What is your identity and how does it impact how you see the world and how the world sees you?

Growing up my identity has always been tied to specific events or groups I’ve been involved with:

  1. I rose the ranks of my high school tennis team to a varsity position my senior year
  2. I was the software team leader of my FIRST FRC robotics team in high school, and spent countless hours after school in the lab, disregarding all notions of social well being and academic success in the process.
  3. I was a 5 year member of the South Bend Youth Symphony Orchestra
  4. I used to embrace my role as a loving boyfriend (this is no longer the case…)
  5. I recently became a tech geek who uses Linux for fun :)
  6. Two years ago I became the founding president of the Notre Dame Table Tennis Club
  7. I am currently a member of the Dillon Hall community
  8. I will soon be a Notre Dame alum

But with so many life-changing events even within the past few years, I’ve recently struggled with the question “can I really define my identity on events that may be ‘out of date’ in a few years?” While all these events are important and memorable, few of them remain an integral part of my core identity today. Writing this post has made me think about my identity in broader ideological terms, instead of individual events in my life:

  1. I am passionate about programming and its ability to empower people.
  2. I am a Christian who firmly believes in the power of Christ’s teachings.
  3. I am a 100% privileged white male who grew up in a loving Christian household
  4. I am a hacker who seeks to write beautiful code and well-designed software.
  5. I will soon be Notre Dame alum

Although number 4 was inspired by the readings for this week, reflecting back it’s something I’ve always embraced I just never knew how to formalize it. Ever since I started programming in middle school I’ve been passionate about code. I’ve had software projects where I legitimately “want to work sixteen hours a day on it” (Graham). I fully embrace the stereotype of “zoning out” for hours at a time because these types of experiences have become a big part of who I am. I am not ashamed of my commitment to writing clean software, and will (almost) never settle for lesser code, even if it means putting myself on the line and losing a bit of sleep.

I also fully embrace my privilege as a white male Notre Dame student. It is easy to shy away from my privileges, but as we talked about in class I am not guity of how I was raised. Part of the hacker ethos is to focus on the quality of the software I produce, which means the technical skills I’ve learned at Notre Dame should not be cause for guilt but for celebration. I think the hacker ethos combines well with the idea of meritocracy: good code is good code, and should be celebrated because it is good code, not because of where or who it came from. Under this framework I am held accountable my individual performance, as my Notre Dame degree has no direct impact the code I write. In other words, meritocracy prevents me from leveraging my degree as a substitute for code quality.

With that being said, I included my status as an ND alum in my ideological identity list because of how influential it is and will be in how people view me, whether I like it or not. I know I will be held to very high standards both inside and outside of the workplace; I hope I can use these expectations as motivation to fully engage with everything I do, including my technical work and loving others. Finding this balance of distancing myself from my privileged status while still embracing it will be difficult, but I think it is a critical part of discovering my true self-identity, especially during my first few years in the workforce. I can’t directly control what others think, but I can control my own actions and how closely I stick to my identity as a hacker, a Christian, and a Notre Dame alum.