This is what I would look like if I drew the world.
Good day, all! My name is Barry Wayne Peddycord III, and if you think that sounds pretentious now, just wait until I get to put “Dr.” in front of it! I started this blog on the very first day of my Ph.D. studies at North Carolina State University to chronicle all of the crazy, fun, and painful things that happen during the course of my Graduate education, both to serve as a motivation for me to keep going through with it and as a public journal so that others can see what I’ve done to succeed both academically and in my personal life. Writing a blog is a great outlet for a graduate student, as it helps shape one’s writing skills through constant public publication, and telling the whole world that you intend to make a great accomplishment adds motivation to keep yourself accountable to your audience and follow through with it. So here we are. The GradBlog.
So for those who don’t know me, I go by the handle IsharaComix around the interwebs, which is a relic of a comic book I used to draw way back in grade school. I still draw a little bit, but I was never particularly good at it, so I focus on my writing instead. My field of expertise is Computer Science, and that comes with most of the stereotypes that one would expect – I like video games, comic books, cartoons, and so forth – I’m motivated by curiosity in most of the things I do, such as programming, hardware tinkering, and to a certain extent, even Amateur (HAM) Radio (callsign KK4DDO, if you’re interested). I also love cooking, and a great portion of my blog is devoted to the things I whip up in the kitchen.
... and this is what I look like when I'm not on the Internet.
But coming to this blog, you’re probably more interested in what I’m going to write about, and not about me in particular. Well, as a student, a researcher, a scholar, an academic… whatever it is you wish to call me, I am driven by a two passions that should serve as the basis for anyone who decides to pursue an advanced degree: a desire to learn, and a desire to teach. The responsibility of academics is to break beyond the state of the art to create new knowledge, and then to share that knowledge with the rest of the world through publication, teaching, and speaking. As such, I put equal weight on my ability to discover new things and to disseminate them in both the formal world of lecture and publication, and the informal world of interest groups, websites, and talks at the bar up until midnight.
I fundamentally believe that the most relevant research is that which is done across boundaries – the boundaries of disciplines, the boundaries of academia and industry, and the boundaries of nations and cultures – the world isn’t divided up into autonomous little sections, and if my observations of the world are representative of the state of academia as a whole, there aren’t enough people trying to step outside of their field to see how their research makes a difference everywhere else.
Mundane or profound, this blog is about my experiences in Grad School, my research, and just how substantially it blurs the boundary of my academic and personal life.
Site License
I believe that education should be available to all, and as such, I want to be able to make my work as widely distributable as possible – I know that not every journal can be Open-Access and not every lecture can be put online, but I will make a stand where the content of this blog will always be available to the world to share under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike license. I’m a huge fan of the open source movement and the way it brings technology to the masses, to learn from and build upon, and I want to emulate that in my career as a scientist and as an educator.
