Use It or Lose It
I was a science major in college, and it pretty much comes with the territory that you’ll be asked if you’re planning to go to med school. Early in college, I had no idea. A common practice for science majors is to work in research labs during the summer. Between my sophomore and junior year, I worked in the lab of Leon Carlock at Wayne State University in Detroit. Little did I know how impactful this experience would be in guiding my post-college trajectory. Leon, being a PhD himself, pushed the grad school option. Most enticingly, he described the idea of a mini-eureka moment, something that has stuck with me to this day.
In his description, mini-eureka moments were rare, and they were amazing. These moments occurred when you made a discovery, monumentally big or so small that the rest of the world wouldn’t care, and you realize that at that particular moment in time, you are the only person on the planet that knows it. You made a discovery. You created new knowledge. The type of moment that makes you want to run up and down the hallways naked while hollering in celebration and high-fiving everyone you see. This notion of discovery was an immensely powerful idea. I wanted to experience this feeling, though I imagined I would want to exhibit the celebration slightly more modestly. So, after college, hoping to experience this rare feat, I ended up in grad school.
Grad school teaches you a new way to think. No longer are you memorizing books or lectures, filling out multiple choice questions or regurgitating facts. Grad school teaches you the art and skill of connecting complex ideas, which may appear totally unrelated on the surface, to identify new ways of looking at data and questions. Grad school teaches you, sometimes with great difficulty, how to learn. You learn to find new answers to questions you didn’t even realize you were asking. This leads to discovery, new ideas, and, yes, on that rare occasion, a mini-eureka moment.
July 20, 2013 was a Saturday, and I was in the lab office looking at my data, trying to figure out the next step in my project. Scientific journal articles, hand drawn schematics, and various notes joined the dozens of sheets of data that were spread over my desk and floor. Gazing at all these papers, something clicked. I realized how these papers, spread all around my office, were connected. This was my moment, my mini-eureka moment, the moment in time where I now knew something that no one else had ever figured out. It was, quite simply, an amazing feeling. While there was no sprinting around the building sans clothing, I did call my boss, interrupting his weekend so that I could excitedly ramble and babble about my discovery. I had a smile on my face for the rest of the weekend, and this connection became a key part of my dissertation.
This mini-eureka moment was the culmination of the grad school thinking process that challenges you to make new connections between distant ideas.
While you’re in grad school this way of thinking is finely honed through constant use. But, like many things in life, if you don’t use tools often enough, they start to get rusty and dull.
In the time since grad school, I’ve gotten rusty. Without the environment of grad school, my mind has gotten a little lazy, as it settled into the comfortable groove of the familiar. When people, including myself, don’t regularly get exposed to new ideas, their minds can get rigid and numb. This complacency toward learning can crush creativity and hinder a person’s ability to adapt and thrive in the modern economy.
I don’t want that. I need to knock the rust off and get myself constantly learning again. This is the main reason that I’ve started this blog. I want to feed my curiosity and have a place to capture the ephemeral ideas from the ether of my mind. I want to learn about science outside my field of expertise. I want to learn about the elements that are shared between different worlds of knowledge out there. I want to make new connections and think of new ideas. I just want to learn.
People tend to play in their own sandboxes and focus so intently on building their own sandcastles, that they often forget that they’re playing with the same toys as others. How can we remind people of this? How can we connect their work with others’? What can we learn?
The goal of this blog is to ask questions, find answers, and learn new things.
I don’t know what topics or fields will be covered. I have a lot of interests and can find supposedly trivial things interesting (at least for a little while). I’ll allow the blog to be driven by curiosity. Topics could range from biology to engineering, from architecture to cars, from social sciences to business, and anything in between. Hopefully this diversity of information results in more interesting connections. I can’t guarantee that every topic and every blog post will be thrilling and cutting-edge. But hopefully, there will be something interesting that’s new to you. And if we’re lucky, maybe, just maybe, something here will spark a new connection in your mind and lead to something great. Onward to learning new things.