Regarding my lack of common sense...

I'm considering rotating into a lab that mostly does mathematical modeling of complex systems this summer. This is not exactly the direction I would have predicted my graduate research would take, but as I consider my options more and more, the appeal of this option grows.

Bioinformatics/data analysis is not really my thing. Experiments are fine, but ultimately, I believe, would be a poor use of the math/physics skillset I went to such great lengths to acquire, and have painstakingly developed over the past four years. As the youngest member of my current lab, a half-Korean 14-year-old mathematics prodigy, dryly observed, "A monkey could do this work."

I suppose that's not too far off.

I was not a mathematics prodigy at 14 (in fact, my math teachers probably considered me to be a bit of a moron), and didn't become interested in the subject at all, really, until I studied calculus in college. Higher math, oddly, comes naturally to me, in a way that the elementary math never did. (To this day, I'm still remarkably bad at arithmetic.) I hesitate to make this claim, but I've noticed that the 'harder' the math gets, the cleaner and more simple everything seems to me. I've thought about this a lot recently, and I think this odd result may stem from my notable lack of intuition. I was a poor student when I was young, and I remember I really struggled with very basic things, like percentages and decimals. I was horrendous at solving word problems. I've concluded that the reason I was so stupid is that I lacked intuition: elementary mathematics is very common-sense. The converse of this seems to be that the more abstract things become, the easier they are for me to grasp.

I think, for most subjects, this would be a fairly useless characteristic. Certainly, biology is fraught with phenomenology and reams of facts with only the barest theoretical framework holding them together, and it is for this reason, I think, that I'm an indifferent biology student, at best. Just how poorly I do in this sort of common-sense realm was not always apparent to me; I'm a hard worker, and that's often enough to overcome a deficit in learning ability. It propelled me through a degree in genetics, after all, with decent grades at the end of it. UCSF, though, is a far cry from a middling state school like UGA, and I took a pure biology course this quarter, with students from the biology program here, who naturally have an extremely strong aptitude for this sort of thing. This really drove home for me that this is not one of my strengths.

I've been wondering, if maybe I should have opted to study theoretical physics or even pure mathematics, rather than an interdisciplinary subject like biophysics. Certainly, I'm coming to realize I have a stronger aptitude for those subjects. But I think there must be ways to make use of my skillset, even within the field I've chosen. I think mathematical modeling may be one of them.

Fun with last names!

Here's a random topic: I'm thinking of having my last name changed. This is something I've actually been planning to do for a long time, but I always figured it would be a huge hassle and/or huge expense, so I never did. But, it turns out that, in California, at least, it's really straightforward to have your name changed: you just fill out a couple forms, bring them to the courthouse, then come back when they tell you to, and the judge changes your name, just like that. Apparently there's a 'court petitioning fee,' but all you have to do is declare yourself to be poor (yeah, there's a form for that, too), and they waive it more-or-less automatically. Also, my first scientific paper is going to be published soon, so I guess it's pretty much now or never!

I remember when I was a kid, my dad was sort of into genealogy, and he'd go on Biblical-style about our ancestors ("George, son of Peter, son of George, son of whoever, etc. etc."). It was kind of funny, actually. Dad's dad's ancestors were all evidently Greek peasants, and mom's descended mostly from Chinese soldiers (well, Taiwanese, now, since her family was exiled to Taiwan because they fought against the Communists in the civil war...). But get this: on my dad's mom's side, it turns out I'm the direct descendant of Sir Francis Drake! And I'm John Adams' great-great-great-great grandnephew or something. Grandma's a big mix of northern European blood -- German, Scots-Irish, English, some Norwegian and Swiss. I remember dad saying if we followed the old Norse naming convention, my last name would be Peterson (as in, 'Peter's son'). I thought that would be sort of a cool way to change my last name to something pronounceable, while still respecting my dad and our ancestry and all that, because it's not like I'm not proud of where we came from... Or, maybe I could change it to something shorter, but still Greek. Being (one quarter) Greek rules; I'm just not crazy about the mile-long, non-phonetic surname that comes with it. My last name doesn't shorten in any real obvious way, though. Maybe I'll ask James what he thinks...

On an unrelated note, if there's a prize for 'most tedious and uninteresting subject' out there, I'd like to award it to developmental biology. My god how I hate this class.

Round and round I go...

I've concluded two things from my rotations: first, that I'm honestly not sure I like any one aspect of research (computation, theory, experiment) so well that I want to do just that, and second, that I don't want to do my PhD in any of these labs. They've all had their upsides, but in every case, the downsides of the lab far outweighs what I liked about it. In my first rotation,I realized that computational data analysis is really, really tedious, and also, that I was not too good at it. I did what I was asked to do, after considerable effort, but it was not something that came to me naturally. This was a disappointment, since I enjoy working with computers in general, and I liked my advisor a great deal.

My second rotation placed me with an advisor who was rarely around, and who gave me an entirely theoretical project that I worked on in isolation for the quarter. I enjoyed the work. I love mathematics, and learning the new math this work required was something I really liked. It's crossed my mind more than once that maybe I should've gone to graduate school for math instead of science. I was decent at physics, but I was much better at the purely mathematical aspect of physics than I was at transforming the physical problem into the math to begin with. And for this rotation, I taught myself abstract algebra, and then solved my problem. After consistently struggling to piece together the biophysics techniques, chemistry, and miscellaneous biological facts from my classes, it was striking to me to remember how clean and simple pure mathematics is. But I can't imagine joining that lab, particularly since the PI is apparently about to move to a different school (something I didn't know prior to agreeing to the rotation), and I had such little interaction with him I have no sense of what the lab is like.

My third and current rotation has me doing experiments again. It's alright. Working at the bench can be tedious, but you get to work with your hands, and its rewarding to know that you're generating your own data. People in this lab, however, are almost uniformly miserable and all caution me against joining for a variety of reasons. The uniformity of their bitterness (with one notable exception) gives me pause. And I think that, if I did join a purely experimental lab, I would be shelving my physics and mathematics background, probably for good. There's not room for that sort of approach in a pure biology lab, as I've slowly come to realize.

So, I'm not sure where this places me. I've decided to definitely do a summer rotation, but I don't think I can choose to do a 5th. It's really important that I choose the right lab for my next rotation. I don't know what I'll do if I don't like my summer rotation. I feel more and more certain that I could not work for the next five years in any of the labs I've been in so far. I suppose, if it comes down to it, I can always leave graduate school... Hopefully, it will not come to that. And it would seem a terrible waste, after all the work I've put into it so far.

Mind blank

I've got a bad habit of rationalizing things, and passing them off as real reasons. It's intention drift, or at least a reasonable approximation of it. The truth of the matter is that I set out not knowing what the hell I'm doing, and still don't. My reasons for coming here in the first place were an odd, muddied mixture of vindication, vanity, and an intense desire to understand our universal affliction: why we age. It was a powerful elixir, and still is. I suppose it propelled me through my first two insane quarters here, where I learned the vast difference between an education at a middling southern public school and here, at one of the top graduate programs in the world. The transition was painful, but I believe I've learned more in the past six months than I did in the six years before that, and now that I am in high gear and keeping pace, I find the intensity exhilarating. Things click. My research is interesting, but it is brick-by-brick, a slow crawl towards incremental progress, a small bit of data in support of a supporting idea; but I am absorbing new mathematics and physics at an accelerating rate. After my work with the pipettes and the microscopes, I remain, late into the night, learning. I am staring into the chaos, and on the edge of something wonderful.