-: So the title of my talk is called
Learning Who I Am,
and that's kind of because the topic
of this talk made me think a lot
about how I got on the path
to where I am now.
And it's not that I never thought
about these things before.
It's just that I never thought
about them in quite the way that I have.
So the topic, of course, was,
"When did you feel like a scientist?"
And my first thought when I saw this was,
I was very excited for the science theme
'cause I came last year.
It was my first time.
I loved the presentations.
I had a wonderful time.
The food was amazing.
Jocelyn's amazing.
My boss is on the chair.
I was gonna get volun-told
if I didn't volunteer, so.
(laughter)
I'm like, "This is easy.
"I'm a scientist."
I go into--
Thank you.
I go into the lab every day,
I show up, I do research, I have this nice
little box here on the right.
And yes, that's nail polish,
and I promise you it's a very important
scientific tool.
(laughter)
I'm primarily an electrochemist.
I work with bio sensors.
So you can think like the glucose meter.
You put a little drop of blood on it
and you measure it
and you can figure out what your blood sugar level is.
I design different types of bio sensors
along those lines.
I've worked with things that detect HIV,
things that detect pancreatic cancer.
I've use gold substrates,
I've worked with metal oxides.
All this sounds very scientific, right?
Yeah.
So I have these nice, fancy designs
with leads attached to them
and I get outputs and graphs using 5,000 plus
dollar instruments.
That's science, right?
And as I look at the topic,
I saw the e-mail that Jocelyn sent out.
I looked over it, I was like, "Oh my god."
I looked over at my co-worker.
"I don't feel like a scientist."
(laughter)
Because the truth is, I feel like it's kind of
the graduate student condition,
or at least it is for me,
and if you feel differently, more power to you.
I have no idea what I'm doing.
(laughter)
But, like, in a good way.
The whole point of science is,
you're trying to elucidate new things
in the field.
That's the whole point.
If you already knew it, you wouldn't be
in there doing it.
It wouldn't be worth publishing.
It wouldn't be worth talking about.
So I spend so much in the lab
working on something that I have no idea what I'm doing.
But I know enough to get started.
So I constantly feel like I'm just below the bar.
So I kinda had to center myself and regroup,
and go, "How am I gonna do this
"if I don't feel like a scientist today?"
So I Googled it.
(laughter)
And Google tells me that
a scientist is a noun.
Which is good, we're part way there,
I do feel like an actual thing, an object, I exist.
(laughter) Perfect.
And then Google says, "A person who is studying
"or has expert knowledge of one or more
"of the natural or physical sciences."
I feel like that wasn't inclusive enough,
so I skipped it.
And I went to Merriam-Webster
and it says, "A person learned in science"
and we're gonna stop it there
and ignore the rest of it.
(laughter)
So I'm like, "Okay, I'm definitely doing science.
"I go in the lab," like I said.
I've done these things.
And it still doesn't feel complete to me.
And there's a reason it doesn't feel
complete to me.
I don't wanna be a scientist.
I know that sounds weird.
I'm a graduate student,
I work in the chemistry labs.
But that's not my career path.
I don't wanna work
in an industry lab,
I don't wanna do quality control.
I don't wanna have
a wide array of instruments
that I'm in charge of.
I wanna teach other people how to do these things.
And so this is a wonderful picture of me.
I wanted you all to see my face twice
'cause it's that important.
(laughter)
And these are two of my students
who I made sure
that they were most definitely following protocol
before I put this up there.
They're wearing, you know, they've got their lab coats
on, they're wearing goggles, they've got gloves.
They look like they're scientists, right?
And the truth of the matter is,
this is when I feel like I'm a scientist.
So a little bit of back story,
I, of course, didn't know I wanted
to do this my whole life.
Like most people when they were younger,
the idea of being a teacher was
absolutely horrifying.
(laughter)
Why would I get paid so much worse
to deal with children?
And I consider--
I'm sorry to all of you that are there.
If you're undergrads or grad students like me.
I consider you a child.
I consider myself a child.
(laughs)
I'm still worried that one day
I'm gonna show up and I forgot to pay
one of my bills, like the oxygen bill,
and they're just gonna turn it off.
I have to hold my breath for three minutes
till I get it turned back on.
So just a little bit of back story
on how I wanted to become a teacher
and it's nothing really special, in all honesty.
Actually, I don't even think this person
knows the effect that they had on me.
And that is, I was a tutor in undergrad
to make some money.
You know, school pays you minimum wage
and you say, "I got my tuition money back!"
So I was teaching an analytical student
and they had questions regarding
the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation.
For those of you who aren't familiar with it,
it's a wonderful (mumbles) equation
about weak acids and weak bases.
If you know the concentration of something,
you can figure out the pH.
It's beautiful, it's simple to understand, I thought.
I'm a chemist.
Of course it's simple to understand.
But this wonderful person,
I love her to death.
She was an extremely average student
who struggled, and I love her to death
because she tried so hard,
and that's nothing against her.
And she tried and tried and tried
and I spent several hours with her
and then finally, magically, we got through it.
It clicked for her.
She understood it perfectly.
And that was it, I moved on.
I got my paycheck.
It was a good day.
And then about a year later,
we were in the same class together.
We were taking a biochemistry course.
And the interesting thing about this course,
and I went to a very small liberal arts college,
so a lot of times people taught classes
that necessarily they weren't the best person
suited for it.
So while she was a wonderful professor,
she was a biology professor
with a degree in parasitology.
So while she'd clearly taken the
chemistry portion of this biochemistry class,
she was a little rusty on it.
Which is perfectly fine.
So a lot of times when she was getting
to more of a chemistry topic,
she would have one of the senior chemistry students
explain it.
And we got to Henderson-Hasselbalch
and that student that I have taught
just a year ago volunteered
to explain the concept to the class.
So she got up and explained this concept
to the class
and I welled up
with this feeling of
what I thought was pride.
And then I realized, no it's not,
it's anger 'cause everybody else is right,
I should totally have been a teacher this whole time.
I don't know why it took me this many years
to figure it out.
So this is kind of what I'm getting
at is I don't feel like a scientist
because I'm not where I want to be
as a scientist yet.
I like learning the science, I do.
I do truly enjoy my job.
I love going in and working,
but it's not where I wanna be.
I want to learn the material so
that I can then tell everybody else
about this material.
That's when I most feel like a scientist.
'Cause when I sit in the lab
day in and day out,
my boss is amazing.
She's way smarter than me.
And when I compare anything I've done
to the stuff that she's done,
I wanna pack up and leave.
But if I go out to lunch
with a colleague in another lab,
I feel like a genius.
They have no idea what I'm doing.
(laughter)
So, just kinda the last thing I want to leave you on
is a Relevant XKCD,
'cause there are always one.
And I'm not gonna read the whole thing to you,
but it basically boils down to,
every single day people are learning new things.
And they gingerly admit that they're learning new things.
And you can't shut down learning.
You embrace learning.
So this person here just heard about the Diet Coke
and Mentos, and we all know how cool that is.
And if you haven't, go buy a Diet Coke and Mentos.
It's really cool.
(laughter)
And he's gonna go to the grocery store
and teach him how to do it.
So every single day when I'm in the lab,
I'm the person on the left
who has no idea what's going on
and is just waiting for something to happen.
But when I teach, I get to be the one on the right.
And that's when I feel like a scientist,
whenever I'm sharing what I've learning
with other people.
So, that's all that I have for today.
Thank you all for listening to me rant.
(applause)