Memepark

[This is the personal statement I submitted to law schools in 2002. I'm not quite this pompous in person, but pretty close.]

In 1995, I broke my English teachers' hearts and packed my bags for MIT. I was determined to break out of the mold of the awkward technician locked in a lab and to reinvent the scientist as Renaissance man. I had been told that generalists were in great demand in scientific and technical fields: the job market craved people who could fit their work into a broader social context. However, translating this versatility into a career would send me on a fortuitous search – one that would lead me to the law.

In planning my course work at MIT, I rounded out my curriculum with humanistic and artistic pursuits. I stretched my skills as an actor by playing major roles onstage: Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Orgon in Tartuffe, and over a dozen others. By my senior year, I found myself writing, directing, and working with prominent visiting artists. I also did film and voiceover work and took the lead part in a radio play on WMBR. My fraternity responsibilities grew as I was elected to three offices – social chair, kitchen manager and literary critic. I was on schedule to finish my double major in Computer Science and Brain and Cognitive Science a semester early and was applying to a Masters' program. When I thought about my career, it was usually in the context of academia: I was too engrossed in the intellectual ferment afforded by life on a university campus to consider leaving.

However, departure came voluntarily in my junior year, when my "big brother" at the fraternity, Ameet Ranadive, walked into my room and nonchalantly asked: "Hey Woody. Want to go to India?" Nine months later, I was the first of us to arrive in Pune, Maharashtra, for the exchange program that Ameet and I had founded with four other students. I moved into a flat with a Jain family and spent a week just exploring the city, dodging motor rickshaws and bullock carts as my feet squelched in the monsoon mud. My eyes and ears took in the gaudily painted trucks, banyan trees sagging with vines, turban-clad Sikhs bicycling by with hand-held radios blasting Hindi remixes of Euro-house music, naked toddlers playing in the rain, paan vendors turning mouths minty and saliva crimson to splatter like bloodstains on the barbed-wire-topped, water-stained walls of the old city. I was nearly mobbed the first time I gave money to the beggars who followed me. Looking into the eyes of people who could live on my table scraps and guiltily refusing them a few pennies would eventually turn guilt and compassion into something more purposeful. When my companions arrived, we started scheduling business meetings for the evenings while we spent our days teaching local high school students about the Internet. In the 14-year-olds at our school I saw a more hopeful vision of India's future. By making a commitment to help bring technology to the have-nots of the world, I hoped to bring them closer to the world I knew.

In retrospect, my life took a less linear path after my experience in India. I became concerned with contemplation rather than discovery, practical problems rather than abstract ones. On returning to Boston, I deepened my exploration of India's culture, signing up for a Sanskrit class at Harvard and practicing yoga at an ashram in my neighborhood. My longtime study of world religions gave way to personal spiritual exploration. My concern about the technological and economic future of countries like India led to participation in international development and technology-access projects. Dr Ken Keniston, faculty advisor to the India program, became my mentor and took me on as teaching assistant and co-advisor to the freshmen in his seminar on Science, Technology, and Society. My social and political concerns found a voice in a magazine, Counterpoint, co-published with Wellesley College, of which I became associate editor. Questions about the direction and shape of globalization led me to take the train home to Washington, DC to cover anti-World Bank protests as a video journalist for the Independent Media Center. I was feeling my way around a problem at least as baffling and multi-headed as anything I’d had to solve in my engineering courses.

When my three-and-a-half-year undergraduate career ended, I began a research assistantship at MIT's Media Lab, an interdisciplinary incubator that brought social scientists, engineers, and artists together to ferment "next generation" technologies. My multidisciplinary background made me a natural fit, but I found my enthusiasm flagging over the course of my year-long Masters’ program. Because the lab's sponsorship model created a "demo or die" environment, I felt more like an entertainer than a scientist. After graduate school, I sought challenging employment opportunities. I found that the market for "well-rounded" technical people in early 2000 was limited to consulting firms and dot-coms, and neither appealed to the pragmatist in me. I opted for work that I knew would make a positive impact: teaching for an educational technology startup called The Learning Community Group. I set up the company's teaching labs at community centers and shelters and taught 12-year-olds at the Boston Museum of Science how to build computers and code websites.

I wasn’t content to settle into a teaching career without first exploring other fields. My concern about the rising commercialization of the World Wide Web and the invasions of privacy it fostered led to a position at a firm that published privacy and ad-blocking software. I had my first hands-on exposure to cyber-law issues there, reformulating the firm's privacy policy and dealing with the intellectual property issues involved in filtering web content. As my involvement in legal issues grew, it became clear that I had found something that engaged me more fully than the technical work I had been hired to do. I decided to leave the company and apply to law school. After taking the LSAT in December 2001, I found employment in New York with a company producing speech synthesis software. Working in a new environment in a new city gave me the chance to reflect on my life and my career. I came to several conclusions that cemented my decision to embark on a legal career. They were the following:

1. I've worked as a teacher, an engineer, a scientist, a salesman, a journalist, a media researcher, an editor, and an actor. After contemplating the lifetime contributions I might make to the human enterprise, I wrote out a description of my ideal career. I found my strengths and interests uniquely suited to the day-to-day practice of a lawyer: the precision of language and logic in the reading and writing of contracts appealed to the editor and programmer in me; the construction of compelling arguments based on evidence and precedent seemed suited to my particular specialty as a journalist; the public confrontation and negotiation of the courtroom excited the performer and the salesman in me; and the meticulous, thorough pursuit of historical detail in researching cases was a match to my research background.



2. There's a reason that most "Renaissance Men" were independently wealthy: the marketplace generates little demand for “well-rounded” dilettantes. While having a broad skill set might have conferred a career advantage as an engineer, the advantage was rather less than I'd been led to believe as a student. I knew a few young polymaths who had found niches in academia or consulting, but their success depended on constant self-promotion, which I found distasteful. Instead, I looked for a solid, well-defined trade I could practice indefinitely and which would satisfy both my intellectual and utilitarian impulses. That trade was the law.



3. While I have become much more realistic about working within existing political and economic institutions to enact change in the world, I still feel a need to shape our social and technological landscape, however indirectly. The issues that concern me most are legal in nature and center around our attitude toward the exchange of information. I am anxious to see a fair, consistent system of legal practice governing software and drug patents, copyright, speech, and the release and control of personal information. I would like to see this system applied domestically and internationally. I would like to see this system protect fundamental human rights of free expression and privacy while continuing to encourage investment at home and abroad in new technologies and new markets. I expect that this system will be molded not in any legislature, but in the courts. I want to participate in shaping this new system, and I am confident that my background, inasmuch as it serves as a foundation for my legal education, will qualify me to lend my hand to that enterprise.

The legal work done in the next 50 years will redefine our country’s – and the world’s – concepts of speech, intellectual property, and privacy. New technologies for communicating and manipulating information will continue to expose inadequacies in established legal theory and call for farsighted rethinking of legal doctrines informed by an in-depth, conceptually firm grasp of media theory, computer science, psychology, information theory, artificial intelligence, and the history of science and technology. Legal experts confronting such issues will need to be grounded in these fields if the law is to change gracefully to accommodate new information technologies and new media environments. I believe that my education and experience, combined with my enthusiasm and aptitude for a legal career, make me uniquely suited to this work.