Depth, Breadth, Focus, and Specialization
Saturday, August 30, 2008 @ 7:41pm
This post was inspired by a conversation I had yesterday regarding my educational track/program plan here at MIT. I'm not going to use names because this is not an attack on any person, just a strong disagreement with a set of opinions.
First we need to cover some background information. The graduate program in biological engineering at MIT offers two "tracks" that a student can choose between. The choice of tracks determines the core courses the student will take and the qualifying exams he/she will have to pass. The two choices are bioengineering and applied biosciences, with bioengineering being the more popular track. The bioengineering track includes classes on transport phenomena, statistical thermodynamics, stochastic processes, and mechanical and electrical engineering. The applied biosciences track includes classes on signalling networks, cellular pathology, toxicology, and genetics. Students in one track are allowed but not required to take courses from the other track as electives, and this point is at the heart of the disagreement we had.
My plan is to choose the applied biosciences track and take a variety of electives related to pharmacology / toxicology. I don't intend to take any courses from the bioengineering track. The group of people I was with yesterday disagreed with my plan and believed that it was better for everyone to take some engineering classes. I strongly believe this is flawed logic for a variety of reasons.
On a personal level, the classes and topics from the bioengineering track do not interest me in the least. They have little relevance to my intended career path, and they would all require a disproportionately large amount of time and effort to produce a still sub-optimal result (because many of the courses require skills that I lack). To better explain this, I used the analogy of building a computer. Let's say a person can build a computer for $500 or $1000. All other things being equal, it's more prudent to build the $500 computer. Now let's say the $500 computer is a top of the line Macintosh, and the $1000 computer is a mediocre Dell. Now it makes even more sense to build the $500 computer. Finally, let's say the person is interested in desktop publishing and doesn't play computer games. At this point, there is no logical reason to build the $1000 computer. By analogy, there is no logical reason for me to take courses from the bioengineering track.
On a more fundamental level, I believe taking courses from the other track is actually antithetical to the purpose of graduate school. In the United States, the point of an undergraduate degree program is to give an individual a broad, general foundation in a topic. I studied chemistry, and I had to take courses from all major branches of chemistry. The net result is that I'm generally familiar with many areas of chemistry but am not an expert in any of them. The point of a graduate program is two-fold: to make a person an expert in a particular field, and to enable a person to conduct independent research in that field. By taking a class from the other track, an individual is giving up a slot (grad students in BE generally only take 5 or 6 electives) that could have been filled with a class from his/her own track, which would have contributed to making the person an expert in his/her track instead of generally familiar with the other track.
The people I was with made a number of arguments that I want to directly refute. The first was that a person has to be open to ideas/perspectives from areas other than his own. The problem with this logic is it's too broadly applicable, and can be used to criticize any educational program. It also reveals the biases of the people making the argument, as these were bioengineering students criticizing my plan because it did not include bioengineering classes. By the same logic, I could criticize them for not taking advanced organic chemistry in undergrad.
The second argument they made was that I should take hard classes or classes on topics that I'm unskilled at, leaving the impression that it would be lazy not to. I don't view this as laziness, I view it as efficiency and self-evlaution. I recognize that I'm very good at organic chemistry and biochemistry, and that by the same token I'm not good at differential equations or physical chemistry. Therefore I maximize my effort/learning ratio by taking classes only from the applied biosciences track. Furthermore, I know that my career applications are in pharmaceutical industry rather than in the biomedical device industry, meaning the classes from applied biosciences are more applicable to my career plans and make me more marketable/employable.
The third argument they made was that my prospective employers would expect me to like/know engineering because my degree would be from a department of biological engineering. However, this ignores a fundamental fact: I don't want to be a biological engineer. So why am I going to school in a biological engineering department? Because biological engineering is an umbrella term that MIT uses to cover a variety of topics they don't offer graduate programs in, including toxicology and pharmacology. In fact, what is currently the biological engineering department was originally the toxicology department. Reflecting this fact, the text of a BE graduate's degree is almost entirely up to him/her. When I receive my degree in ~5 years, it will not say biological engineering.
In other, less diatribe-laden news, I'm happier than I've ever been in my life. Every day here is amazing, and every day I love life more than I did the day before. I've met so many amazing people that I already feel like I've known forever. Thursday we had a photo safari that involved a number of famous/infamous MIT locations, including some hack sites. Last night there was a dance party at my dorm that was incredibly fun, and my friends and I hit up a few bars afterward to relax and laugh. I spent most of today at Pete Dedon's house on Plum Island at a BE party. The weather was gorgeous, the scenary picturesque, the food delicious, and the people a blast.
I could not ask for more.
MIT Pictures, Update on Mom
Thursday, August 21, 2008 @ 12:12am
In response to numerous requests from family and friends, I got out one sunny day this week and took some photos of my dorm and the campus. These are fairly mundane shots, nothing artsy. Just wanted to give everyone an idea of what it looks like up here. Now that I've discovered how easy Picasa is to use, more are sure to follow.
In other, less happy news, my mom is starting to experience stronger side effects from her treatment. She's finishing up her fourth week of combined chemotherapy and lung radiation, with two or three more weeks to go. Her lungs are starting to burn from the radiation, making it difficult to sleep at night (lying flat or stretching/compressing the chest hurts) and winding her easily. Her hands and feet are also starting to tingle and go numb from the chemotherapy, which could make her unable to drive herself to treatment (she does that occassionally if scheduling doesn't work out for another family member to drive her) if it gets too bad. The biggest problem with this is that if the side-effects get so bad that mom says she can't stand them anymore, she'll have to have a "treatment break" to give her body time to recover, during which time the cancer will also be able to recover and spread. Just as not finishing a course of antibiotics encourages resistant bacteria to multiply and causes the infection to come back stronger, cancer treatment breaks give more robust cancer cells time to divide and grow, and can potentially make the cancer worse. So my biggest hope now is that she'll be able to tough out these two or three more weeks of chemotherapy and radiation without having to experience a treatment break. After that, she'll move into just chemotherapy with cisplatin, Taxotere, and Avastin (one of the drugs I talked about earlier that I was hopeful they would put her on).
In response to these new problems, my grandmother and other family members are trying to convince my mom to relax, lie down a lot, sleep a lot, and in general not do much of anything but eat and sleep, in order to give her body the most strength to fight the side-effects. Of course, stubborness runs rampant in my family, and my mom doesn't want to listen. She still wants to do as much as she can with Gage (my little brother) and around the house. Honestly, I'm split on how I feel about it. I fully understand the rest of my family's point of view, that she needs as much rest as possible in order to get through treatment without a break. But I also sympathize with my mom because I know there's the very real possibility that, at least for a while, treatment and side-effects will only get worse. If she still feels up to running around with Gage today, even if it winds her, she may think it's worth it because she might not be capable of it at all next week. It's a quality vs. quantity thing, and I'm beginning to see how those can crop up quite a lot in cancer treatment.
Thoughts, prayers, wishes, and notes are still (and have always been) much appreciated.
First Public Speaking Article
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 @ 3:37pm
My first article on public speaking is finally finished and online! This article is about a set of 5 simple tricks that you can apply to any speech in any context and see instant improvement. This is a very "beginner level" article, but a more advanced one with some lesser known techniques is already in the works. Enjoy!
My Biggest Fear
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 @ 12:44am
Remember that rapidly growing fear that I alluded to yesterday? Time to spill it.
I want to do great things with my life. Not great like "oh he got a great job and makes 6 figures a year and has a bunch of nice stuff and works in a field that helps people". Great like Bob Langer great. Great like people who don't speak English know my name. Great like a building at MIT/Harvard/etc. is named after me. Great like 100 years after I've passed away people are still talking about me. I want to change the world for the better. I want to impact the lives of more people than I can possibly fathom. And I'm afraid that it won't happen. I'm afraid that I'm just not cut out for it. I'm afraid that I'm destined to do a lot of good things, but no great things. I'm afraid that I'm going to go through life without ever being known outside my circle of friends, family, and coworkers. I'm afraid that I'm not special enough, not smart enough, not creative enough, not driven enough, not rich enough, not privileged enough, not experienced enough to do great things.
I look at people that I regard as great (Michio Kaku, David Liu, Bob Langer, etc.) and I'm boggled by the things they accomplished at young ages. Michio Kaku built a working particle accelerator while in high school. What did I do in high school? Speech and debate. Was it intellectually stimulating? Sure. Did it demonstrate profound creativity or the capacity to create world changing inventions? No. Was I good at it? Sure. But was I great at it? No. I never took first at any national level tournaments, and was regularly beaten in state by fellow competitors. I did Science Bowl, at least that was in the realm of science, right? Was I good at it? Sure, I set a new record for questions answered in Mississippi. Was I great at it? By no means. Our record at nationals? 1-5.
How about once I got to college? David Liu had a better than 4.0 GPA at Harvard. Me? I couldn't even muster summa cum laude out of Ole Miss. Not to disparage my alma mater, but it's no Harvard. If I couldn't pull better than a B out of genetics or physiology, how the hell am I supposed to become a world changing biological engineer? Could I chalk those grades up to not trying my best in those classes? Sure, and that's probably true. But how do I know for sure? I don't. And those are far from the only examples. I barely scraped an A out of calculus 2 and I only passed physical chemistry because of my ability to write in ridiculously small print on an allowed note card. I never took differential equations because I knew I'd make a B. I can't integrate to save my life. And now I go to MIT, and this fall I have a course on biochemical kinetics and mathematicl modelling. What am I going to do in that class? Even if I somehow manage to bust my ass and get an A, I still had to bust my ass. It didn't come easy and it wasn't intuitive. I did it the old fashioned way. The regular way. The average way. The mediocre way.
At times it seems as if everything I've done in my life has been mediocre, at least in my spectrum. I understand that the things I've accomplished are great to the majority of people, and I don't say these things to insult those people or downplay their significance. I'm just backing up and taking a frank look at my life. When I strip away all my fancy wording and my ridiculous ability to talk myself up in person and on my CV, what am I left with? A kid who went to a mediocre high school in the educationally worst state in the nation, had moderate success at public speaking, went on to a state university in that same last-place state, pulled a good but not great GPA, and went to a great grad school. Is it better than the path that 99% of people in the world take? Of course. Will it almost certainly lead to a wonderful job and a good life? Of course.
But is it great? Is it dazzling? Does it read like a movie of the week? Does it sound like it would be at home on the jacket of a hardcover book in the biography section? Does it sound like someone who would make you stop in your tracks and say "wow..."?
Or does it sound plausible?
Does it sound average?
A Full Mind
Monday, August 18, 2008 @ 12:03am
There have been so many things on my mind as of late that I think part of the reason I've been putting off doing an update is that I know there's no possible way I can cover all the things I want to talk about in the depth that I want to talk about them. But at the same time, I want to talk about them, so I'm making myself at least attempt it. Let's start at the beginning...
I got moved into my dorm without any trouble, and everything unpacked and in its right place (I'm a little anal about organization) by about 10pm. The private bedroom is rather spacious (bigger than the one I had in my apartment back in Oxford), if sparse (even with all the furniture, it didn't look like anybody actually lived there when I finished unpacking). The shared kitchen/dining room is ridiculously tiny, but I guess that's the trade off for a sizeable bedroom (though I'm not sure I'd have made that trade if actually given the choice). My roommate is clean and friendly and I think we'll get along great, even if we don't become good friends (we don't seem to have a lot in common as far as interests/background goes). The facilities of the dorm as a whole are quite nice, with a well-equipped gym and gameroom in the basement, a variety of spacious common areas, TV rooms (with large HDTV's and DVD players) on each floor, and an extensive movie collection that can be checked out at the front desk. There's also a large courtyard/patio area on the interior of the building (it's built like a hollow square) with a large permanent grill pit and a big collection of chairs and tables. Sidney-Pacific (that's the name of my dorm) appears to be one of the more (if not most) social dorms on campus, and schedules lots of regular events like coffee hours, brunches, movies, dances, grill-outs, etc. I'm really excited about living here and I'm hoping to get involved in the hall government community, which is the easiest (and most sure-fire) way to guarantee residence here after your first year.
After unpacking and meeting my roommate, I was exhausted from travelling (remarkable how sitting down on a plane all day can somehow make you tired?), so I went to bed early. When I woke up Sunday, my roommate had left his copy of How To Get Around MIT for me on the dining room table, so I spent the first few hours of the day perusing that. Then I set out onto campus with no real plan, and enjoyed walking around aimlessly, getting lost a few times, popping out into seemingly randomly placed but beautifully appointed garden areas. One of the unique things about the MIT campus is that the vast majority of the buildings are connected by a series of spacious underground tunnels, many of which allow access to areas not accessible by ground (such as the so-called "secret ninja courtyard", which is housed on the interior of a square of four connected buildings). I ended my wandering in time to head back to my dorm and catch my friend Vasileios's birthday party cookout. I had a blast there, meeting a good number of current and former graduate students and splurging on some terrible-for-me-but-tasty grilled meats. Inclement weather set in about midway through the party, so I spent the rest of the night in my room reading HTGAMIT, and began my ritual of nightly trips to the gym.
Monday saw another day filled with indoor activities, as the four boxes of goodies that we had shipped the previous week arrived. I spent several hours unpacking and finding a place for everything, and was highly relieved to finally have access to a full-sized computer (I love my PocketPC, but it's not the ideal web browsing platform). I squeazed in a bit more campus wandering late in the day, mostly to find the best route to the biology building in preparation for the summer class that would start the next day. On the way back, I stopped by the nearly-on-campus grocery store and loaded up on the necessities for the following week.
Tuesday was when things really fell into a regular routine, as this was the day I began my short summer course on basic biology lab techniques. The course is a joint offering between the Harvard systems biology program and the MIT biological engineering program, and usually features enrollment from both schools. However, my class of incoming BE graduate students is apparently highly skilled in biology lab, as I ended up being the only MIT student in the class. I don't really mind because the people (for the most part) are friendly, fun, and accepting, but it is a little annoying to know that I'm probably not going to see any of them again after next week. Still, I'm glad I took the class. It provided some structure to my day, gives me something to do, and allows me to be sociable (a desperate need of mine that wasn't being fulfilled since I only know about 4 people in this city right now).
Thursday I made my first venture over to the Boston side of the Charles River to meet my friend Maria, whom I met during the summer of 2006 when I was here on an REU program. We had killer cheap Chinese food at a hole-in-the-wall joint in Chinatown, then she gave me the more-or-less grand tour of Boston. One of the neat features of Boston is that it has the urban, exciting, cosmopolitan feel of New York City, but without the grounds and contained in a ridiculously small area. It seems entirely possible to walk to all the good parts of Boston in a day, and the compact area makes it relatively easy to get your bearings and accordingly difficult to get lost. Once my fellow classmates start to arrive and I get to know more people well enough to the point that we do stuff together, I have no doubt that Boston will provide a plethora of easily accessible and ridiculously fun activities.
In more academic news, I'm starting to get really excited (read: incredibly nervous) about the courses I'll be taking in the fall and about all the research areas that are open to me. Unlike many graduate schools and departments, the BE department doesn't have a formal lab rotation system. Instead, students are encouraged to use their own time to arrange work in various professors' labs in order to find our which one best suits them. Students are supposed to declare a research advisor by the beginning of spring semester, so the time to shop around labs is highly condensed relative to the number of options available (around 40 faculty members). Thankfully I'm not interested in everything they're doing, but there is a handful of professors (six, to be specific) that I think I'm going to have trouble choosing between.
- Pete Dedon is the professor that I worked for during my summer at MIT, so his research has the added benefit of familiarity to it. Beyond that, it was the research that first sparked my interest in the chemistry/biology interface, and it involved the nitric oxide that I've come to love. His research is very fundament, basic biology type research looking at the causes and mechanisms of DNA damage and repair. It has a wide variety of applications, but I'm not sure if it's too "basic" (that is, separated from practical application).
- John Essigmann is in many ways doing the same sort of research, but his is more practically oriented and in the toxicology/drug discovery/drug delivery area of research. He's active in entrepreneurship in the pharmaceutical area and has experience taking a laboratory finding all the way to the on-the-shelf stage, which is an enticing plus.
- Dane Wittrup is a professor I've just discovered who's doing cutting edge cancer therapy research, so my interest in his work is obvious. He's another one who seems very familiar with entrepreneurship and the conversion of academic findings into marketable products.
- Darrell Irvine is a member of MIT's Koch Cancer Institute, so his work also has tie-ins to cancer therapy. His research is more synthetic chemistry, with a focus on nanoparticle drug delivery. It's a fascinating technique that's interested me ever since I first heard about it at the Biomedical Engineering Society conference I attended in 2006, but I worry that the actual lab work would be too similar to the synthetic organic work that I came to hate during my senior year of undergrad.
- Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli has research very similar to Darrell Irvine's, looking at the way nanoparticles interact with proteins and DNA and in turn using that information for drug delivery purposes. Again, fascinating research with a clear possibility for practical application, but maybe too chemistry/materials based for my tastes.
- Ed Boyden has, I think, by far the most exciting research. He's doing neuroengineering, with applications to both healing disorders and improving functionality of healthy brains (thus somewhat bypassing my "therapy vs. improvement" debate that I posted about a while back). His attitude toward problems seems aggressive, complex, and astoundingly creative (he has a blog that I read often), and I would imagine that translate well into his research. My biggest reservation is my almost complete lack of experience with studying the brain, though I hope that could be overcome with coursework and outside studying.
Wow, this post took longer than I thought it was going to. As I predicted, I'm still not done. The other big thing I wanted to talk about is a fear that's been getting progressively more tangible over the past week, but it will have to wait until tomorrow when I can devote a proper amount of thought and writing to it. Check back.
Real Update Still Coming...
Sunday, August 17, 2008 @ 12:38am
I've got a big updated planned for tomorrow, where I'll talk about my place in Cambridge, my activities thus far, my research/scientific plans, some philosophical musings, and some pictures. Check back soon!