What is systems biology? I’ve been asked this 102 times in the last few weeks, and if you are my friend or classmate you may find yourself having to answer this question as well, so here is how you respond, depending on who asked the question. To your friends: “Systems biology is the study of (More…)
Today was my first day of grad school (orientation). What was it like? Imagine a lanky, stubbled, Englishman declaiming the following: Here’s the difference between your undergrad studies and what you are about to embark on for your PhD. Undergrad is like being in a hurdles race. It’s 4 years, you know how many hurdles (More…)
I’ll start with the ending: three Mondays ago, after 2 years of work in a lab and several recent months of panic and suffering quiet perseverance, I turned in my thesis. It arrived at the biochem office 51 minutes after the deadline. This was after I wrote an abstract in 10 minutes (4:30pm), an entire (More…)
William Deresiewicz, an English professor at Yale, is disappointed. Really disappointed. In you. Why? Because thanks to your cleverness and ruthless ambition, Ivy League schools are turning into glorified professional academies: When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary (More…)
The Pre-Med You live in perpetual fear. As far as you are concerned, the noble pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, as something enjoyable, ended thousands of years ago when Hippocrates invented the medical profession. You’re really stressed out. In fact, nobody is more stressed out than you, not even other pre-meds. Or meds. (More…)