Throughout my life, I have often tried to bring two of my passions together: science and art. (Disclaimer: the terms “science” and “art” are being used in their broadest terms here.) I often have teased my father, who was a chemical engineer before retirement, that I had I not gone into the study of languages and literature, I would have been a physicist. The beauty of physics (mostly theoretical) stupefies me. Most of my life, however, I have been judged as just a “word nerd”. Though I love the term and am proud of my nerd-dom, I also have worked throughout the different scientific realms throughout my wordy career.

For one of my jobs, I worked as the head of the student-run portion of IT for a graduate school of business. One of the economic students asked why he never saw me in class. I responded that I was working on my advanced degree in literature. Immediately flustered, he asked how in the world I could know and understand the intricacies of the computing world? And were they short on business students to help run things? Had I had my very first laptop (see picture below) with me, I would have pulled it out of my bag and said, “I have been using computers since the mid 80s. I took one of the first programming classes offered in my high school. Why do you assume that I wouldn’t understand computers?”

Well, you might ask, what does this have to with my present job in advertising? Quite a bit. The studio artists I work with bring computing sciences and art together on a daily basis, and quite amazingly, I might add. Us word peeps (I am including more than just the proofreaders here…) deal with a wide range of topics thanks to our wide range of clients. If we don’t have the knowledge to write about, proofread or process their terminology, then we find it. And we all use computers/social media/apps/programs to do it. So I am proud of all of us for delving into the science and the art of things.

And I look forward to the possible day that I proof some work of my past high school students who learned HTML coding through the grant we received to set up a scientific website to show off their English-language skills. We learned together and taught each other. We were amazed by the ease of our journey.

How do we take just one more step to show how science and art can take the next step together?

And here is my still-viable Macintosh PowerBook 165c that I powered up this morning: