Hashtag Symbiosis

It's that time again! It's time for some goshdang realtalk, ladies and gents!

So I've been thinking. That's a thing I do pretty often, really, but this time I've been doing it in a more specific way, y'see. That's why I'm here, writing stuff on the internet for people to read--sharing my words with you guys. And this time I use the word "sharing" for a very specific purpose: to establish a theme! Yay, sharing!

Now I know there's this whole stigma about the word "sharing" which brings up images of a guy in a purple dinosaur costume singing some song about how "sharing is caring" and all that jazz. But I'm here to talk about sharing in a far more scientific and analytical way than any purple dinosaur has ever done. I'm also going to throw around the word "symbiosis", as you could probably already tell by the link you clicked earlier that brought you here.

But now that all that's out of the way, let's get down to it.

Symbiosis is this thing in nature where two creatures learn how to become codependent to prevent themselves from dying a horrible grisly death. This concept is how society eventually developed, how animals became domesticated, and how you're even reading this article that you probably saw on Facebook in the first place. Humans are all about the social networking, and everything social stems from some form of symbiosis.

Symbiosis is the entire reason that society can even exist the way it does today! You think the internet was made by some monkey who just so happened to put a bunch of minerals together the right way? Nope! That monkey needed some other monkeys to invent some stuff first, like that electrical engineer monkey named Nikola Tesla did. And that monkey needed another monkey named Benjamin Franklin to discover electricity first. And Benjamin Franklin needed someone else to invent a kite, et cetera, et cetera.

The point I'm making here is that all technological advancements have pretty much been a symbiotic passing of knowledge from one highly-advanced, sapient super-monkey to another. We're all born knowing absolutely nothing, and in order to progress from the point that society is currently at, we must first be brought up to speed. That's the whole point of the educational system--to help us learn from and eventually surpass those who taught us--hence the phrase "now the teacher becomes the pupil".

We've gotten to the point, though, that it's impossible for any one human to know everything that all the previous humans have discovered. This is why society is so specialized. You learn everything you need to learn in order to push forward in the field you've decided to specialize in. And in order for society to not lose the information discovered in another field, someone else decides to specialize in something else. Different people take different paths--and now you have something that resembles a college environment that offers a wide variety of majors for an even wider variety of careers.

What I've learned from attending RPI is that even the people taking the same courses learn different things. All the stuff we learn tangentially from the research we do and the mistakes we make--it all gives us unique experiences. You can have a team of seven people in the same major, and have each person bring to the table something entirely different. This is how you make a great product. This is how your skills grow even faster than they would if you were on your own.

I believe that RPI is all about helping each other out. What sets us apart from the more cutthroat, competitive schools is that we don't leave each other in the dust, but pick each other up and brush ourselves off. By sharing the knowledge you've learned from your mistakes, you prevent someone else from making those mistakes, which gives them more time to learn other things that you haven't yet. And, hopefully, they'll share their discoveries with you as you did with them.

This is how we all grow together. This is how we become smarter much faster than we would by ourselves. At RPI, we always say "Why not change the world?" Well, guess what:

This is how we change the world.

Now go out and share your knowledge!

--J