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.