Oldspeak Ministry

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So if I had to summarize my life in 5300 characters or less, my rough draft would probably go something like the this. It’s a bit tailored towards getting into an MD/PhD program, but everything I say about myself is completely true. Comments/criticism on content, prose, style, etc. are extremely welcome since I’ll have to revise this repeatedly for the next 2 years or so. Anonymous comments can be posted on my actual blog at http://www.freetofall.net/blog/archives/21 if the criticism is particularly harsh and you’d rather I not know who you are.

Especial thanks to Prof. Kent O., Lisa D., Tony L., and Data for inspiring/demonstrating/elucidating major motifs.

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Space… the final frontier. Those words are perhaps the epitome of my early childhood. Memories fade, and individual episodes have long since blurred, but journeying with the Enterprise to the depths of the void was my earliest exposure to the vibrant universe beyond my sheltered world. Throughout my adolescence, I marveled at the wonders of the stars, the intricate patterns they wove as they danced through the cosmic ether. I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up: an astronaut, exploring strange new worlds. As soon as I started reading on my own, I eagerly devoured all the science fiction I could get my hands on. As I grew older though, even that was not enough; adventures spanning the galaxy became too august, too far removed from the limited world I began to realize I inhabited. Science, true science, became the bridge between the two, the lifeline that let me continue dreaming no small dreams, while remaining steeped in reality.

It was only during my high school years that I realized how myopic that vision was. Patterns just as intricate were right in front of my eyes. Not only in front of my eyes, though. Rather, within my eyes. It was this realization that prompted me to investigate this “limited world” I earlier despaired at living in. In other words, I became curious. Whereas before I had only been interested in the sciences as a means of making the impossible possible, I now possessed an insatiable drive to learn for knowledge’s sake. And not only the sciences: social interactions, previously regarded as merely a waste of time, metamorphosized into a fascinating first-hand display of human behavior; the fine arts became a window into the psyche; and humanistic novels offered other people’s insights into the world.

I must confess it was only out of curiosity that I first started doing community service events; I do truly enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when I point to a house I helped build with Habitat for Humanity, but it is learning about the inhabitants that strikes the strongest chord. The local soup kitchen where I volunteered was housed in the same building as the homeless shelter; I was astounded that some of the people I met were genuinely contented with their lot in life. Or the news would relate stories of people who devote their lives to religion. Though I intellectually understood their motivations, I did not truly grasp why, as my own upbringing emphasized such different paradigms of life. It was for this reason that I studied theatre; the experience of fully immersing myself in a number of unique and personal 3-dimensional characters allowed me to far better comprehend human nature different from my own.

My search for patterns manifested itself most purely in the disciplines of music, mathematics, and dance; they all involve simple concepts–the amplitude and frequency of sound waves, a couple basic postulates, a finite number of ways muscles move–but complexity arises from them in such a natural manner. In fact, besides reading, it is in these disciplines that I lose myself most easily; I became involved in the Swing Dance Club majored in mathematics for that very reason. My other major extracurricular, the Labyrinth Literary Magazine, was to give myself an excuse to keep reading during the school year: many of my other activities, especially the academically inclined, bring me closer to reality, but books keep my mind open to the realm of dreams and possibility.

Despite all of these adjunct ventures, science has always been the interface between my curiosity about the world around me and dreams of marvelous possibilities. When I came to college, at the tender age of 15, I had the wonderful fortune to be exposed to an actual neuroscience research laboratory, where the scientists were actually the ones to find the patterns remarked on in the science books. I knew almost immediately that I wanted to be one of those people, exploring not the universe of fantasy I once dreamed, but rather one of the great undiscovered countries still remaining, the human mind and body. My second semester, I joined a neuroscience research group focusing on pain transmission, and immediately set to work. As luck would have it, I happened to have a skill unique among my colleagues: I could write computer programs. My first project was to develop a piece of software to analyze mass spectrometry data for putative neurotransmitters. During this time I learned what scientific research actually entails: not quite the endless march of progress described by textbooks, but the rare instances where results materialized were more than worth the wait. As time progressed, I became more involved in non-silico labwork, including chromatography, mass spectrography, and cell culture work, and am currently working on my own project characterizing endogenous lipopeptides.

Because the medical sciences exist at the junction between possibility and reality, where I can both research basic truths about nature and exercise my curiosity about humanity, that is the place my personal dreams for the future lie. And what shall my motto be along the way? What else but to boldly go where no one has gone before.