Upward!