Presentations

Reading

Please familiarize yourself with the project descriptions for your section [Note: Not available to OCW users], so that you will be better prepared to provide feedback in the coming week.

Once you have read the recommendation letter assignment below, read “A Message to Garcia.”

Assignment

For those doing a project

To fit everything in, you will have only 10 minutes for your presentation. We will bring a computer that speaks PowerPoint and Impress. You can either plug in your machine or loan us your memory stick. If you need an adapter for a Mac, please bring one or let us know what you need.

You are also to provide us with your annotated slides. You can prepare this after your presentation; we will not be looking for it until Friday, or some other negotiated date.

We prefer to receive the slides via an emailed pdf file, but we will live with whatever is easy for you to produce.

For everyone

Part I

There are two required parts to this assignment. Part I has two options.

Option I: Attend the classes devoted to project presentations and provide constructive advice to the presenters, using forms to be provided. Please be punctual; we start at 9:30 sharp and 11:05 sharp.

Option II: If you are unable to come to class, you are to prepare a comprehensive review of western thought, in not less than 100 pages or more than 200, starting with Aristotle, clearly identifying the slogan and symbol best associated with each significant thinker, as well as a synopsis of that thinker’s most salient ideas. Identify all surprises and comment on whether the thinker used stories to covey his ideas.

Here are some helpful references:

A Brief History of Western Philosophy by Anthony John Patrick Kenny. Wiley-Blackwell, 1998. ISBN: 9780631187912.

The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers by Will Durant. Pocket Books, 1991. ISBN: 9780671739164.

Part II

This part of the assignment is due at the final class; however, we will not be looking for it until Friday, or some other negotiated date.

You have just decided to apply for something that requires you to submit recommendations. You know you can rely on your UROP supervisor to help out, and your advisor, once prompted with your name, will scribble out something pro forma and pretty much useless, as all s/he can do is recite your transcript and say that s/he has never observed you do drugs in her/his presence. Alas, the application asks for three recommendations.

Fortunately, you took 6.803, so you know Winston maintains a dossier of your 6.803 work. Also, the dossier is augmented from time to time as you send him notes describing how you are progressing through life and how 6.803 has been of use. Accordingly, you send Winston the following note:

Professor Winston:
I am applying for graduate school/law school/medical school/a faculty job/etc. Do you think you know me well enough, from my 6.803 work, to write a favorable recommendation for such a position? If so, I append a few talking points, in the form of a draft letter, which I think will save you some time and strengthen what you can say. Also, if you can help, I will, of course, arrange to come by for a chat and drop off copies of all the material I am submitting.

Your job is to supply the draft letter, written as if by Winston. Mention your GPA along with any explanation you would like to have delivered if it is not high. Explain UROP work, if any, with special emphasis on what was fun. Describe extracurricular activities and achievements, if any. Explain passions and goals, if any. Detail reasons for wanting the position applied for and how having you will enhance the reputation of the place that takes you on.

In all sections, remember to use the press release style:

Most important things first
Write in a way that chunks can be used with minimal rephrasing

But wait!—you may say—I don’t know the first thing about writing about myself. Do you have any advice? Read “A Message to Garcia,” is the reply. Your mission, in effect, is to get the message to Garcia.

Note: When you do get around to needing a recommendation, send a copy of your letter, along with the following:

An explanation of characteristics the deciding organization is known to look for, how you fit the profile, and how that fit might be expressed or emphasized.

A few bulletized items that will be useful to Winston in understanding you, even if the bulletized material would be unlikely to be used explicitly in Winston’s letter. In this category, you might mention heroes (possibly in multiple categories), how you plan to change the world, most influential book, most enjoyable book, most influential subject (other than 6.803, of course), most enjoyable subject (other than 6.803, of course), favorite music, high-impact experiences, and so on.

Also, explain why it will be fun to have the position you are seeking and why you will be a better person for having got it, why the world will be better off if you get it.

(by Elbert Hubbard, 1899)

In all this Cuban business there is one man stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at perihelion.

When war broke out between Spain and the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain fastnesses of Cuba—no one knew where. No mail or telegraph could reach him. The President must secure his co-operation, and quickly.

What to do!

Someone said to the President, “There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.”

Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How “the fellow by name of Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks came out on the other side of the island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and having delivered his letter to Garcia, are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail. The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?”

By the Eternal! There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college in the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this or that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies; do the thing—“carry a message to Garcia!”

General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias. No man, who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man—the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it.

Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, and sends him an Angel of Light for an assistant.

You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office—six clerks are within your call. Summon any one and make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Corregio.”

Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task?

On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye, and ask one or more of the following questions:

Who was he?

Which encyclopedia?

Where is the encyclopedia?

Was I hired for that?

Don’t you mean Bismarck?

What’s the matter with Charlie doing it?

Is he dead?

Is there any hurry?

Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself?

What do you want to know for?

And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered the questions, and explained how to find the information, and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of the other clerks to help him find Garcia—and then come back and tell you there is no such man.

Of course I may lose my bet, but according to the Law of Average, I will not.

Now if you are wise you will not bother to explain to your “assistant” that Corregio is indexed under the C’s, not in the K’s, but you will smile sweetly and say, “Never mind,” and go look it up yourself. And this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift, are the things that put pure socialism so far into the future. If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all?

A first mate with knotted club seems necessary; and the dread of getting “the bounce” Saturday night holds many a worker in his place.
Advertise for a stenographer, and nine times out of ten who apply can neither spell nor punctuate—and do not think it necessary to.

Can such a one write a letter to Garcia?

“You see that bookkeeper,” said the foreman to me in a large factory.

“Yes, what about him?”

“Well, he’s a fine accountant, but if I’d send him to town on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and, on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and when he got to Main Street, would forget what he had been sent for.”

Can such a man be entrusted to carry a message to Garcia?

We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for the “down-trodden denizen of the sweat shop” and the “homeless wanderer searching for honest employment,” and with it all often go many hard words for the men in power.

Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er-do-wells to do intelligent work; and his long patient striving with “help” that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned. In every store and factory there is a constant weeding-out process going on. The employer is constantly sending away “help” that have shown their incapacity to further the interests of the business, and others are being taken on.

No matter how good times are, this sorting continues, only if times are hard and work is scarce, this sorting is done finer—but out and forever out, the incompetent and unworthy go.

It is the survival of the fittest. Self-interest prompts every employer to keep the best-those who can carry a message to Garcia.

I know one man of really brilliant parts who has not the ability to manage a business of his own, and yet who is absolutely worthless to anyone else, because he carries with him constantly the insane suspicion that his employer is oppressing, or intending to oppress, him.

He can not give orders, and he will not receive them. Should a message be given him to take to Garcia, his answer would probably be, “Take it yourself.”

Tonight this man walks the streets looking for work, the wind whistling through his threadbare coat. No one who knows him dare employ him, for he is a regular firebrand of discontent. He is impervious to reason, and the only thing that can impress him is the toe of a thick-soled No. 9 boot.

Of course I know that one so morally deformed is no less to be pitied than a physical cripple; but in your pitying, let us drop a tear, too, for the men who are striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through the struggle to hold the line in dowdy indifference, slipshod imbecility, and the heartless ingratitude which, but for their enterprise, would be both hungry and homeless.

Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds—the man who, against great odds, has directed the efforts of others, and, having succeeded, finds there’s nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes. I have carried a dinner-pail and worked for a day’s wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; and all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous.

My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the “boss” is away, as well as when he is home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets “laid off,” nor has to go on strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks will be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town, and village—in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such; he is needed, and needed badly—the man who can

CARRY A MESSAGE TO GARCIA.

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The Human Intelligence Enterprise