Consider your life a research project

one of my biggest insecurities as a

child

was the question what do you want to be

when you grow up

i hated it it made me feel like uh i had

to commit

to something for the rest of my life and

so like many of you

this question came back to haunt me in

my senior year of high school

when i was applying to colleges so i

decided for one of my essays to be very

honest

and i wrote about the tragic life cycle

of a cell

you see a cell is programmed to

differentiate in a certain way

specialize in a certain function

and do that for the rest of its life

the coincidence is that three years

later my undergrad

research would be about how cells

differentiate and specialize

in the brain of fruit flies but for the

essay itself

for the tragic reality is i got rejected

from all six schools i sent it to

when i went to college i found out about

research

i have been doing research for the past

six years

i worked so far in three different labs

in abu dhabi new york and oxford

and today i’d like to tell you about

three things

that each of my professors told me about

how to do research

that ended up teaching me a lot about

how to do life

so the first one is get your hands dirty

um when i was choosing my undergrad

thesis i told my professor that i really

enjoyed

analyzing the data but i didn’t want to

do any of the lab work

which in that case was dissecting flies

and looking at their brain under the

microscope

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and he said to me no you need to get

your hands dirty

you need to understand how the data

you’re

analyzing is generated

and so doing that project

taught me that you actually spend more

time

most of your time in research figuring

out the right question to ask

the right way to look at a problem

instead of

you know looking for an answer and the

way you do that

is by getting your hands dirty you do

experiments

you get more data and you refine your

understanding of the problem

so finding the question

is not the starting point of any

research project it’s actually

the point of doing a research project

so i realized it’s actually not

to find your passion to then

live your life it’s start with something

small that’s interesting to you and

spend your life

gaining your experiences to have more

data

and readjust your interests and what you

care for

number two why not

this one gave me a hard time at the

start because i first understood it

as you know detach yourself from

tradition

don’t limit yourself to what people have

done before

but if you think more about it it’s

also about trend it’s about not limiting

yourself

to what people are doing right now and

trend is complicated

more than tradition because it’s always

presented

in a positive light because it’s

happening at the present moment

and so you need it takes more effort to

take a step back and think about

whether what other people are doing

makes sense for you

um last year i was invited with a group

of

other female students to speak with a

panel of

uh what were called powerful women uh

they were politicians

ceos of corporations and non-profits

and they talked to us about their

careers the difficulties they faced and

encouraged us to

be ambitious and follow our dreams

but then a female student

said something she said to me the most

powerful woman

is my grandmother who

is a stay-at-home mom who raised five

children in wartime

and whose grandchildren are all seeking

phds right now

you see those women saw ambition

through the lengths of their work that

student

saw ambition through the impact her

grandmother had on her family

and so in the spirit of why not think

about what you personally value in your

life

and make your own decisions about what

you think

an ambitious life looks like for you

now here’s the last one good routine

is what 90 of any successful research

carrier is

one of the misconceptions about research

out there

is that it’s this endless process of

looking for an

answer until someday by magic the stars

align

and you reach a breakthrough

what’s not talked about is that in the

lead up

to that breakthrough is just simple

routine work and consistent structure

there’s actually a lot of structure in

the research process

first of all it’s limited in time you

know you need to deliver

by two years five years ten years

whatever

like any job uh but within that

you also have checkpoints for example

you present your research

at a conference or you publish a paper

about

the results you found so far and that’s

actually quite helpful

because it helps you to take a step it

forces you to take a step back

um and look at the bigger picture of

your problem in your project and figure

out what your next step should be

now imagine if you could do that

for your personal life where

every every year you sit down and say

okay

where am i at what am i doing well what

am i struggling with

what do i want to change for the next

five years

unfortunately for me that’s the kind of

exercise i only do

once i have to write an application

essay

and very reluctantly

so here’s my proposal to you

consider your life a research project

start with something that’s interesting

to you that you care about

and then get more data by having more

experiences

talking to people and when faced with

new data

be comfortable with reevaluating your

assumptions

and changing your plans about how you

want to play the game