here

week 3 of graduate school:

I was sitting in the office today - my office, as it turns out I'm not going to be the homeless/deskless graduate student as I thought might happen - and it really hit me: I'm here.

I feel in some way I've always wanted to be a scientist, but it's taken me nine years since I consciously realized I was driven to ask questions about the world.  My roommate in college gave me an essay about questioning one's way to the heart of a matter, and that tremendously influenced my first two years of college - knowing that I needed to learn more than was being taught, knowing that I needed everything I was learning to be able to ask and answer the questions I wanted to ask.

Much of this curiosity has been driven by my own childhood experience with disease.  I didn't know why I had it, what had caused it, or why anyone couldn't fix it.  I think that perhaps if the answers would have been available, I might not have been quite as driven to look for answers.  So I ended up thinking, "What do I need to know to understand what is known, and to find answers - or at least the right questions to ask?"

What is really astonishing to me after so many years of not even being able to figure out what question to ask, is that finally a project has fallen into my lap (well, with probably years of thrashing around trying to find a suitable question) that is basically what I always wanted to work on.  It really is at the intersections of mathematical modeling, immunology, and allergy.  But what's crazy is that much of the data didn't even exist till the past year or two.  (Many years ago, my cousin - also a scientist - told me that he was working on things he couldn't have imagined and with tools that were not available at the time he was planning, so it was good to be flexible in one's goals.  He was right, I think.)

Even better, I finally am beginning to have enough background to understand the literature.  One never really knows enough, but I guess that's part of the appeal, too.  Science is so deep that I don't think it is possible to exhaust the field.

Anyway, this is a really long way to say, Wow.  I've spent a good fraction of my life working to be able to do what I'm doing now: asking questions about things I'm interested in.   And here I am!  It's an amazing feeling.  But what's just beginning to dawn on me is that even beginning to answer those questions could well be the work of a lifetime.