eRes Course Resources

When I was born my father wanted to name me after his grandfather and my mother wanted to name me after someone in her family. They resolved their issues with my name by agreeing that my legal name would be Shon, but everyone would call me Shlomo. It was a good move by father because now I identify with Shlomo and think of Shon in a way that most people understand their social security numbers. Being named a 'unique' name is fairly advantageous because it is a great conversation starter and it grabs peoples attention so they don't forget my name. If you are asking yourself if I am Jewish, you are quiet right, I actually have attended a Jewish parochial school my entire life. I also deferred a year from college (one of the best decisions of my life) and spent a year studying Judaic philosophy and texts in Israel. That year was the best of year of my life (so far). I traveled throughout Israel, did many hikes (me and my friends did a 3 day hike from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee), and learned more about myself than I did throughout all of high-school. The year has had a profound impact on my life and has helped me discover what I think I would like to do one day - be involved with startups preferably helping build products and services that enhance or make life easier for people - in addition to seeing the world around me a very different lens. Since that year I have lost interest in grades and purely view them as a stepping stone. That is not to say I will not try to do well in a class, but doing well is not my primary motivation anymore, my primary motivation is to learn, and that is why I do not like grades because I think they devalue learning to a large extent. Anyways, back to my story. I am from Westchester, NY, White Plains specifically; and am a sophomore majoring in Social Computing Informatics and am graduating in December '13. This past summer I worked as an IT Intern at a clean energy company in White Plains, was paid, and learned absolutely nothing from the internship. I guess you can call what I did usability or user experience stuff within Microsoft Sharepoint and social media stuff, but it was not much and I spent most of my day reading hackernews and techcrunch (not as good as it used to be, but still a great resource). And finally, I love tech, books and movies, and anything that is generally mind blowing.