Autumn 2011
The spring of my freshman year I became involved in an Oceanography lab that my sister had previously worked in - the lab of Professor Virginia "Ginger" Armbrust. The lab's focus - genomics and transcriptomics bioinformatics on marine plankton - seemed narrow at first, nothing like the medical research I had imagined myself getting involved in before I came to college. But I ended up learning so much about applying the scientific fundamentals, and the research process too, that it didn't really matter the end goal of the work itself. The first few months were filled with technical skills - using the fluorimeter, knowing how to apply exponential growth equations to bacterial cultures, ensuring sterility to get good results - but after a quarter I could begin conducting real experiments. Working with Shady Amin, a post-doc in the lab, I conducted and presented on an experiment that measured the interactions between marine bacteria and diatoms (in my case, Pseudonitzschia multiseries): silicate-based phytoplankton. The experiment I conducted ended up being included in a paper ("Interaction and Signaling Between a Cosmopolitan Phytoplankton and Associated Bacteria") that is now being submitted to Nature for potential publication, with me as one of the contributing authors.
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This also acted as one of my experiential learning projects; read my in-depth reflection here:
Science is the pre-eminent research publication in the world. Its acceptance rate of papers submitted is less than 7%, a statistic that is both revered and reviled by the highly competitive academic community. I was reminded of this competition when I ran into Shady Amin, the post-doc I had worked with in the Armbrust Lab, at the local coffee shop a couple weeks ago. Over iced coffee, we caught up on life (since it had been a couple years since I had last seen him), including the news that Shady’s paper, "Interaction and Signaling Between a Cosmopolitan Phytoplankton and Associated Bacteria," had been rejected from Science. Expressing my sympathy, I experienced a curious mélange of surprise and disappointment when Shady told me the paper had me listed as one of the contributing authors. The experiment between marine bacteria and diatoms I had conducted in the summer of my freshman year had made it into a major scientific publication?! Not quite.
Even so, it’s empowering as an undergraduate to find out that your little freshman project contributed to an actual article, even if that article was rejected by Science. When I was performing my experiment that summer, I got caught up in the minutiae of working in a lab: maintaining cultures, counting bacterial colonies, logging data, and putting together a presentation and paper. My presentation was a hit; Professor Armbrust remarked that she wished “all undergraduates were this motivated.” Writing the paper was a little more difficult, because I had just started my resident advisor position and couldn’t seem to find the time to complete it. But after all was said and done, when I had received my credits for OCEAN 499 and gotten just a little too busy with life, I kind of forgot about it in the rush of all my new sophomore experiences.
The amount of time I put into my experiment was a valuable lesson in the dedication required for scientific research. Over the last two years, I’ve had a couple other forays into the research world, but I feel none of them were as productive as that first experience in the Armbrust lab. Sure, I’ve been involved in some pretty cool projects – one of them was the Rao lab’s brain-to-brain communications experiment in my computer science department (a project that eventually made it to some major news outlets and even Reddit) – but I didn’t have the same personal level of completion or satisfaction. In retrospect, I know that it was due to my own level of familiarity with the lab’s work: at the Rao lab, I thought I could just come in and write computer programs, but in reality there was a very steep learning curve in navigating my way around the lab’s prior code base. I forgot that I had put in almost daily work into becoming acquainted with the way things were done in the Armbrust lab, an understanding that enabled me to make a more impactful contribution in the long run.
This high activation energy is not unique to the research world. I’ve come to realize more and more that pretty much every field and discipline requires a similar initial investment in order to reap a significant success. This investment can take many forms. In business, it’s your networks with the movers and shakers in industry. In many of the sciences, it’s a strong foundation in essential knowledge and connections with faculty. In music, it can be a ruthless mix of all three: the talent and skill required to play a musical instrument, the connections to secure gigs, AND the supporting equipment/instruments themselves. Even in computer science, with its plethora of online tutorials and ready-set-go guides on how to start web programming or build mobile apps, the real hurdle comes when you attempt to differentiate yourself from all the other people who can follow those selfsame online tutorials and ready-set-go guides (it’s arguable, though, that the internet age has fostered an environment where overnight [at least in relative terms] success is distinctly more reachable than in any other discipline, specifically because the entry cost is so low. Just look at the recent acquisitions of Snapchat, Whatsapp, and Summly by major software companies - and the corresponding jump in wealth of their previously plebeian creators). Even if you get past said entry barrier, you might still face stiff competition depending on the concentration of skilled people in your field, with everyone fighting for the same pool of capital, resources, and acclaim. There’s a reason why Science doesn’t accept very many publications.
However, you can’t let these daunting prospects stop you. The world is so vast now that even the giants among us have limited reach. Amazon’s US empire is rivaled by its Asian counterpart, Alibaba, much as RenRen is to Facebook and YouKu to YouTube. Google and Microsoft have been similarly stymied by protectionist tendencies in China’s emerging market. So it’s not such a big deal to be turned down by the world’s most prestigious scientific publication. Often it’s the lowly successes in your small pond that can cascade into a future of great opportunities and greater contributions.
Science is the pre-eminent research publication in the world. Its acceptance rate of papers submitted is less than 7%, a statistic that is both revered and reviled by the highly competitive academic community. I was reminded of this competition when I ran into Shady Amin, the post-doc I had worked with in the Armbrust Lab, at the local coffee shop a couple weeks ago. Over iced coffee, we caught up on life (since it had been a couple years since I had last seen him), including the news that Shady’s paper, "Interaction and Signaling Between a Cosmopolitan Phytoplankton and Associated Bacteria," had been rejected from Science. Expressing my sympathy, I experienced a curious mélange of surprise and disappointment when Shady told me the paper had me listed as one of the contributing authors. The experiment between marine bacteria and diatoms I had conducted in the summer of my freshman year had made it into a major scientific publication?! Not quite.
Even so, it’s empowering as an undergraduate to find out that your little freshman project contributed to an actual article, even if that article was rejected by Science. When I was performing my experiment that summer, I got caught up in the minutiae of working in a lab: maintaining cultures, counting bacterial colonies, logging data, and putting together a presentation and paper. My presentation was a hit; Professor Armbrust remarked that she wished “all undergraduates were this motivated.” Writing the paper was a little more difficult, because I had just started my resident advisor position and couldn’t seem to find the time to complete it. But after all was said and done, when I had received my credits for OCEAN 499 and gotten just a little too busy with life, I kind of forgot about it in the rush of all my new sophomore experiences.
The amount of time I put into my experiment was a valuable lesson in the dedication required for scientific research. Over the last two years, I’ve had a couple other forays into the research world, but I feel none of them were as productive as that first experience in the Armbrust lab. Sure, I’ve been involved in some pretty cool projects – one of them was the Rao lab’s brain-to-brain communications experiment in my computer science department (a project that eventually made it to some major news outlets and even Reddit) – but I didn’t have the same personal level of completion or satisfaction. In retrospect, I know that it was due to my own level of familiarity with the lab’s work: at the Rao lab, I thought I could just come in and write computer programs, but in reality there was a very steep learning curve in navigating my way around the lab’s prior code base. I forgot that I had put in almost daily work into becoming acquainted with the way things were done in the Armbrust lab, an understanding that enabled me to make a more impactful contribution in the long run.
This high activation energy is not unique to the research world. I’ve come to realize more and more that pretty much every field and discipline requires a similar initial investment in order to reap a significant success. This investment can take many forms. In business, it’s your networks with the movers and shakers in industry. In many of the sciences, it’s a strong foundation in essential knowledge and connections with faculty. In music, it can be a ruthless mix of all three: the talent and skill required to play a musical instrument, the connections to secure gigs, AND the supporting equipment/instruments themselves. Even in computer science, with its plethora of online tutorials and ready-set-go guides on how to start web programming or build mobile apps, the real hurdle comes when you attempt to differentiate yourself from all the other people who can follow those selfsame online tutorials and ready-set-go guides (it’s arguable, though, that the internet age has fostered an environment where overnight [at least in relative terms] success is distinctly more reachable than in any other discipline, specifically because the entry cost is so low. Just look at the recent acquisitions of Snapchat, Whatsapp, and Summly by major software companies - and the corresponding jump in wealth of their previously plebeian creators). Even if you get past said entry barrier, you might still face stiff competition depending on the concentration of skilled people in your field, with everyone fighting for the same pool of capital, resources, and acclaim. There’s a reason why Science doesn’t accept very many publications.
However, you can’t let these daunting prospects stop you. The world is so vast now that even the giants among us have limited reach. Amazon’s US empire is rivaled by its Asian counterpart, Alibaba, much as RenRen is to Facebook and YouKu to YouTube. Google and Microsoft have been similarly stymied by protectionist tendencies in China’s emerging market. So it’s not such a big deal to be turned down by the world’s most prestigious scientific publication. Often it’s the lowly successes in your small pond that can cascade into a future of great opportunities and greater contributions.
winter 2011
Though many science majors may complain about finding VLPA credits to fulfill their requirements, many of my Honors peers and myself see them as welcome distractions from the difficulty of science classes. I took Romantic Poetry from Raimonda Modiano in the Winter and rather easily 4.0'd the class, since writing has always been one of my strong suits. I was glad to discover that my self-judgment could stand up to the scrutiny of a 300-level English course.
Spring 2012
Spring was a creative quarter for me. I engaged in an Honors photography class that allowed me to not only explore the technical skills necessary for operating a DSLR, but the compositional, artistic aspects of photography. The class challenged me to see how I could differentiate my work from that of my classmates, to find unique locations, angles, layouts, and subjects that would wow my audience during critiques and get the best reactions from the crowd. I thrived on these attentions, feeling justified that although I was pursing hard sciences, I was still able to excel in the liberal arts to the point of admiration. My final project in the class received the poorest score out of all my projects due to the less-than-satisfying image quality of the pinhole photos (it's such a fickle technique) but is the one I am the most proud of. I used Photoshop to combine digital and pinhole photographs of different locations so that I could capture both action and stationary subjects in the same composition. To this day, I am still rather annoyed that it didn't get a high grade, because I spent the most time, the most thought, the most creativity, and the most learning on this project.
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SUMMER 2012
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My quartet played a wedding at the Ball Harbor International Conference Center in July, and one of the special requests was "At Last" as sung by Etta James. I'm rather proud of my transcription because it sounds pretty close to the original, and it's also in a genre I'm not super familiar with, blues. Also, I didn't use a fancy music-writing tool like Sibelius or Finale, just a little free version of Finale Notepad I found on the internet. Writing was slow and rather painful, as some of the markings, like changing time signatures and key signatures, that I'm used to in professional quality arrangements were unavailable to me. From the current point of view, I pulled it out at another wedding this last summer (2014), which was both heartwarming and rather amusing; I never really imagined this little arrangement to have much staying power in my repertoire, yet here it was.
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