Why Boston?
Context: for those not aware, about 3 weeks ago I moved to the lovely (albeit shockingly warm) city of Boston, Massachusetts. I've already found somewhere to live, got my bills set up, identified the best local watering hole, etc, and am generally starting to fit in. Some day, with luck and effort, I hope to be able to spell "Massachusetts".
Anyway: people keep asking "Why pick Boston?" so I thought I'd, y'know, write it down so that I can refer people to it.
About two months ago I had three realisations:
- I really don't know what I want to do with my life, and I can't get to who I want to be by staying in the life I have;
- My immigration status means I can happily live, ooh, anywhere in the United States, and;
- Given 1 and 2, it seems silly to not relocate while making a break from things and getting my head in gear.
So I immediately started evaluating places to live. Well, first I told my boss, but immediately after that. There were basically two axes: "how much location makes me want to kill myself" and "how much the facilities at location align with what I potentially want to do". The base dataset was the places I've visited in my various wanders - the road trip, plus Philadelphia, Salem, and New York.
"This place would make me want to kill myself" swiftly eliminated everywhere but Seattle, Minneapolis and Boston, so I moved on to "alignment with what I want to do". As said above, I'm not entirely sure what I want to do, but I do know I'd like a good PhD programme in HCI to potentially be in my future. That's a good base set of cities, with that goal in mind: Seattle has got UDub, and no institution that gave us J-Mo can be all bad. However, it's only got UDub, and only got J-Mo. That's not a particularly large base population.
Minneapolis, similarly - great people, GroupLens, halfak, Nettrom, but I've barely got to the stage of realising I might want to do a PhD. GroupLens specialises kind of a lot, and I probably wouldn't be doing myself any favours by relocating to a place where, if I want to do a wide range of potential programmes, I have to up and leave again.
Boston, however, has the Berkman Institute. It's also got the LazerLab at Northeastern, the MIT Media Center, and several other institutions: kind of a wide pool to pick from, which is nice. Add to that the decent public transport, the thriving tech community, the food and the actual fucking seasons and you get a pretty good city.
So: Boston.