My name is Diana Kimball, and this summer, I’d like to try something new.
This August, I’m moving from San Francisco to Boston to start at Harvard Business School, to begin again. But before I go, I want to find something surprising to work on for the summer—a project to pour my heart into—because I learn the most from falling in love, and I want to learn everything I can.
These are things I’ve loved before.
I spent the summer of 2007 submerged in words, learning Russian in Vermont. I’d taken two years of classes, but it didn’t matter: arriving at Middlebury meant landing on another planet. In the beginning, I knew just enough grammar to get by, but my vocabulary was beyond basic. At breakfast and late at night, my friends and I would play with words and fall out of our chairs laughing, delighting in language—amazed at how little we knew, how much there was to say. The summer started with fragments and ended with sentences, with whole stories, with foreign dreams: every day felt new.
In late 2007, Tim Hwang, Christina Xu and I teamed up to start ROFLCon, a ramshackle academic celebration of internet culture. When the conference finally came to life in April 2008, you could find me running all over MIT with tattered sheets of paper—printed-out spreadsheets full of names and phone numbers, times and places, stained blue by jeans pockets. For two surreal days, Tron Guy and Alice Marwick collided, and around 800 other internet-lovers collided too. But for me, nothing could have been more important than the months leading up to those two weird, shining days: working incredibly hard with some of my closest friends, teetering between overwhelm and joy, toward something we knew had to come true.
And then, in the summer before my senior year of college, I fell in love with San Francisco. The dark pastel buildings and slanted, sunlit streets struck me first, but it was the energy of progress that pulled me in. In 2009, I moved here for good. Not long after, I started techbookclub with Amit Gupta. The material of techbookclub is always changing, but somehow, it all hangs together. We’ll read about the Toyota Production System and then we’ll read about screenwriting, and we’ll never end up where I expected. When we come together as a group it’s this electric, giddy explosion of ideas and plans, words tripping and insisting—there is so much to know!
I want more like this. Are you working on something you love?
- Diana
