Fractal University

Background

Fractal NYC started as a co-living community. The popular mantra that described it was living near your friends. The idea was something along the lines of if you lived near your friends then there would be more opportunities to do things with them, and you would have a more fulfilling and enriching life. To accomplish this some friends started a co-living community in NYC, and made sure that they had space to invite visitors.Having spare rooms for visitors was key, because when people could experience the magic of being near friends first hand they would be motivated to make the move themselves, and then this effect would compound!

This initiative evolved and they started teaching classes to each other. At some point these classes were offered t0 the public. When I signed up for my first class I had only been living in NYC for a year. I had heard great things about the Fractal community, I wanted to learn new things, and I felt that this could provide an opportunity to meet new friends. Even though it has only been about 2 years since I took my first Fractal class I have now since taken at least 7 distinct classes, and am interested in taking poker strategy this upcoming semester. Inspired by my Close Reading teacher who wrote about what she learned at Fractal I figured I should provide an overview as well!

At Play with Poetry

I wish I remembered what other classes were offered during the semester, and exactly why or how I decided on poetry. From what I do remember the choice was largely dictated by convenience. I take tap dance classes every Wednesday and therefore that day was off limits. My other constraint is that I didn't want to do work related things outside of work.

Besides that I know that I had no interest in poetry, but maybe the class description and its playful nature drew me in. This class holds a special place in my heart maybe because it was my first one. Through this class I became acquainted with Merlin's Place, one of the residences of Fractal. I also met Merlin the cat who Merlin's Place is named after. My class also had some micro celebrities (at least to me). Namely the person who runs the Joy List, and a founder of Fractal.

I learned that poetry is a great means to express yourself, and the art form is not as dense as it seems. I also ended up going to a poetry camp because my attendance in this class. Much later I ended up becoming close friends with a guest lecturer from poetry camp.

Intro to EDM

I took intro to EDM to connect with my brother who creates music digitally himself! This class was one of the longest continually running classes at Fractal, but it looks like it's not offered this semester. I ended up adding the songs I made on a Sound Cloud. The class is one of the most structured classes at Fractal. The teacher David Shimel maintains a youtube channel that has summaries of all of his lectures, and also would send the unlisted youtube videos of the lectures.

I really shouldn't blame my classmates for my lack of success here, but not many people did the homework, and this led me to be less motivated. The biggest challenge was learning Ableton. The software has a huge learning curve, and even though the class would go over how to do things most of my time was spent trying to figure out how to get the software to cooperate with me. The goal of any artist is to get the idea they have in their head out into the physical world, and it's understandable that this would be more challenging when you first started. One takeaway I got from the class is that from an idea generation standpoint it's good to be able to create music quickly. For example, in class we'd often have 15 minutes to make a quick song, and the teacher would often show us him creating a quick beat. Even though it might take 2 hours to instruct us on how the drum set up worked in Ableton from that point forward we should be able to use the drum setup to create basic drum beats in a few minutes.

Intro to Climbing

I took this class at the same time that I took the EDM class. At the time of the class I had plateaued at climbing V4s, and I was hoping to get over this hump. Unfortunately I think I've still plateaued at v4s. Nonetheless, I did learn a few things in this class.

1. Marginally got better at dealing with ego (or not)

There was a classmate who had been climbing for way less than me. He climbed way less elegantly than me, but sometimes we would work on the same climbs together. It frustrated me that we were at the same level. Ideally it'd be great to say that I learned not to take myself so seriously, and get hung up on something like this, but I don't know if that's true.

2. Learned the 3 steps to dynoing - these were offered by a pretty advanced classmate

In climbing dynoing refers to doing a dynamic move specifically jumping from one set of holds, and catching yourself on the other set of holds. This is actually a move I am still not good at, but conceptually I learned 3 key things to success.

a. Visualize success - Think about what it will look like to make the move successfully.

b. Only swing one or two times - since you are doing a dynamic move people often swing multiple times prior to doing the move. If you've visualized success you should know you are going to grab the next hold, and therefore you shouldn't waste time or energy second guessing when to go for the move.

c. The move often only requires stepping up and grabbing - Although these moves seem hard, and it feels like you need to jump a lot. The reality is that stepping up on the hold is often almost sufficient from getting to the next hold.

I probably should put these tips to use

3. I learned to really drive my toe into things - Footwork is such an important component of climbing. Often times your feet can slip out from under you. The technique was demonstrated to me specifically in an overhung context, but effectively you can use the entirety of your leg to drive into a hold to ensure that you are truly in that hold, and use that to provide leverage to position your body, and move you to the next hold.
4. Read the route - this seems really obvious but it's still a recurring problem for me today. Oftentimes I won't be able to complete a route, because I didn't even notice a hold that is part of the route. Another key component that the teacher pointed out here was it's important to think about where your feet will be going as well.

Going into this class I really expected that with a little bit of guidance that I would be able to jump to the next level. In fact the teacher indicated that his goal for us was to get us to climb with as little strength as possible. One explanation for my lack of success might be because technique is hard to learn. Another explanation is that if you want you want to get better at something you should do more of it, and around this time I was only climbing once a week, and I was also getting over a wrist climbing injury.

Tango

Tango was one of the closest knit communities among the fractal classes. I think the relationship you form with people is different when you are dancing with them than when you are side by side learning something else.

Tango is the furthest I've made it with exploring partner dancing, but it still had its frustrations. This was the first Fractal subject matter that I took multiple semesters of within fractal, and started taking classes outside fractal. I think that's what you have to if you want to get better. At this point Tango started taking up a lot of my time, and I truly wasn't that passionate about it. There's an interesting point to be made about persevering until you really enjoy the hobby, but I wanted to spend more time on other hobbies.

The two things that stand out the most about Tango are:
1. Our teacher would often be yelling at us saying something along the lines of we need to be a man.

I got yelled at a lot about this, because I preferred to follow instead of lead. This was okay at the beginning of the class when we were changing roles. However, later our roles were becoming more established.

Other classmates did their best to provide different ways to express being a man as instruction since varying gender identities could be interested in leading. It's also interesting to associate masculinity with dancing, since that association is not always made.

2. My teacher thought I was hilarious

There have been two other times in my life where I was asked if I do standup or told to do standup comedy. To me standup seems overlapping with story telling, and I'd like to be a better storyteller, so perhaps it's something I'll explore. Generally, I'm not known to be the one who is super funny, so it's interesting that it does emerge in some contexts.

Intro to AI

The intro to AI teacher was very smart, and also a lot younger than me. For the longest time I had intentionally avoided classes that overlapped with work. Nonetheless, AI keeps getting more, and more impressive, and I thought a class would help me structure the learning process.

Unfortunately, I didn't do any homework for the class, and we also kept providing varying requests about what we wanted to learn, so this made it harder to focus the subject matter of the class. I found the teacher's substack hilarious particularly all the different ways they failed to make rice.

Planter intensive

After devoting so many weeks to classes, and trying to wind things down I decided to try a 1 day class. I had my reservations about how much could be accomplished in a class. This was the first class (and so far only class) that I attended with my girlfriend.

We learned how to do 3d modeling in Rhino, and then had our planters 3d printed. It turns out the process for creating a very simple bowl to serve as a planter can be taught pretty quickly in Rhino. The rest of the class was about coming up with your own design / inspiration and bringing it to life. I wanted to build something really creative. So I designed a planter that had a saucer on the top with holes, so you could pour water on the top, and have water rain onto the soil / plant below. This is a cool idea in practice, but logistically it's silly. The saucer effectively obstructs the ability of the plant to grow, and blocks the sun.

The planters that my girlfriend and I made are currently cursed considering that anything we've tried to grown in them hasn't done well. This is in some way more of a reflection of me as a plant caretaker, but that being said I do have other plants that are doing okay. This class is being offered in the upcoming semester, and if you decide to take it tell the instructors to respond to my email showing them the planter.

Intro to Computational Biology

The computational biology class was a 2 day intensive. I only took one of the two days of the intensive. I opted not to take the second day because I didn't retain much in the first class, and during part of it I was trying to fight off sleep. The instructor was very adamant about not proceeding with the class if you weren't interested. What I appreciated about the class is

• The instructor is super passionate
• An outcome of the class was potentially getting a job in bioinformatics
• The class was very affordable $20
  • The money was basically going to fractal to support their campus
  • The teacher was teaching because they have a huge passion

Close Reading

Similar to the poetry class I feel that I have a weakness in interpreting literary works. Additionally, my workplace book club was also reading Age of Innocence, so it was interesting to be able to participate in two books, and only have to read one book.

In the Close Reading class I learned that reading is not about solving a puzzle it's about connecting with the book. This was one of the first expectations that was set, and it really took the pressure off not being a mastermind to perfectly understand what the author was saying.

I also learned that what I viewed as pretty romantic in the book many of the woman in my class viewed as deeply unromantic. In particular the protagonist was content to be in the presence of his fling and said he didn't require anything more than that. Some woman in my class were upset that he wouldn't kiss his fling in this scenario.

Finally, the book mentioned that you would rewear a wedding dress. At first I was confused, because in modern day a wedding dress is for a singular occasion, and doesn't get re used. However, one of my classmates pointed out how wasteful it is to wear something only once, and then I realized that my assumptions are way more wasteful, and it was something I had just taken for granted based on societal norms.

If Close Reading sounds appealing to you their is a fall class available.