A Summer At Harvard

You never know where life is going to take you. But at the same time, many of us have a certain intuition about where we want to take our lives. In a strange way, everything always seems to happen at just the right time. But we can only ever says such things in hindsight. While the past is set in stone, the future is uncertain, and that's what makes the whole game of living so much fun. Some people describe life as an hourglass with the top half covered. We know how much sand has fallen, but we don't know how much is left—could be a lot, could be a little. For that reason, each of us owes it to ourselves to make the most out of every picosecond we have, because beyond our short lives is a long continuum of time and space. We can't stop the flow of time, but by living wholly in the present, we can chart our own course.

In 2016, I moved out of my home state for the first time to pursue research at Harvard for the summer. Without going into the deep metaphysics of fate versus determinism, I firmly believe that all great opportunities are born from a combination of fortune and tenacity. In this particular instance, I got the opportunity to work at Harvard totally by chance. I didn't go looking for the opportunity, instead it was a graduate supervisor to a club I was part of that told me about it. However, in an ironic twist of fate, the summer program that he notified me about wouldn't accept me, because I was graduating a year early and they wanted to take in people who still had some time left as an undergraduate. The the only reason I actually ended up going was because I persistently asked about other opportunities at Harvard. Eventually I was informed about The Origins of Life Initiative, which brings together researchers from a variety of different sciences, from biology to chemistry to astronomy.

This was by far the best opportunity I could have asked for. I had just completed my degree in astrophysics, but after learning so many new things, my knowledge in the other fields of science had waned. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, except my research interests revolve around understanding the nature of consciousness, which requires a little something from every major discipline. That's why I was elated to have the opportunity to learn some quantum chemistry to expand my scientific repertoire.

While that kind of work may sound complicated to a non-scientist, anyone who has worked as a researcher knows that the interesting work usually doesn't get passed along to the undergraduates, especially for someone like me who had very little background in their research field. It would be more accurate to say that I was a science intern, running mundane calculations on a large server about things I only barely understood. In truth, my research alone took very little work on my part. I merely had to input loads of data, make sure the code was sound, press enter and let the machinery do its work. But this was all part of the design. Nobody in academia really likes to work during the summer, and very few people expect young students to take on the really heavy responsibilities, because more than likely that time will come for then anyway.

My supervisor emphasized that my summer should be treated as a time for growth and adventure, a stress-free opportunity to expand my social network and get a feel for what life as a researcher was like. But in a strange twist of irony, that freedom ended up putting a lot more responsibility on me to make the most of my limited time there. I frequently went on walks along the historic campus, racking my brain about how I should spend the rest of my professional life. My main dilemma was to figure out how I could get the freedom to do my own scientific research, without having to constantly write grant proposals and suck up to a higher authority. For that I needed multiple streams of income, and at that moment I realized that what I should focus my time on was doing research to write a book.

Towards the end of the summer, I ended up visiting Harvard's Museum of Natural History on a regular basis. I went nearly every day. I visited every single exhibit, read nearly every single one of the written descriptions attached to the various displays, and watched several of the pre-recorded videos as well, all the while taking notes that would be useful for my manuscript. Coupled with what I was learning from all the papers I had to read for my summer research, I was able to compile all the knowledge I had learned in the last 21 years of my life, and spent the following two and a half months bringing it to life in my book, where I try and tie together everything in existence.

I wanted to share this story as a way to inspire people to make the most out of every moment of their lives. I don't have all the answers, nor do I ever expect to. All I know is that I want to do my best to understand as much as possible about how the world works, because learning is what makes me happy. I encourage all people to do what makes them happy, because a happy society is a healthy society. And if my small part can be used to teach and help others, that's all the better. As a person who's favorite pastime is thinking critically, I refuse to move unless I know that I'm going somewhere, but that's a mantra I think can useful to everybody.