This is not an Ada Lovelace Day Post

[deborah]

So it's hard to say I am currently admiring a woman who left computer science, and it's certainly not Ada Lovelace Day material, but let me flail for a minute.

So to start with, quoting allen:

Went to see viennateng(with highceilings opening) show tonight. I went with deborah and cnoocy. cthulhia showed up a few minutes after we did and sat behind us. ursamajor we met up with at the merch table between sets. momijizukamori found us after the show and walked back to the T with us.

The concert was excellent, too, in addition to the impromptu meet-up.

If it's not clear, all of those meetups were unplanned and coincidental. I also ran into M, a friend from high school.

Anyway, Vienna Teng. She got a BS in Computer Science at Stanford in 2000, and worked as a programmer for two years. Then career shift, boom, music, and that was her career for the next 8 years - and then she turned around and went back to grad school (dual Masters, MBA and Environmental Studies). And now she's making music again.

It's just, man. I'm currently working on my third completely unrelated Masters. (Library Science can be related to both Computer Science and Children's Literature, but I'm not interested in the overlaps, except inasmuch as I'm a programmer as a librarian and archivist.) And looking at how Vienna Teng has happily decided she can be a musician along with her other skills and studies, reminds me that this can be a successful way to be, rather than just undecided flailing.

And her music is freaking gorgeous.