Pushing forward

Posted on by

Last week, Zoe wrote about research in the face of despair from external factors. How can you not push forward, she asked, when in your work is hope for a better future?

late_night_squarejpg
Late nights in Frick – an all-to-familiar scene for me and many other thesis students.

This week, I tackle inner despair: How can you push forward when in your work you see no hope?

My thesis project holds no immediate promise of hope for the reefs, or of curing some plague, or of fantastic future technology. The motivation for basic biochemical research comes from its intrinsic beauty, and the hope of applications long in the future. I was incredibly excited about my thesis project at the beginning – I was asking fundamental questions about the origin of life; I had the potential to create something genuinely new. Inevitably, though, my project hit obstacles – both technical problems and scientific difficulties indicating misconceptions in my original idea.

So, the thesis I’m currently writing looks nothing like the thesis I imagined last spring. Continue reading Pushing forward

Fighting Imposter Syndrome and Finding My Confidence at Princeton

Posted on by
Even though they said I belonged, I felt like I was hiding a flawed interior - that I was an imposter among the many high achievers.
Even though they said I belonged, I felt like they had only seen the veneer over a flawed interior – that I was an imposter among the many high achievers.

When I was a freshman, President Shirley Tilghman stood on the stage in McCarter Theater and told us, a crowd of alert and excited newly enrolled students: “If you’re wondering whether you belong here, you do. We don’t make mistakes.”

I wanted very hard to believe that. I was in awe of all of my classmates who seemed so talented and brilliant. I loved talking to them, but at the end of the day, I felt inadequate. I spent a lot of time wondering whether President Tilghman’s words really applied to me.

Continue reading Fighting Imposter Syndrome and Finding My Confidence at Princeton

Q&A with HackPrinceton Directors

Posted on by

Every year, students across the country come to campus for HackPrinceton, the biannual hackathon event that boasts thousands of visitors. While I’ve never attended a hackathon in my life, quite a few of my friends attend them regularly. They gather in small teams to work on technology and engineering projects (colloquially called “hacking”) at the event, which culminates in group presentations of the projects they’ve created. I’ve noticed that the hackers who are involved in research or entrepreneurship find the hackathon experience especially rewarding. So, this spring, I plan to try out my first hackathon at HackPrinceton. In preparation for the April 1-3 session. I decided to learn a little more about hackathons and how they relate to research in general.

Here’s a snippet of my Q&A with 2015-16 HackPrinceton Directors Zach Liu ’18 and Monica Shi ’18, who helped run the incredibly successful HackPrinceton Fall 2015.

A great perk of being a HackPrinceton competitor – lots of free swag! Swag Credit to Monica!

Me (Kavi): What exactly is a Hackathon?

Monica: Essentially it’s an event where people come together to think of and build projects. Traditionally, these projects are divided between software and hardware, but there are hackathons for other things – like design projects. It’s a great way for people to learn about programming and technology by getting together with a group of like-minded students to build a project for 24-36 hours. It’s kind of like a marathon where you have any and all the materials you need to build your project. The hackathon organizers will do their best to make sure you’re able to hack with all the resources you need – including all the food you need to keep you satisfied. At the end, teams get feedback from a panel of judges, and the top projects win awesome prizes!
Continue reading Q&A with HackPrinceton Directors

Are We Robots or Are We Dancers?

Posted on by

Princeton’s Dance Department and Robotics Program might seem like polar opposites to the average student: The former attracts the most creative and artistically inclined of the student body while the latter is deeply math-science oriented. Over the past three weeks, however, I have seen one student challenge these assumptions by bridging the arts-science divide.

Dana Fesjian ’17 is an undergraduate in the Electrical Engineering (ELE) Department, who is participating in a Lewis Center for the Arts initiative called Performance Lab. Known informally as P-Lab, this initiative allows dancers to explore independent work that connects dance with a different field. The culmination of this exploration is a performance in early March where the participants showcase their choreography and explain their independent work. Dana—whom I dance with in Princeton University Ballet—is using sound-sensitive robots to create dance movements and patterns that will eventually be performed by humans. She asked me to be one of the dancers in her project and I happily agreed to do so.

Dana’s robots reacted to sound signals from a jazz song to map out the pattern above. In her P-Lab piece, the dancers will trace this exact pattern and five other ones created using different songs.

Throughout our rehearsals over the past three weeks, I have had the chance to learn more about Dana’s independent work, and decided to cover her experience for my post this week.

Continue reading Are We Robots or Are We Dancers?

Mentorship in Research: Don’t go alone!

Posted on by

Over the course of the semester, PCURs will reflect on the professors, advisers, and friends who shaped their research experiences. We present these to you as a series called Mentorship in Research. Most undergraduates have met, or will meet, an individual who motivates and supports their independent work. Here, Stacey shares her story.

~~~~~~

I didnt even know how to make a proper posterboard when I started conducting research.
I learned a great deal about conducting research during my first research project, even if making a proper poster was not one of those skills.

I really didn’t want to stay for the awards ceremony at the science fair that day, but Mrs. Sabherwal insisted. I told her I had to go to my clarinet lessons. No luck. I asked my mom to plead my case. No luck. She only offered, “It’s okay if you miss your lessons today”—and so, defeated, I waited at the fair.

And what an arduous wait it was. I couldn’t sit still—I just wanted to leave, and I was starting to get hungry. They kept calling names and more names. Names and more names. Were they done yet? I left and used the bathroom. But there was a flurry as I emerged, hands still damp with residual sink water—come quick, they told me, they’re calling your name! The highest award in the district science fair! Impossible. It turns out that Mrs. Sabherwal had confided in my mom about the award and expressly requested that I remain.

Mrs. Sabherwal was like that—always looking out for her students, no matter how frustratingly obstinate. She pushed me to become a researcher even when I didn’t realize I could be one. Continue reading Mentorship in Research: Don’t go alone!

A Pledge to Repay my Debt to Laboratory Research

Posted on by

Why aren’t lab researchers paid better?

To this date, I have asked myself this question over a hundred times, and still haven’t come up with a particularly satisfactory answer. My curiosity started in middle school when one of my teachers put into practical perspective my new ambition to become a chemist. It was my first lesson on risk and reward. The risks of pursuing a career as a chemist were plentiful and the reward was limited (in terms of both career and financial success).

But I didn’t let that sway me, and in high school, I continued to stay true to my beliefs. My closest friends and I worked in labs for nearly two years. We wrote several research papers, ran a student-led research magazine, and spent long nights in the lab working on our projects (which ranged from making new optical fiber cables to biodegradable nitrate filters).

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 4 years since my friends and I last presented our lab research projects.

Yet today it’s entirely different. Every single one of us has drifted away from the passion that bonded us. And, while it may be that our interests have evolved over time, we are all aware of the unspoken but overarching reason behind the change. We tend to blame the hours and the frustration involved in being a researcher; but in all honesty, we always loved working long hours on experiments that failed 90% of the time. We were mentally invested in our projects. It’s the financial stability of the profession that has cut our ties with the lab.

Continue reading A Pledge to Repay my Debt to Laboratory Research

Scientists aren’t termites: New thoughts on meaningful research

Posted on by

I’m reading The Lives of a Cell, by Lewis Thomas – a biologist who did his undergraduate degree at Princeton before becoming a renowned science writer and getting Lewis Thomas Labs named after him. It’s a beautifully philosophical piece of writing, as Thomas draws parallels between the miniscule cellular networks which give us life and the massive, invisible human networks which give that life meaning. But what jumped out at me wasn’t one of the many scientific tidbits with which Thomas peppers his writing, but a quote Thomas uses from an essay by physicist John Ziman: “A typical scientific paper has never pretended to be more than another little piece in a larger jigsaw—not significant in itself, but an element in a grander scheme. This technique, of soliciting many modest contributions to the store of human knowledge, has been the secret of Western science since the seventeenth century, for it achieves a corporate, collective power that is far greater than any one individual can exert.”

Ew
Termites: conceptually beautiful, but physically rather gross

Thomas, ever the biologist, goes on to compare the collective effort of scientists to the collective effort of termites building a nest. And indeed, if you’re okay with being compared to translucent-brown grubby insects, that’s an apt comparison. For this is how the scientific enterprise moves forward: incrementally with millions and millions of individual papers (and now, in the age of big data, individual genetic sequences, chemical structures, geological maps, or other data points). But, especially early on in your research career, it’s important to remember that, however wonderful the collective efforts of termites are, research is much more than that.

Continue reading Scientists aren’t termites: New thoughts on meaningful research

“Women aren’t meant for research” ? Reflections of my path through Electrical Engineering

Posted on by
P1200258
Electrical Engineering has been an arduous road, but I wouldn’t have chosen another major.

“Women aren’t meant for research. Get out of the research field while you still can.”

I heard those two sentences during the summer of my freshman year. I was at a summer research program, and the woman who told me this was the last person I would’ve have expected to discourage me from pursuing research. She was an associate professor from China working in the lab for a year and seemed very successful. But as it turned out, she had many buried regrets and concerns about her choice of profession and had come to question her own abilities as a woman researcher. Continue reading “Women aren’t meant for research” ? Reflections of my path through Electrical Engineering

The Project That Made Me a Researcher: 8 Things Infancy Teaches Us About Research

Posted on by

Over the course of the semester, PCURs will explain how they found their place in research. We present these to you as a series called The Project That Made Me a Researcher. As any undergraduate knows, the transition from ‘doing a research project’ to thinking of yourself as a researcher is an exciting and highly individualized phenomenon. Here, Bennett shares his story.

~~~~~~

This is hardly the conventional idea of a research project: for one thing, I don’t remember it, and it’s hardly a lab or an archive project. But, unlike the writing seminar paper I wrote on Osama bin Laden, or my first lab experience with yeast genetics, this is a project every PCUR reader has gone through. So here’s baby Bennett, to take you through the first and most exciting research project any of us has participated in: discovering the world as an infant.

1. Bury Yourself In The Literature

I don’t mean that literally, silly.

You can’t start a research project without a deep background on the question you’re asking in the first place. That’s pretty difficult for an illiterate baby: the best I could do was crawl into the papers in my Dad’s briefcase, and hope some knowledge rubbed off, or that I would at least get a better understanding of how the world around me was shaped. If you’re literate, then you’ve got a huge advantage: read everything you can (even if you don’t understand it all at first – we’ll get to that later).

Continue reading The Project That Made Me a Researcher: 8 Things Infancy Teaches Us About Research

Research Resolutions

Posted on by

Happy New Year! In the January spirit of new-year-new-you, PCURs are sharing their Research Resolutions – things we plan to do, or do differently, in 2016. Take a look at what we hope to have in store:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

What are your research resolutions? Let us know here, and keep us posted on your progress!

— Melissa Parnagian, Chief Correspondent