Letting Go

Dear Tuğba,

We are now nine hours apart. It makes one wish flat earth theory had some merit during these times. But we will find our new dynamic soon. At least we can still deliver these letters digitally, so I can read your thoughts almost instantly.

I am glad you have chosen to cover a more fundamental topic than learning to use an AI application at a superficial level. The attitude I saw in the field is to invest tons of money into the salaries of ML experts with little regard towards the scientists who are generating the actual data. I understand that even if data is scarce, you still try and build the methods, but it is easy to forget the blood, sweat and tears of all the PhD and post-docs who have spent tremendous hours generating all that data AlphaFold is using. I am curious how much investment Google made towards generating structural data. Hmm… I will research it and let you know. If you know anything about it, I am all ears.

I had to delay the start of my new job by a couple of days. As usual, I caught a cold. It took me a relatively shorter time to recover this time around, and my cold didn’t turn into a secondary bacterial infection. I am looking into a genetic component that makes me prone to infections and prolongs my recovery. I’ll keep you posted about my whole genome sequencing analysis results. It’s really fun to see what you look like with four-letter encoding. Anyways, back to the new job.

It’s been only a day since I started, but I can tell you a bit about the process till the first day. I can safely say I had not worked with so many professionals at the same time before. Working with people who are good at their jobs allowed me to let go a little. It was challenging, and it still is, but specializing in a field is a blessing. Working at a start-up or academia, you are a one-person factory along with other people who are also one-person factories. Moving to a bigger company, you quickly see that you don’t have to worry about everything. You can instead focus on breathing and doing what you know best.

Not having sudo rights in a computer was such a big deal for me during the post-doc; I think I complained and got sudo rights that way (or maybe it was given after they saw I wasn’t a crazy person). But back then, I didn’t have trust in the system administrator. I need a program now, I have to install it now. Whereas in a more established company, the programs you need are already available. Of course, it’s an ever-growing, always-changing, sometimes improving and sometimes-struggling system but you know who to go to for change. Change takes time in such an organization, and for it to come around, an army of people takes shares of the burden. It’s no surprise that ant colonies are such strong organizations. This is going to be my challenge till the end of the year. How to be an ant in this colony, as opposed to being a single-person colony?

Another challenge for 2023 is to go through my read-later list. From twitter, LinkedIn, etc. I have collected a list of articles to read. So that’s what I will do for the rest of the year while many new articles I want to read come out every day. What are the latest three articles you have read lately? What have you agreed/disagreed and what strike you as interesting in them?

I hope we will be able to still have phone calls or video chats once in a while despite the time difference.

Hugs,
Özge