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Cities Are Made Of People
By Sean Foran | December 2, 2010
I’ve written a lot in the past about the awesome opportunities I’ve been given since coming to Canisius in the Fall of 2008. What I’ve largely neglected to mention is that cities are made up of people. I wrote last time about how awesome Buffalo is for entrepreneurs (through, I’ll admit, largely anecdotal evidence), but I was thinking about Buffalo as a geographical location, not as a community of people. The people of Buffalo are what makes it so wonderful a place to live in.
You can see this just by looking at Canisius; ever since I’ve come to Canisius, I’ve had people go above and beyond their job descriptions, making their lives harder in the name of making mine easier. Whether it’s Kelly, giving me this job when I first got on campus and serving as a friend, adviser, and mentor ever since, or Joe, offering to be my reference a few weeks later when I was applying to work for ITS, then hiring me using the department budget for his sub-department of ITS when ITS told me they were too full. Whether it’s my bosses overlooking my idiosyncrasies and shortcomings and helping me do awesome things on campus, or whether it’s my professors, going out of their way to help me be successful in a system that clearly does not work for me. The people around me have always had my back.
And this is true of Buffalo, as well. I’m sitting across from the organizer of TE DxBuffalo as I type this, as she types notes for our meeting about how to make Buffalo an even better place. I’ll be sitting with a senior editor of Lifehacker, who covered my application, met me, and offered me paid work writing Android applications on the spot, with the most laid-back approach to hiring a software developer I’ve ever seen.
I’m surrounded by amazing people doing amazing things, and I think all this awesome is beginning to rub off on me.
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