School system being against me studying biology and computer science
Despite the fact that throughout my life I have repeated Hesse’s name and quote more than any other collection of letters and words - which should be considered an achievement and not a source of pedantic embarrassment -, I feel obliged to cite his well-known and illustrative aphorism - once again - to help me visually represent my experience as an individual inserted in this predefined system that we call education: the bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. Before any skeptic in the room points out that I am not a bird - I am well aware of that fact, although flying has always been one of my childhood dreams, making me a staunch fan of Da Vinci’s inventions -, my personal path as a student has always been characterized by my constant fight against our outdated academic system and its henchmens - and laidlaw has helped me win this last battle before the end of this apparently endless war.
When I was little, I was passionate about numbers, math problems, enigmas, and any other abstract entertainment that had to do with unraveling hidden answers, ideas, messages, and solutions. I still remember this time when, after having profusely asked my mum for a new problem to calculate and solve when doing our weekly shopping in that little supermarket down the road - it needs to be said that my only motivation for me to go with her was to buy those rounded catalan candy that were selled there - , she asked me: is it possible for you to ever relax and contemplate what is in front of you without the need of having to be doing something with this little mind of yours, “cuki” - literal phonetic translation in spanish for “cookie”-? And my answer was: mum, I wish I could do that, but I cannot stop thinking: my brain does not allow me to do so… After this, beyond the fact that I became an annoying weirdo in my beloved family because of my innocently extra reply, my parents did realize that I have a naturally - in the least poststructuralist way possible - inquisitive mind.
While growing up, until the age of 12, my love towards STEM subjects was directly proportional to my hatred with regard to reading and Humanities in general, making me focus more on areas such as math or biology and actively marginalize history or literature. This bound-to-be disastrous path ended when an amazing teacher that I had in highschool made me rediscover how magical the act of reading is, how the alienation of one’s body is possible, and how mystical collaborations can be established between “inquisitive minds'' and a bunch of well-organized letters. From then on, I started devouring books like those rounded candies that my mum used to buy as a sweet culmination of endless problem-solving skill sessions, making me inevitably fall in love with philosophy, politics, fiction, and, of course, with the borgesian idea of framing the infinite, the endless contemplation of the potentiality of everything that is not but can be.
Setting aside my inherent urge of invoking Borges every time I have the opportunity to, this now personal passion towards both sciences and humanities suffered a bureaucratic breakup when I had to decide which path to take for my baccalaureate. After having to walk up the stairs of the Main Library every day - St Andrews people feel me - and the time when I had to explain to my dad that the butterfly effect is an actual researched phenomenon in chaos theory and not a new movement in favor of LGBTQI+ rights - I am not joking, this year’s Christmas dinner was beyond interesting and worth recording -, deciding between sciences and humanities was the hardest and most discomforting experience I had ever faced. Despite the fact that I had the possibility of doing both National and International Baccalaureates, I still had to choose, and I ended up taking the Humanities path: nonetheless, I managed to find certain loopholes for me to keep studying STEM subjects, such as participating in extracurricular programs like Young and Science and Crazy about Bioengineering, or sneaking into my highschool’s biology classes and doing my extended essay - shoutout to IB survivors - on convergence evolution between two apparently unrelated species but with a shared morphological trait - a prehensile tail -, a research that, because of it entailing using bioinformatics tools to generate phylogenetic trees, allowed me to combine both evolutionary biology and computer science all at once.
Nevertheless, despite having taken those loopholes, they were not entirely reflected on my official grades to access university, making me renounce those STEM subjects that, throughout my life, had actively shaped my personal and academic understanding of knowledge, research, and inquiry, and study International Relations, a thrilling subject that, nonetheless, does not include nucleotides in its papers or phylogenetic trees in its geopolitical maps. This constant struggle against an outdated, narrow, and contingent education system, this world Hesse imagined as ubiquitous to the bird, is at the same time fragile: breakable.
There is a way out.
And my way out has been the Laidlaw Program.
Laidlaw being my way out
As I have stated, when I learnt about the Laidlaw Program and its leadership dimension I said to myself: weren’t you looking for a way out of your egg?
I had different ideas of what my project could be about, but after checking the pre-defined ones available I identified one that successfully encompassed my two other loves: biology and computer science. And that is how I became a deserter of our beloved and boud-to-be dismantled education system: by choosing a project that has nothing to do with my university degree and that focuses on the study of microorganisms in hydrothermal vents. Without going into the details, this research aims at interrogating their DNA to find genes that unravel what these organisms use to eat and breathe by using bioinformatics tools to find homologues to those sequences, align them, trim out bad positions from the alignments, and reconstruct evolutionary trees to see how these microorganisms’ metagenomes relate to the genes we are interested in.
Despite the fact that, at first, this research seemed intimidating, it really motivated me how I was going to be able to not only apply certain skills previously acquired during my pre-uni time as a partial-time deserter, but learn new methodologies with alternative coding languages and multiple bioinformatics softwares, something that my IR degree could never provide me with. That is the reason why I see Laidlaw as my way out, as the perfect opportunity for me to work on a project I am passionate about beyond my academic path, allowing me to continue cultivating my personal interests in a thrilling and enriching experience.
My learning experience as a potential big name in the biological arts’ community
One of the main components of my research, as it has been previously outlined, is the use of bioinformatics tools and coding languages to process metagenomic data. Here is an example of a normal day in the office:
Yes, I know it looks scarier than a bacteriophage, particularly to someone who has spent the past year having on their screen Bush’s speech regarding the War on Terror on one side, Agamben’s Homo Sacer on the other, plus an article on Fanon’s psychoexistential complex explained for dummies in the background, but, believe me, it makes more sense than it seems (or maybe not, but I guess we will never know). Jokes aside, I am very grateful to say that my supervisor has been extremely patient with me when it comes to explaining all the new commands and the procedure I need to undertake to produce certain outcomes, making the experience and the learning journey truly enjoyable. Plus, now I know what multitasking truly is.
Moreover, beyond a bunch meaning ( if (understand == true) {-ful}: else {-less} ) words, one of my main outputs is the elaboration of phylogenetic trees to clearly identify those organisms that are close relatives of the query sequences we are interested in from a protein domain profile. Here are a bunch of - arachnid - trees:
Just by looking at these images, it is clearer what I mean when I describe my Laidlaw journey like my learning experience as an potential big name in the biological arts’ community, because every time I need to generate a phylogenetic tree I feel as if I am this painter dealing with a piece of captivating abstract art that has life of its own: coloring the branches depending on the sequence score, adding circles according to the robustness of the findings, placing medium-sized yellow stars for the query sequences. On top of that, these little cosmological images encompass the beauty of evolution, relatedness, closeness, remoteness, possibility, fact.
And that is what I am enjoying the most in my Laidlaw journey: my job as an artistic translator of evolutionary signals by giving shape and color to what is written down in those microorganisms’ metagenomes: I am part of this cohort of artists that happen to have unraveled the encrypted message encoded in those sequences.
And, suddenly, I am back to when I was little, next to my mum, profusely asking for an enigma to decipher, for a problem to solve, for a new mystery to puzzle out.
Thank you, Laidlaw, for the puzzle: ready for this new adventure.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my amazing supervisor, Joanne Boden, for her unconditional support and the guidance provided throughout my project. Moreover, I would also like to thank both Lord Laidlaw and Laidlaw Foundation for having given me the opportunity to participate in this incredible program.