Speaking as a guy who made the pivot to research in life sciences (as a "data scientist") from "full stack software engineer", yes the data and mission is very sexy to a nerdy guy like myself, applying deep learning algorithms to spatial or epigenetic sequencing data of cancer cells to figure out the secret markers or mechanism of cancer cell mestasis or human immune response.
The realistic or unromantic view is you are a cog in the life science industrial complex where you are underpaid and under-appreciated; research often takes years and unclear if you are making progress or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that); and in computing, unlike tech, you are not the center of attention, most wet lab scientists treat you more like a resource, a grad student they need to make their pvalue or figure panel pop nicely versus a "full stack software engineer" - And if you don't like it, hundreds of thousands of post-doc's or grad students are waiting to take your place for their shot - not in pursing their passion but for a visa in America.
The real value I learned from my pivot from pivoting away from tech and pivoting into Biology is ironically how to gamble. I joined a Discord/Slack sub-channel for #options-trading, #sports-betting and #poker during my studies for a Masters in data science with other degenerate students who loved gambling, and how to identify, automate and size +EV plays in gambling or derivatives trading. I make more than 2-3x what I make in W-2 from my capital gains and W2-G than my W-2 for past the 6 years. But that is not put shade on biological sciences and rather giving credit to Biology for teaching me how to analyze data and gamble.
Lol that took a turn, I was expecting a link to a how to course at the end; or some nfl week one picks!
i make more money trading options and have way more fun! in a way - it is "real" science in a way whereas the modern Life Science Industrial Complex is anything but that.
One of my favorite books was The Mathematics of Poker
one thing's for sure, there are certain spaces for people who lack people skills, and that seems to be associated with "STEM" skills
This applies just as well to biology.
RE: your political point, I submit to you many institutions are very left-leaning and "Woke-1" was defeated by its emphasis on shaming tactics and identity politics - which ironically brought upon the identity politics of the right and the current "regimen's" backlash on defunding DEI initiatives, which hurts ironically the sciences most due to its outsized reliance from NIH/NSF/DARPA etc. And I welcome actually "Woke-2.0" where DSA is actually focused on kitchen table issues such as grocery and health insurance cost; and anticipate that our political pendulum will swing to the left at the next cycle.
This reminds me of the pedagogical philosophy of Seymour Papert, who was heavily influenced by the ideas of Jean Piaget. Piaget's "genetic epistemology" argues that knowledge and understanding is created by interacting with environments, which traditional educational approaches fail to provide.
Papert combined Piaget's ideas with the emergence of computing to argue that children should be taught subjects in a hands-on, exploratory way - and not just for teaching computing! The idea is that by programming in simplified languages, children can discover ideas in subjects like mathematics and grammar - deriving them as they try to solve problems instead of having them dictated to them.
Suppose that biology was taught in a game-like environment where students were designing cells or organisms in some way. Maybe the game could be structured so that each organelle could be "discovered" by the student as they designed the cell to survive in some environment. Perhaps that'd make the purpose of each cell component more grounded and memorable.
Papert's book Mindstorms covers all this in detail, and I highly recommend reading it. I feel like it's especially important today given fears of how AI will affect childhood education. At best, I hope that computing can be a boon to education instead of a detriment if it's woven into pedagogy thoughtfully.
I saw this happen twice in my university life. I took the honors version of CHEM101. 80% of it was more about exploring and discovery, and 20% was more traditional problems, calculations, etc.
For people like me who were not chemistry majors, this was great. For the chemistry majors - they really struggled when they got into CHEM102.
The same happened with Quantum Mechanics I. The professor didn't want to teach all the bra-ket notation, and more or less skipped much of the linear algebra aspects of QM - focusing on a purely calculus approach. He then retired. The professor who taught QM II saw what the professor did, and said "WTF?!" He spent most of the semester reteaching QM I.
As a result, those like me who went on to grad school had to retake QM II at the new university to make up for all that wasn't taught to me.
I wrote biology-online.org shortly after education and it's achieved a few thousand years worth of page views. wikipedia tends to cover all those informational queries nowadays and I've been programming for 20 years since.
It's so easy to forget that much of our inspiration comes from biology (and ecology of course) and its emergent behaviour. When I hear hype about anything I think about how it's taken 4 billion years for anyone to say it and you simply can't forget we're standing on the shoulders of giants.
Just about every subject is interesting if you are able to take a really good hard look at it, and construct it from first principles.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=I%20should%20have%20loved%20bi...
Always happy to pass along a good article to the next generation of Posters
Every generation needs to rediscovery the old chestnuts. That's why I think old but good textbooks should stay available and new text books should cute them. That is how knowledge is retained over generations.
Some dislike new text books that rehash the same old material. I think it is necessary to do it even if there is nothing new to add other than new artwork and a contemporary typeface.
I've already seen the horrors that lurk inside of poorly-written 90s video games. Hard pass.
The history of physics and the theory of it is great. A Brief History of Time is an awesome read.
Studying physics is not like that. Studying formulas, applying them to situations, and of course very math heavy.
One thing I regret is the experiments as well. In physics and chemistry they were kind of a blur. Just following instructions and sometimes they didn’t work out and no one knew why. I never learned the most important thing: how to design an experiment. Following a long recipe then reading the result is much less useful than observing a thing, forming a testable, falsifiable hypothesis about that thing, and then testing it.
Last thing I’ll say is you probably aren’t going to get the “wonder” of science from a science class. Those classes are there to tell you the answers, but the most interesting part is discovering the answers yourself which is not possible in a one semester survey course.
Fully agree with labs (not just science but engineering as well). 2 years into my grad program, I visited my undergrad campus and a professor asked for feedback on the education I received. I told him that all the labs need to be revamped. As taught, they were a waste of time. Virtually every lab I did went like this: "Design a circuit (e.g. amplifier) with the following characteristics. Then build it and confirm via measurements."
The challenging part was the design, which was all theoretical. It was then trivial to wire it up.
I recall one time I was given a project to build some circuit. I built it, but when the professor evaluated it, he saw the output was very fuzzy. He wanted to know if it was due to my circuit or whether the input was fuzzy. He did a bunch of interesting things on the oscilloscope to determine that it was indeed the input. Now that's the sort of stuff they should have taught us!
As for motivation for subjects like physics/other sciences. It's a challenge. As I said in a different comment, there often just isn't enough time to teach both. I think professors expect students to have some level of intrinsic motivation already. For something like physics, you really cannot reduce the math involved - most undergrad physics curricula have too little math as it is!
Most of my courses were very "Point A" to "Point B". You're given a set of formulae, then a problem, then you use some combinations of those formulae to solve the problem. Most labs were the same way: you're given an exact script to follow without any explanation of the experiment design. It felt like both were optimized for easy instruction / grading and not for learning new skills or concepts.
Only two of the courses I took were substantially different. One was an upper division lab that actually was more open-ended, where we were given a goal and some equipment and had to figure out how to use the equipment to meet the goal. Another was a more conceptual course where we explored how to approach broad problems to come up with rough estimates for a wide variety of questions. Both were much more engaging, but I saw many students good at the typical course type struggle with how open ended these courses were.
Well, a lot of places would penalize you if your data is incorrect, so most of the focus ends up on execution rather than the why. If you were angling for a high GPA for whatever reason, you cannot afford to experiment too much during lab work. It's another case entirely of course if you are conducting research.
Exactly right. School teaches you that the point of running an experiment is to try and get the same result as the teacher, while performing a ritual with steps called "hypothesis" and "method".
When I became an adult, I gravitated to computers because there is so much to learn about them. My focus has been infrastructure, but I've picked up software development, assembly, kernel hacking, data science, and a dozen other things along the way (mostly at amateur levels, but I'm always happy to learn).
I have have other interests (economics, homebrewing, astronomy, sociology, making music), but in each of those cases I learned what I wanted to after a few years & moved away. When covid hit, I picked up natural history through iNaturalist -- and that has so far been very very different, much more the same kind of endless opportunity for discovery that computers felt like.
There is so much weirdness in biology. Parasitic wasps with genes that came from viruses that suppress caterpillar immune systems, male spiders that have appendages (pedipalps) that look like boxing gloves, the many kinds of bumble bees around me, introduced species, nests, microorganisms -- it's insane. It's higher up the stack than the stuff the author is describing, but no less wonderfully complex and fascinating.
The quote from Lewis Thomas really hit home for me: "People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that" [cell|insect|weird relationship|phenology|behaviour]. Kudos to the author for putting this all into words so well, and for adding a dozen books to my must-read list.