2015-2016

I decided to come to Ohio State because of numbers. Almost like a formula, it made sense to me to stack my choices against each other spread-sheet-style, making my choice like many might pick an insurance plan. Now I’m not complete mechanical, visiting campus did feel right, but the numbers were a whole lot more reassuring to me than the emotion. But when I first drove the 9 hours from Memphis to Columbus to move in, the only number I could think about was 65,000–the rough number of students at Ohio State, the very number that makes it the largest public university in the US. I was overwhelmed and out of my element.  And despite some study changes–a second major in Math turning into Philosophy within the first 2 weeks–I was able to cling to my high school interest in Neuroscience and use it to give the rest of my year a growing sense of home and purpose.

I started looking for research opportunities in the first month. I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career, but I had a romantic idea of research. I knew that I had to give it a try. After a few weeks of emailing professors and asking around for lab opportunities I connected with an older Eminence fellow about a job with Dr C. Glen Lin’s “Molecular Mechanisms of Neurodegenerative Disease lab” at the OSU medical school.. I applied and interviewed, and by late October I had a spot in the lab. Because of paperwork issues I wasn’t able to start till second semester, but my excitement during the application process and my anticipation to start helped get me through the tedium of the pre-major courses.

The cliche goes that first-year chemistry weeds out the business students from the pre-engineering and pre-med students, but in my case it just took the fun out learning. There’s nothing like a packed, fluorescently lit room to destroy any chance of academic creativity and fulfillment. I hate to sound so cliche and whiny, to actually relent that chemistry was neither fun nor easy for me, but it’s true and it was important for my first semester. It broke down my romantic preconception of college classes as a rigorous center for intellectual development and fulfillment.  I would need to outsource meaningfulness out to my extracurricular interests more than I did in the small sized, personalized classes I had in high school. My own growth was in my hands and wasn’t just up to the classes. This made me more motivated to get involved with student organizations. I expected less from my classes (which actually helped me enjoy them a little more). Despite some rough patches I ended my first semester with a lab job, a solid student org community to support me, and a 3.7 gpa.

The lab job then became the most important part of my second semester. While the introductory classes felt detached from my interests and from any tangible scientific applications, the work in the lab helped to connect the theoretical with the practical. I took on 20 hours of work a week on top of a full courseload. I learned dozens of difficult molecular analysis techniques and animal behavior protocols, and I started gaining the proficiency necessary to understand current academic papers. It was hard but the rigor motivated me and gave structure to my academic goals and schedule.

I spent my summer managing a research project with that followed up on much of my work and lessons from the second semester. I constructed a behavioral protocol to create stress-induced depression in mice in order to study the effects on the glutamatergic system of the brain. The work will also be replicated in the testing of a novel pharmaceutical compound to treat depression.

2016-2017

I started the year coming out of a tough summer. I was working full-time on a molecular neuroscience research project that demanded 7-day-a-week care for mice. Although I was able to finish the project and present it at two fall research forums, by October I was realizing that molecular neuroscience was not for me. It didn’t engage the sort of big philosophical questions that made me interested in neuroscience. It seemed unable to provide a very comprehensive picture of the brain (kinda like trying to explain what an elephant is like by only looking at the hairs in their foot). And its reliance on mice models was difficult for me to commit my remaining undergraduate years to.

I decided to leave the lab and search for one that was more computationally focused. Something that could hopefully give me a big picture of how actual people do things, and how those things (whatever it may be) may be reflected in brain mechanisms. By November I was able to get in contact with a Cognitive Neuroscience lab that specialized in computational modelling of the brain. Instead of western blots of behavioral mice protocols in a sterilized, labcoat wet lab, I was now throw into Bayesian statistic, hierarchical modelling, and a lab full of computers and nothing else.

The most complicated part of my previous lab was patience and accuracy. The theory behind what I was doing was simple, but it was all tied into day-long, careful processes aimed at trying to get a rough understanding of protein expression. My current lab is very different. I was able to jump into a project to create a model intertemporal choice in the brain (deciding between two options that differ across time and value, $20 now or $40 in 10 days)–we create a joint model based on what computations need to be made in order to make the decision and what areas of the brain are activated and could play the different computational roles identified by a subject’s behavior. The theoretical background of this project is significantly more difficult than my previous role, and it was dependent on a working understand of programming (in R, C, Python, and Matlab), bayesian statistics, and fMRI imaging. To say the least, it has been very challenging, but it is the cutting edge of the field right now, and I’m only excited about diving further into my work next year. All during this lab transition, I have had two semester’s of difficult classes in Psychology and Neuroscience. I shied away from taking many GE’s this semester. I wanted to focus on getting a solid background in the classes I was actually interested in, and I think it paid off.

Aside  from classes and the lab, I also became president of the 2017 Eminence class project, Best Food Forward. We transitioned out of using vouchers, to become some sort of bulk food purchasing club. At the beginning of Autumn 2016 we had 18 members and we hadn’t really done anything to alleviate food insecurity on campus. By the end of the second semester, after a first semester of planning and rearrangement, we had moved over 2 tons of food, fed 500 students, and grew to around 50 organizational members. It was very exciting to see the growth and see all of the encouragement from the Ohio State community. We are now focused on optimization, and I am happy to say that I will continue to lead the group and oversee the growth of our mission next year.

2017-2018

There is always going to be a funny tone to these year-in-review posts. Most of them are due the day or two before finals start so most people will likely be doing them at 2 in the morning between final papers and final exam studying. But event though I tend to just instinctively push back on this sort of thing, it is kinda nice to see the history from these posts. See how everyone changes over the years and keeps getting re-formed. I hope the tone of it also shows how I have sort of changed in character. By now most of us have sort of come into our own. We’ve dealt with the anxiety at the beginning of college. We have dealt with the worries about major, the worries about whether we will actually do anything meaningful in college. I feel like I am kind of past that point and you will probably see that in most of the the third-and-fourth years. That’s partly because we have just been here for awhile, but also because we have been doing this school thing enough to know whether our goals will be made and whether we actually will make it into med school, or into our ideal job, or into grad school etc. So now I am at that point. I’m done with most of my coursework and I know what I am good and bad at it and I know roughly what I can practically do in the future. That’s sort of liberating but it’s taken a lot of the excitement out of school.

So here’s where I am at now. My life is in mainly three parts now: classes, research, and Best Food Forward. If you’ve actually read this far into the post then you are probably either reading it because I submitted it as an assignment or you read the posts before and probably don’t need an explanation into BFF. So I will just give the website here (bestfoodforward.org) for the reference. It’s been a tough year on that front. I start fall semester with a serious commitment to BFF. I wanted to automate it completely and I wanted to feed a thousand people per buy and I wanted to play a big part in making the OSU community healthier. And though we have gotten very good at what we do (takes 3 people to run a buy, we have an awesome ordering website, and we have a lot of software tools for optimizing and automating our ordering), but we didn’t see anywhere near the growth that we wanted. I suppose that is okay, but it is still a little bit disappointing. I guess the takeaway should be something about being careful with ambition. On top of that, I just learned a lot about people and business and how incredibly hard it is to encourage healthy behavior–side rant, education and economic incentives aren’t actually that effective in changing people’s behavior, most non-profits or service projects that think they will improve the world through education have the deck stacked against them, and in this case the deck is just human psychology, BFF started out as a sort of healthy nutrition education initiative and that fell through pretty significantly. Anyway, BFF will continue to serve people and it will hopefully continue to improve the lives of people on and around the OSU campus, but it probably won’t be the massively disruptive org that I was hoping for. That is okay.

Classes, again, have significantly wound down for me. Most of my coursework is done, and the vast majority of what I actually learn is from my independent studies or through projects that I take on through my lab and/or through my other activities. My advice to all first years is to put the least possible amount of time into your actual classes (determine the grade you want and put the lowest hours possible into getting that) so that you can use the majority of your time and the best part of your days taking advantage of connections within OSU–whether that is working on your own project, working on research, working for some big student org, etc. You will learn the most and grow the most from that. For instance, I’ve become a pretty decent programmer and data scientist through just taking on projects and working in the lab. I can understand anything you throw at me and, given some time, I can eventually work out a way to code up anything I may need in the lab. I didn’t gain that  by going through CS and Math courses because I know that you don’t need to sit through a lecture to understand even the most complicated material. With some confidence, time, passion, and persistence you can learn years worth of courses in month-long sprints without the headaches of constant, stressful, and often pointless testing.

The last part of my life right now is the lab. It’s been tough to find time to work in it as long as I’d like to. But I’ve become obsessed with the lab because it’s given me a chance to independently learn so much in math, cs, and data science. It’s given me great mentors and really fantastic chances to think for myself and take serious ownership over projects and problems. Next year will be almost solely committed to working on my thesis in the lab and deciding when and where to apply to grad school. Sorry for the bluntness in the essay. I don’t mean to come off arrogant or anything. I just have to be honest about the year actually went.