Biophysical Society Bulletin | July/August 2020

Career Development

Personal Perspectives on Surviving in a ChangingWorld “The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.” — Eric Hoffer , American philosopher in Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973. questions without fear since they were new to the topic or scenario and still learning the ropes of how things work. For example, Anton Van Leeuwenhoek was not a trained biologist, but a cloth merchant, and in order to look at the finer details of the cloth he used lenses to magnify the fibers to check their quality. That led him to build microscopes and that led to observations of microscopic life. Closer to home is the inspir- ing story of Margaret Dayhoff. Trained as a chemist, she was able to harness the post-WWII computing facilities to make the first database of protein sequences. At the same time, she was able to apply the same computing knowledge to as- tronomy in collaboration with spectroscopists Ellis Lippincott and Carl Sagan .

The above quote resonated with me and spoke to my personal journey of how I survived in an ever-changing world. Hoffer talks about an important skill: lifelong learning. Change can arise in many different circumstances. For some, change could be in their work- place environment or lab dynamics, or it could be moving to a lab where new skills need to be acquired. For others, it

The techniques you learn in your graduate school career do come in handy. For instance, it might be possible to apply a modified version of a particular technique to a new prob- lem. For example, for my PhD, I was trained to learn the skills required for understanding small molecules. During my postdoctoral research, I had moved to another field and was considered an “outsider.” My work was on protein thermo- stability and how we can make a mesostable protein into a thermostable one. I took a step back and asked if we know what makes a protein thermostable to begin with. It looked like we didn’t, especially for the family of proteins we were studying. The techniques that I previously learned in order to understand small molecule binding (solvent accessibility, specificity, etc.) could be applied to study proteins as well. It never occurred to me that it could be that simple! There is no one single “rule” when it comes to adapting to an ever-changing world. Keeping up to date with the latest re- search, the latest products launched by industry, and making new contacts at conferences are some of the things you can do to prepare yourself. Depending on your area of research, these things may vary. Additionally, there could be a need to focus on what the missions and visions are of your communi- ty of researchers. One always goes to the unknown from the known, but the challenge of making the unknown into the known is never letting go of the skill of lifelong learning. — Molly Cule

could be personal. Here, I will discuss how curiosity and life- long learning can help to cope with changes that are happen- ing in science and the world. From early school to university, we are ingrained with lifelong learning skills day-in and day-out, without realizing it explic- itly. At every stage, we are bombarded with new concepts, new abilities, and new techniques with the latter being more evident at the graduate student level. Usually, your mentor will have advised you to master multiple wet-lab and dry-lab techniques during your graduate life so that a specialized skillset becomes a valuable asset when looking for the next career move. Thus, you are employable. As a biophysicist, you have realized by now that compared to 50 years ago, science is moving as fast as a bullet train. A technique or method that was considered the “in“ thing or buzzword a couple of years ago has now become a routine lab exercise or assignment. In such a scenario, a soft skill that helps is to have a curiosity for learning and a questioning mind. Graduate school trains you to ask the right questions, rather than find the right answers. Scientific discoveries are peppered with instances of an “outsider” bringing a new perspective that was not looked at by others. This was possible because the “outsider” could ask

Numbers By the

Since the beginning of 2020, BPS has added support to more than 17 letters to federal legislators and agency officials on topics ranging from fiscal year 2021 appropriations, emergency pandemic funding, anti-Asian discrimination, and immigration legislation.

July/August 2020

12

T H E N E W S L E T T E R O F T H E B I O P H Y S I C A L S O C I E T Y