Musings of a Young Scientist
Personal
It is currently 4:00 AM. Yesterday afternoon, my mentor from last summer’s research internship texted me asking for me to review her proof for submission for publication. That’s how I spent my evening and night. Admittedly, I was distracted for a good chunk to spend an hour arguing about political theory with my roommates, and after that I took a quick nap while still reading the manuscript at my desk. I am a bit sleep deprived from having to write 10 emails the day before related to co-op interviews. There is a lot on my plate — at any moment there is never fewer than three things on my mind at once. Despite all the stress, I feel… Great. Proud of myself actually, and that is something I have never been able to say before coming to Northeastern.
My childhood was wholly unremarkable. That in of itself is a source of motivation for who I am trying to be today. I grew up in the shadow of my older sister. She was taller than me, stronger than me, straight As, GT schools, a natural at sports. I was short, underweight, kinda dumb, also ugly. On the shelf below my sister’s array of trophies, I have a couple of participation awards crumbled up and scattered about. Despite relatively easy circumstances, I was a letdown. The feeling of being a nobody is one that leads to question why it matters that you exist.
To overturn such gloomy thoughts is a journey. For me, I owe my recovery to computer science. In high school, my programming skills excelled compared to my peers. But the common assumption that people make about me is wrong:
I was not born knowing how to code. It’s not that I’m that much better at programming. What initially set me apart was simply that I liked it a lot.
Hence, I would spend skip meals and sleep late to hack out projects and learn new things. Passion — I am passionate about computer science. That is a damn good reason to exist. When you care about something enough, you create meaning in your own life.
I left everything that was familiar and easy to come here. Boston is cold and expensive. Why? My personal goal is to give an answer to that question. Why did I come to Boston? It’s because I am above my past self and I am here to prove it. I am ambitious. For the first time, I am in the driver’s seat for my own life. I want to justify to myself that I am here for good reason. I have no intention to seek a life where things come easy and for free. My passion will fuel the effort necessary to accomplish all that I hope to get done.
Intellectual Goal
Five years ago, I was diagnosed with a chronic disease for which there is no cure. Pain is a powerful motivator; I have a strong curiosity to find out why it is that twice a year I feel like I’ve been impaled.
My primary research interests are in how commensal bacteria “talk” to the host via immune modulation at mucosal barriers in the gastrointestinal tract. There is a fascinating case study of a patient who, upon receiving a fecal microbiota transplant, had their secondary progressive multiple sclerosis put into a ten-year remission. In English, this guy recovered from an untreatable neurodegenerative condition by receiving a poop transplant.
Reality is seldom as it seems: there are complex systems underlying what we observe. To understand these systems is beyond human capability. Only by high-throughput bioinformatics and computational theory can we effectively study a topic on the scale of systems biology. My intellectual goal is to understand the computational methods of metagenomics and to develop a framework for understanding biology through the lens of a computer scientist.
Professional Goal
As scientists, we are always standing on the shoulders of giants. So much progress means the challenges that we face today are increasingly complex. They demand interdisciplinary solutions to be solved. These days, computing is integral to biological research. Having been trained as both a biologist and computer scientist, I often find myself as the contact point between these two fields. Science is collaborative. My professional goal is to further develop myself as a liaison for empowering research through computation.
As an academic, every of mine own achievements are directly dependent on the availability of open source software and open science. Companies and publishers fail to realize open science is more than a nice-to-have.
Open source and open science are pivotal for the progression of not individual organizations, but rather the collective human effort.
Given their grand importance, my professional goal is to enable integrative research by contributing to open source software and open science.
This was originally written for Northeastern University Office of Undergraduate Research & Fellowships’ PEAK Basecamp Awards — The First Reflection: Goal Setting.
P.S. dear NEU: stop trying to make SAIL happen. It’s not gonna happen.
