Essay + Research + Passion + Punnett Square = future Nobel?

Yesterday I posted an essay submitted by Jessica for admission to the undergraduate program at Cal Tech.  I wanted to keep some  additional information about her out in order to let the essay speak for Jessica herself.

Today, I want to provide a profile of Jessica mostly through other words she has written in response to questions I have asked her or on the website quora.com.  In the Quora community Jessica is not a rock star exactly; instead, she resembles a youthful equivalent of a charismatic Nobel prize in science recipient. The latter prize might well be in her future if she continues on her current trajectory.

People ask her all sorts of questions (the purpose of quora.com is to ask and answer questions). People wish to bask in her glow even though she is just graduating from, you guessed it, Cal Tech.

Questions range from what it must be like to be her to how she got to where she is to dating patterns among the intellectual elite.

Having read some of her responses and having read her essay, I asked her several questions (in private correspondence) so that readers of this blog will have a better sense of context to in order to learn from her.

Jessica has done something almost no one else her age has ever done. She published an article one of the most highly regarded journals in the scientific world. Here is how she describes her work:

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When I was sixteen I published a paper in the journal Science.  It took basic statistics, a little bit of programming knowledge, and (most importantly) a mentor willing to give me a project.

One of the postdocs in the lab had built a selfish gene (a gene that would enhance its own transmission).  Selfish genes are useful because you can link them with genes that block mosquitoes from transmitting malaria.  Then the anti-malarial gene spreads into the population with the selfish gene.

My job was to predict how fast the gene would spread.  First I did this for an infinite population, and wrote some equations that calculated the percent of flies that carried the selfish gene from the percent that carried it in the previous generation.  Then I learned how to use Mathematics so I could plot these frequencies over time.  Eventually I simplified the mechanics by making a Punnett square in Microsoft Excel and copypasting it until the percent of normal flies hit zero.

After that I modeled a finite population by writing a C program that randomly picked two flies in the population and mated them.  This was the first program I'd written that wasn't like "find the first ten Fibonacci numbers," so my code was atrocious.  I didn't write any comments, and I spent three days debugging "if (a = 1)".  But eventually I finished the program, and extended it to support fitness costs, mutation, and migration.

After I left a grad student continued my work, so I got three papers out of it: the Science paper, a theoretical modeling paper, and a review article.

Now half of you will be like "damn, I could have done this in high school."  And you would be right.  I think success in undergraduate research depends a lot more on which project you get than your actual level of skill.  So if you want to be consistently successful, you should do a lot of projects.  (I did five, and three of them led to publication.)
You can read more about the project here: http://www.scientificamerican.co..

Punnett Square

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This answer, especially the last paragraph, should inspire other students rather than intimidate them. Jessica knew, early on, that finding a mentor was absolutely essentially in her quest to do high level research. In addition, she is aware that taking on numerous projects vastly increases the odds of finding a mentor and then publishing. For those hoping to get into great STEM schools or majors her words provide a map and a destination.

How did Jessica find a mentor?

“I got my research project through family connections but as I understand it the standard procedure is to email professors at top universities until one says yes.  If you can't travel to a top university you can do research at a local university, but it will probably not be as high-impact.  Try to look for professors who list undergrads on their group webpage, since those amenable to taking on undergrads may be more receptive to taking on high school students.”

While students often visit school websites, few actually do the research necessary to discover professors who may be open to working with young researchers. Professors often welcome bright people who have a similar academic passion. Learning how to approach faculty creates an atmosphere in which students actively participate in creating experiences that will also help with graduate school applications, internships, and jobs. Does it help to have connections already in place; of course, and students should use any of these they might have.

Jessica’s essay sings in some of its rhythms. All great writing tells a story of some sort while also showing too. The legendary writing teacher William Zinsser (at Yale and still working at age 90 in New York) preaches that great writing emphasizes what he calls ‘the human element’.  Jessica lets us into her mind moving—among philosophy, physics, biology and more. Her concrete nouns evoke her world. Many people with her achievements would have rehearsed a self-congratulatory reexamination of her publication; instead, her words delve into the way that knowledge and interests cross disciplines. Seeing across and down leads to innovation and insight. And we as readers gain both knowledge of her pursuits and knowledge of the how these are born from imaginative leaps:

“To mold the universe to my specifications, to cure malaria with the touch of a button – this wasn’t just enlightenment; this was power.  I fell in love with it, and decided to major in biology as well.  Yet had I been a man, genetics would have been my wife, and mathematics my mistress: after hours I would sneak over to the back room and do abstract algebra with a pen in my hand and passion in my eyes.”

Confident and learned, her words speak beautifully. Before the new meme of ‘grit’ took over the discussions of what admission officers look for, ‘passion’ claimed the top spot. I would argue that this trait predicts future success as much or more than grit.

Given Jessica’s accomplishments I asked her about her time management skills. Her answer demonstrates that even the great among us can procrastinate. My guess, however, is that her definition of procrastination may be a bit different than mine. What follows her response is a post she put up on quora.com about what it is like to be a child prodigy. This answer demonstrates that even those blessed with great gifts still sacrifice a lot in order to rise to the top. Success comes with a price, in time, or friends, or in other ways that different high achievers write about.  For those who think that anyone ‘has it made’ they need to rethink their cliché. High achievers make things; things do not create with a mind, people do:  as a verb or as a way of life. I would like to thank Jessica for her words and for her permission to quote her essays and Quora responses. I too am one of her fans and will be following her journey of hard work and earned success.

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“I am not terribly good with time management unless I am excited about a project, in which case I work very hard.  I attribute most of my academic success to unreasonably high standards.  For example, I used to think I would fail the AP Physics exam unless I read the entire chapter and did all the odd problems in the book.  But it turns out if you work that hard, you can do well in national competitions.  I didn't know that, so I worked a lot harder than I had to.  But I still procrastinated on everything.”

Growing up as a child prodigy was probably detrimental to me, for the following reasons:

1.     I was always in special classes.  When I was five I was already doing algebra, so my teachers had me sit behind the counter and work independently while the others were learning to add.  When I was eight my parents sent me to the eighth grade, where I worked alongside people twice my height.  I saw nothing wrong with this at the time, but in retrospect I probably would have benefited from fitting in.

2.     Between the newspaper articles, the special classes, and my parents emphasizing academic achievement to the exclusion of everything else, I ended up seeing myself as a genius.  This is how I would introduce myself to other students.  I can't be sure of why I had no school friends until college, but that probably had a lot to do with it.

3.     I looked down on everyone else.  Other people were "normal," and normal people were dumb.  This continued all through high school, although in middle school I stopped thinking it was important to be smarter than everyone else, so I compared myself to people less and less.

4.     Academics were basically my entire life.  Most of my fun activities were science museums, bookstores, and educational computer games.  Regular computer games and non-educational television were guilty pleasures and synonymous with "goofing up."  When I started using the Internet heavily (in eighth grade) my parents tried to ban it because they wanted me to read an AP Bio textbook to prepare for a summer program.  During lunch hours or social events, I'd bring work to do instead of talking to people.  I didn't think this was so unusual, because even though other people had different upbringings, they were just "normal people" and they weren't supposed to save the world like I was.

The upsides of being a child prodigy:

1.     I never had issues with self-esteem.  Most people didn't like me, but I was smart so it didn't matter.  I also never worried about my appearance or anything else because the only thing that mattered was my intelligence, and I had plenty of that.  In high school I showered about once a week, and in general I was never afraid to raise my hand or correct teachers.  In retrospect, that might have been a bad thing.

2.     I never really got exposed to "bad influences."  I wasn't popular enough to know people who did drugs or got bad grades.  I left high school with most of the same values as my parents, and although that wasn't ideal, it did keep me out of a lot of trouble.  Also, since I was mostly isolated from the social scene, I never experienced the worst of the bullying that I hear goes on in most schools.  People were mean, but not enough for me to remember it.

All in all, the whole "prodigy" thing was probably bad for me, but now I'm happy so it doesn't really matter.