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