Adele’s Aerie

(I used to have this on an About Adele page on my old website, and in this new site, a shortened About page is more appropriate and modern. I’ve decided a blog post is a more appropriate place for this, anyway. Sometimes, it helps to write out my beliefs, my priorities, my activism, my soapbox… and other times, I just need to get out in the fresh air and hike alone with the rocks and trees and open wind. And other times, I just need to go for coffee with a friend. Today is one of the soapbox days, I guess. The original version of this content was in part inspired by NPR’s This I Believe.)

I live passionately, and I focus intently on activities at home and at work. I am a perfectionist endlessly fascinated by life, the universe and everything. This also means that I am endlessly striving for one of those “work-life balance” things I’ve heard so much about.

I believe in imagination. I believe in hope. I believe that the journey to explore ourselves and our world is infinitely engaging.
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Last weekend I got to help out with SURF Seminar Day, which was very cool. SURF is Caltech’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships program, and the seminar day is the time when all of the researchers do a 15-minute oral presentation of their work. It’s organized like a multidisciplinary technical conference, which is what it really is.

Note that any undergraduate anywhere can apply for the SURF program. This past year, between 1/4 and 1/3 of the SURFers were non-Caltech undergrads.

The SURF program provided me with the opportunity to do research in an academic setting far earlier than if I had waited for grad school to try it out, and it taught me that I didn’t really want to be a protein chemist, though I respect them greatly. I also learned that I like talking about scientific research more than doing it. That’s not a drawback, it’s a strength, and I got to use that strength in the morning when the SURF office folks asked me to give an hourlong revolving introduction to the day and to Caltech to groups of visiting prospective students and their parents. I need to find ways of using that strength more often; it felt wonderful to flex those muscles again.

Researchers need to share their efforts to both let other prospective researchers know about the good and the bad of the process, and just as importantly if not more so, to justify funding, research space and staffing. It’s also important on a larger scale to share the knowledge and challenges of an individual’s work with other researchers and the public so that it can both spawn other ideas and have other ideas yield insights which might assist in it.

It was an awesome day.

http://www.surf.caltech.edu/