The Risks of Speaking Up
How to win a speech competition by going meta
Ping – a new email in my inbox. It was a reminder that I had signed up for the “MIT Can Talk” Oratory Competition, taking place tomorrow. The email window stayed open for a while, waiting patiently while I was deciding whether I still wanted to participate. I had just submitted a paper for a […]
Inaccurate Prior Probabilities
Moving to a new city and worrying about the future
The day after I committed to MIT for my PhD, a wave of panic set over me. I felt like I was about to repeat a disaster. I’d tried moving to a new city before and things hadn’t worked out well, yet here I was doing it all over again. I’ve been a west coaster […]
According to Plan
How facing and conquering obstacles makes us better scientists
Many people I talk to at MIT have high expectations for their first year. They’ll ace their classes, breeze through teaching, and have two publications by the time they are a second-year student. A sixth-year student I met, however, summed up reality: “If there’s one thing I learned in grad school, it’s that things never […]
The Art of Giving Things Up
I’m not sure if I would be a graduate student at MIT if I had kept playing the double bass. I’ve had many identities including son, brother, student, runner, and musician, but one of the challenges of becoming a scientist is that research becomes your sole identity. As a professor of biology once told a […]
Impostor Syndrome vs. the Scientific Method
My strategies for fighting the idea that I don't belong at MIT
I received my acceptance letter to MIT a few days after the 2017 Oscars – shortly after a human error led to the wrong film being announced as Best Picture winner live on national television. The mix-up loomed large in my mind. As I slowly read the email informing me that I had been […]
