Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Such Great Heights

I belive in endowing community services and providing more people the mental space and freedom to be educated. I firmly believe everyone on the planet ought to have stress free access to fully funded education; furthermore, they should be able to pursue the most advanced degree they desire to achieve. Throughout my life I will aspire to accomplish this mission.

My education has been world class by all standards. At the Taft School, which I proudly and fondly remember, I was inspired by the mission "Non ut sibi ministretur sed ut ministret (Not to be served but to serve)." I have served my myself, my family, and my community. By being whole of self and mind, I have been able to contribute actively and outward.

Many years back when I was considering undergraduate studies programs I became enamored with a school called the Webb Institute. It carries the name of William H Webb, who fully endowed the school. Any student driven enough, talented enough, and fortunate enough to attend will receive a 100% tuition-free experience. This is a world-class institution. I was not passionate enough or competitive enough, performance-wise, to reasonably complete with the best of the best that attend this fine institution. Their focus is on naval architecture and marine engineering, and undoubtedly some of the finest vessels to ever traverse the worlds waters are conceived of by Webb Institute graduates.

Upon recently learning Harris Rosen's story I am also inspired. My desire to reach further and do more has been reinvigorated. Despite some setbacks early in his career, he has been a very successfully entrepreneur and hotelier. In recent years he has emphasized his philanthropy, which includes providing broad access to families needing assistance both money and time-wise to attend school.

It can be disheartening when you fail to mesh with those surrounding you professionally; Harris Rosen had similar struggles early on, and those challenges resonate with me. I see my challenges in the past as fruitful learning opportunities to dissect, to wrestle in that uncomfortable space, but also as firm ground to spring forth and achieve new heights. I am a lucky person to have had so much rich quality education, to have a healthy and happy family, and vigor to create a brighter spot in a seemingly encroaching world. Harris Rosen has risen above his personal challenges, and he has given so much to those around him.

My friends over at Flocabulary worked on a beautiful PSA piece along with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation on the global time poverty struggles. It highlights such a critical issue facing our world that there are stresses forcing in on families everywhere. Let that sit with you a minute. How high on the Maastricht hierarchy of needs are you and yours?

I believe in hiring others to help out our family and expand the time that we have to be more productive and to be more restful. A recent survey found those buying services, which free up time, can make you happier. This is not a conflicted position because there are both people needing work, our ability to pay, and freeing us up to complete other activities.

Should it be this way? I don't think so; I think everyone should not only be able to be as educated as they would like to, but they should be able to spend their time anyway they want to as well. I think there's a very bright spot in the future to introduce many more robots into society. Human intellect is key to realizing and fulfilling the potential that creating robots would mean for humanity. Essential tasks and services could be swiftly and more correctly handled by robots freeing up vast swaths of humanity to pursue other educational, productive, creative and recreational activities.

Willam H Webb and Harris Rosen are heroes to me. They and their legacies are helping create the world I want to see. Think about your community a moment and consider whether your neighbors have the resources they need to subsist, to see themselves and their children advance to the degree we all know is possible. If there is a disparity there, I ask that you consider their needs and consider whether you have the ability to change their future. Do you have a dime or an hour to spare to advance their/our destiny to such great heights?

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

There is a "me" in Costa Rica

We quickly set in pretty swimmingly (literally every day and many days multiple times daily) when we first arrived. Willa was in a local camp here, CREAR, which runs during the mid-year school break, and she began her school the following Monday in mid-July. We sorted through our long term rental situation, and Marla and I each then took a couple weeks of Spanish classes, more in fact for Marla who is still continuing. Our language school Intercultura provides world class education with a deliberate focus on Costa Rican history and culture. Completing each class it has become progressively easier to have a richer experience here in Sámara. I took a couple cooking classes, which is an offering at school's kitchen each week, and I learned how to make yuca tortas and picadillo.

There are the occasional shrieks in the morning like when a crab was in the house the other day. We have worked on an ant encroachment into the house a couple times. Dislodging about a dozen wasps nests arounds the eaves took some efforts by our landlord the other week. While taking out our green waste the other day, which included some head to tail fish bodies Willa and I drew the attention of a racoon; the bandit started trailing about 10 feet behind us; thankfully, tossing the food waste into the horse field beside our house, the usual target, sent the racoon racing to get to the fishy remains first. Occasionally, a golf ball sized beetle will slam itself into the sliding door at night. We may have been reading and the slam jolts us back to the surface of our immediate surroundings.

This blog post for one was paused recently while I was writing poolside comfortably in the afternoon shade. Marla was reading and Willa watching a great new show, Tumble Leaf. There I was enjoying a nice quiet moment, and a yellow tailed wasp (they're the more aggressive lot compared with their all black brethren), and it started giving me a full body scan like a disgruntled TSA agent. I stood up, and the scan persisted seemingly even closer than before. Well, I was having none of it, and inside I went. One thing I most certainly do not want to experience here is how badly my body will react to a yellow wasp sting.

At our new house things went a bit south with the pool after an algae bloom kicked up. Ten days and many visits from the guys tending to the pool later it's back to looking crystal clear. Separately, it took a handful of visits from the landlord to work out all the kinks of the new house squeaks here, clogged drain there, missed times to connect on issues, and so forth. Everyone has been extremely helpful and able to do much with every contact we have had.

Dropping Willa off at school the other day I observed the metal shop immediately adjacent kicking out welding sparks. I became concerned because kids just like us adults have a very difficult time looking away from the allure of the blue glow. Much like yesterday's total eclipse starring right at it is an opthamologist's nightmare. After suggesting a couple ideas to the school a few friends and I are working on creating a "screen" to shield the kids' eyes. This was a necessary distraction from getting to my sabbatical business. We're far along now and will hopefully wrap it up in the next couple days.

All this is to say that I somewhat anticipated sabbatical to be a bit more readily apparent with vast swaths of free time to work on me projects. There are a few areas of study that I need to make a plan for, and then carve out and execute on that time squarely among the needs presented in renting a house abroad, parenting an energetic fournado, and all the daily life maintenance needs. That said my long wait for Game of Thrones season 6 is over. I signed up for HBO Now yesterday and binged through the first six episodes. I'm ready for Sunday's epic finale.

Monday, October 22, 2012

edX initial impressions


For the past several weeks I have been participating in the 6.00x Intro to Comp Sci and Programming class provided by MIT through the collaborative edX effort. It has been really great. Their syllabus states the course requires approximately 12 hours of effort, and unfortunately, it's not too far afield. The structure is very clean, and nicely everywhere I'm encountering difficulties the discussion forums are often well populated with feedback on similar if not exactly the same issues. The learning curve has been steep both getting into Python for the first time and recalling math that I haven't used in 3-10 years.
This course is not the only reason there are a paucity of posts for 2012, but it's a current contributing factor. My hope is that with some added skills I'll be able to begin prototyping some ideas we've been kicking around the house.

Thursday, February 23, 2012

For the last several months I have been studying the criminal justice system with a particular lens of education available in the prisons. The argument is simple: the more education inmates attain, the less likely they are to be re-incarcerated. I am interested in the immediate restoration of Pell Grants and all other opportunities for education in the prisons. Below is a list of organizations I have come across in my research. If you have suggestions of other organizations that should be added, please reach out.


  • Prison Education Associations
  • Reentry:
    • National
    • New York
      • Cases
        • New York City's courts are the front door to CASES programs. Our legal staff maintains a presence in courtrooms citywide. We work with judges, district attorneys, defense lawyers, legal advocates, the NYC Department of Probation and the NYS Division of Parole to identify individuals appropriate for our programs and we advocate for their supervision by CASES. CASES court representatives report frequently to judges and other criminal justice stakeholders on our participants' progress towards the fulfillment of their legal obligations.
      • College and Community Fellowship
        • College and Community Fellowship (CCF) is unique among organizations aimed at helping people reclaim their lives after criminal conviction. Many programs try to address the basic needs of people returning to the community after conviction and prison, but only CCF guides them through the stages of higher education while promoting their leadership, self-advocacy, artistic expression, civic participation and long term economic security. We see beyond reentry. We see limitless possibilities for our participants, their families and their communities. We expect what others deem impossible and the results are incredible!
      • College Initiatives
        • Our mission is to create pathways from criminal justice involvement to college and beyond and to establish and support communities invested in their own success.
      • Fortune Society
        • The Fortune Society is a nonprofit social service and advocacy organization, founded in 1967, whose mission is to support successful reentry from prison and promote alternatives to incarceration, thus strengthening the fabric of our communities.
      • Osborne Foundation
        • We offer opportunities for reform and rehabilitation through public education, advocacy, and alternatives to incarceration that respect the dignity of people.
      • Getting out and Staying Out
    • Washington
    • Washington, DC
  • Juvenile Programs:
    • International:
      • PACT Urban Peace Program
        • The PACT Urban Peace Program is dedicated to helping at-risk youth and building peace and hope in our urban communities in partnership with the courts and schools.
  • Legal Aid:
  • MISC
    • Correctional Association
      • The Correctional Association of New York is an independent, non-profit organization founded by concerned citizens in 1844 and granted unique authority by the New York State Legislature to inspect prisons and to report its findings and recommendations to the legislature, the public and the press. Through monitoring, research, public education and policy recommendations, the Correctional Association strives to make the administration of justice in New York State more fair, efficient and humane.
    • Critical Resistance
    • PEN Writing Assoc - Prison Writing Program
    • Prison Reform Movement
    • Women on the Rise (WORTH)
      • WORTH (Women On the Rise Telling HerStory) is an advocacy/consultant group comprised of currently & formerly incarcerated women, who have the expertise and understanding to engage, navigate and challenge policy and perceptions concerning incarcerated women.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Recently, I have been asked by a prospective Stern MBA student about pursuing my degree, and I thought my response may benefit other applicants:


Prospective Student (PS)> I essentially just wanted to know what your NYU Stern experience was like. I know its a great school so I am more interested in knowing if you have any regrets at all from the school?

Adam Aronson (AA)> I attended the part-time Langone program, and it was only one of two programs I applied to. I was accepted to both, and NYU was my first choice, and I was thrilled to enter. From that point forward I drew tremendously on the available resources at NYU, especially the Berkley center for Entrepreneurship and their focus on Social Entrepreneurship.


That being said, I have absolutely no regrets. Often while attending the program people asked if I would recommend they do it as well, and I had three different phases of responses. Through the first half, YES!, from half-way through until a couple months before graduation, I was slogging and said people really needed to want it, and from that point onward, it wholly solidified how amazing the program was and what I had gained from it. Was it tiring? Yes. Was it absolutely worth every minute of it? Yes.


PS> Anything that you wished was different or done differently by the school?

AA> Nobody has figured out how to expand the day beyond 24 hours, but were that to happen, I would want to do the program again because there were so many opportunities, I was limited by time to participate in the activities I wanted most. There are numerous students clubs on campus, with varying degrees of activity levels, which are student led, then the academic departments themselves also provide great programming. All of this is in addition to the degree's extensive academic offerings. I belonged to the Social Enterprise Association, Technology and New Media, and Strategy and Operations clubs. They all had field trips, brought in industry specific guests, participated in national conferences, and provided resources like job listings to keep members abreast of what was available.


PS> Also what kinds of opportunities does Stern offer for aspiring Strategy Consultants and Entrepreneurs?

AA> Some of the clubs I mention above are great ways to constantly look past school's walls. In addition there's also a start-up competition with three different content areas, there's a consulting corps program, which provides short-term consulting teams to external firms , and both areas as well as so many others are available as specializations with extensive course options. Professors very often bring in speakers from the subjects' industries as guest lecturers, and then there's time for Q&A to ask how to get more involved, or what the guest's path had been like to that point giving great first hand exposure.


PS> Which industry are you in currently?

AA> Professionally, I started in the non-profit world serving in several technical roles for an international development organization. From there I switched into Education with a couple software start-ups. Since September of this year I have been with the College Board working with their Corporate Strategy team. I would not have been prepared for this role without my MBA degree from Stern.


PS> Did you feel like Stern gave you enough time to explore your career prospects and be sure of your career choice?

AA> I was working full-time and spending 10-20 hours per week attending school, participating in clubs, the start-up competition, and all other life/extracurriculars. Note that this is a very different experience than of a full-time student, where quite often the summer internship parlays into a full-time position the subsequent year.


Regardless of full-time or part-time Stern has innumerable resources, and you need to make the best use of them that you can. The single greatest lesson I learned while pursuing my MBA was time management. And, beyond the time that you're in the program, the networking and institutional resources around career development are indefinitely available. Managing my career is an ongoing process, and whenever I want to check-in with the NYU community, I know that they're there to support me.