Like most bloggers I’ve stopped updating the blog after a while. This post is not a promise to pick up the pace of this blog! I thought I’d just share some anecdotes from life.

My daily life now involves a bit of cell-culture, reading, seminar, meetings and less coding. While I do miss coding and statistical thinking I’ve picked up some experimental skills which give me a different perspective on science. There are definitely non-linearities in this line of work. Most of the time progress is small but sometimes these can add up to some major progress.

I was tutoring a student for ACT-prep and there was a question on number of bacterial colonies surviving His- media. I felt at ease tackling it having worked with yeast for a couple of months.

I got hold of a book called “Bioinformatics The Machine Learning Approach”. One of the authors is someone who worked on neural nets to predict MHC binding to small peptides. This was one of the really early applications of neural networks to this problem and is possibly still one of the best predictors currently after more than a decade or two. I was curious to check out the book but I’m still in the middle of reading it.

I’m TAing an Introduction to Biostats class. The class teaches introductory Python and some basics of statistical thinking. Teaching programming has always been fun to me and I’ve done this with several colleagues ranging from informal help with the command-line/programs to a 7-day course for IT professionals in Chennai. I think I could do 10-20% teaching and 80-90% research in an ideal job.

Being in grad school has meant that I get to grab lunch with the seminar speakers. I’ve been lucky to have lunch with many fabulous scientists. I recently learnt that one of the speakers that I had lunch with was knighted (Sir Peter Donnelly)! While such titles don’t mean anything to me it’s still a bragging right.

Being in graduate school also means that I get free dinner twice a week at school, breakfast once a week and sometimes lunch once a week. While the food might not be at the same level as that at Google, DropBox etc, it definitely is a perk and means students end up working longer on the nights with free dinner!

I’ve been reading a lot of books since grad school. Two recent books that I read were Animal Farm and Things Fall Apart. I wish both had been a part of the CBSE syllabus in India. I guess there’s only so many books you can require students to learn.

Talking about high-school, the Math and Computer Science that I learnt in high school have helped me immensely. Kudos to my high school CS teacher Uma Arti for two great years of C++. The curriculum was at such a level that one could find a job at Google with this course and some additional effort. The high-school CS syllabus could include a bit more about data structures and Algorithms and this would be sufficient. Perhaps it already does this, it’s been 14 years since I graduated. Again, there’s only so much room in the syllabus. But hands-down learning programming early has been immensely helpful to me. I remember learning C during a summer camp in sixth grade, most of the other attendees were adults but the instructor was happy to take me on in the class. Sometimes all you need is someone to take a chance on you. Indeed this has been a major factor in my life.