F*ck the system & focus on your success

Yes, I got this kind of question pretty often: "how do we educate our students better?"

...and yes, every time we discussed this topic, we ended up talking about students with bad life attitudes...talking about students lacking EQ... talking about students looking for well-paid jobs, rather than pursuing their passions or giving back to the society.

...and then we talked about training better teachers..making better environment in school & university....reducing bureaucracy.. .giving more money and freedom to talented scholars...
....Yes, we all agree on that.

..then, we go back our work, knowing that the system's not gonna change the way we want it to be.

Recently I interacted with quite a few friends, both Thai and non-Thai, who are passionate about tackling education problems. These folks are really serious and they do "build" things...organizing camps, teaching workshops, starting schools, tutoring online, writing books, making app, pushing policies, etc. I have a lot of respect for them. While the success of their approaches remain to be proven, at least they take actions...rather than sitting around and complaining. I'm honored to them as friends.

For my part, I have my own little agenda too...regarding education.
I called it a "megalomaniac approach."
The idea is simple: I will try to make students growing up wanting to be like..ME
(..yeah, see? that's why I call it a megalomaniac approach).
        I think it's much easier for me to first, of course, focusing on my own success..which I did have some decent track record...but there is a lot more to do. And, of course, the word success for me is not limited to academic and career..but also include all other aspects of life...financial security, health, community, etc...all aspects allow a person to live a happy life and share that happiness with people around him. I take this mission to "live a happy life" as an experiment..with myself as a guinea pig. Rather than debating over the philosophy of happiness and meaning of life, why don't experiment on different ways to have one? Of course, sometimes I succeed..sometimes I failed..but that's the nature of experiment..any experiment.. in the lab or in real life..hopefully we learned something about it.
        Then, there is a storytelling component...by words..and by actions. The point is I MUST appear to be really really AWESOME.in front of my students..(yes, many people will oppose this thinking that it's another pompous megalomaniac attitude I have). No matter how successful I am... no matter how much I have learned (and willing to share) about my recipe of success.., unless I look 'cool' enough..no one will care and no one will benefit from my personal success. No, I'm not talking about going around bragging about achievement..that's a stupid way to present success. One tip I learned over the past year was to tell plain stories..with great excitement...stories about really cool works I do..stories about great friends and colleagues I have....I don't have to mention any trophy..I don't have to use big words describing my codes of ethics.... just plain stories..with great excitement.
         So, who are my students? I'm not a professor yet ...and I don't have a school or workshops..yet. I think we all students and teachers of one another in everyday life. We're inspired and learned from those we interact with..through work, social gathering or other random activities. If whatever I do inspire or teach anyone around me..if my excitement and positive energy lit up anyone curiosity and passion ..even just a little bit....I counted that as a one small step of my educational achievement...and I do try to meet more people. I think I have quite a few good stories to share.
        For me, the best model of education is a small group of people..with a least one inspirational individual.
        I think our educational system is in a pretty bad shape now..and it's not going to change soon.
        My plan is: f*ck the system, focus personal success...
        ...and inspire other to do the same.


   












  

Grad student life

Except for a pressure to publish & graduate, I really like my job(s) these days. 

I'm in the lab roughly seven days a week. Of course, I'm not working at the bench every single minute. It's kinda like back and forth between office and bench; I'm mostly at the office actually, reading/documenting stuff, listening to music, sketching out random ideas. I'm pretty lucky that most of what I do don't require that much time to set up and implement ..and also don't cost that much relative to the lab budget. To be honest, many experiments I ran just because I'm curious to see what happen (oh, yeah my advisor has to remind me from time to time to stay focus). When things don't work, I joked about it with folks in the lab; when things do work..well, we celebrate. Early in the morning, late evening and weekend are my favorite time in the lab, actually. It's so quiet..the building (Y2E2) is locked..I can sit, lay down, roll around anywhere..any meeting rooms..any whiteboard..any table any couch ..from the basement to the third floor. Let imagination go wild.

 

Surreal week & amazing people - Part 4

Wednesday Nov 14th

   By the time I returned to Palo Alto Tuesday night, I got an email reminder from SynBioBeta (synthetic biology startup conference). The conference was just 20 minutes away from my home..that's not a problem.
The problem is..I got another email..reminding me that I have signed up (months ago)..for an investor pitch session.

Oh shit!
"I don't have any synthetic biology business to pitch," I told the organizer.
"That's ok..you can just pitch whatever idea you think interesting," he replied.

...so, I pitched.

"Alright, guys..I'm not gonna talk about businesses.. I'm gonna talk about market opportunity for you guys..".. and I talked about molecular cost&speed problems for molecular biologists in Thailand....and that these biologists could be (overlooked) early adopters of many technologies developed by new companies in that conference room..
(* you can read more elaborate version of this idea in my earlier posts.)

During the break, two guys came talk to me.
The first one was a founder of Desktop Genetic, a startup in London working on cheap DNA oligo printing..now interested in providing their DNA printers to lab in developing country.
The second one, even more interesting, is guy from Biocurious,
"I wanna move to Asia and start a private biohacker lab there," he told me.
He's probably around 40-50 year old, used to be a software developer. The company he founded, back in 1990s, was among the first that make video streamline possible on internet. He sold his company four years ago ..he didn't say for how much ..but apparently, he doesn't have to work anymore. He traveled around the world for three years..been to several southeast Asian countries like them a lot. He learned molecular biology for fun at Biocurious starting less than a year ago. He also told me about his spirulina project at Biocurious.
"..seems like a lot of interesting papers came out from Thailand," he mentioned.
"..oh yeah.. I knew these people.I gave a talk at their university last December." I said.
"Great! we should talk more; do you have a card?" he said.
  
..I handed him my business card. He looked at it and said,

"Oh, you're the bike rental guy from Endy lab! I called you couple weeks ago for bikes!"

Surreal week & amazing people - Part 3

Sunday Nov 11-Tue Nov 13

"So, what's in the box?" I asked.
"Our gizmo... Spherical drive system..you know, like the wheel of Batman' motorcycle," the guy sitting next to me answer. His friend opened the box showing a weird looking wheel entangled with power cords and wires.
"..it took us sometime at the airport check point to explain that this is not a bomb"
I was in the Limo bus from the Washington Dallas airport to the hotel. Sitting next to me were three undergrads..one Chinese, one Indian, one Russian. They were one of CIC finalists from San Jose State U.

      For nearly 20 years, an organization called Invent Now put together CIC..a national competition of student inventors across the US. This year there were seven teams of undergrads and seven teams of grads selected for the final round judging at USPTO in Virginia. The "inventions" can be anything..from biotech..to electronic..to medical device..to robot...to aviation control systems. I and my colleague in the lab were lucky enough to in the final round..(for our work in DNA data storage..I'll talk about that in the blog sometime)..it was really an eye opening experience just to interact with these folks from totally different research areas. I'm also very surprised that we made it to this round given that almost all other contestants have taken their works very far toward application: a Turkish guy from UCSD already patented his drug delivery system..and raised money to start a company around it, a Egyptian guy from Wynes State U already got interest from GM for putting his autonomous combustion devices to automobile. .. Well, I'm still debugging these E.coli in the lab.
     The judging session was one Monday. Each team needed to present their work to the judge panel..it was a close room..with one big TV screen..the team and the panel..an the camera man...no one else (that gave me the same feeling as Qual). Most of the judges, for grad and undergrad sections, are "distinguished senior inventors"..well, I can't think of any more fancy words for that...We had Dr.Fogarty (inventing balloon catheter), Dr.Hoff (inventing first Intel CPU), Dr.Langer Keck (inventing fiber optic)..Dr.West (inventing electret microphone)..Dr.Sasson (inventing digital camera)..Mr.Starkweather (inventing laser printer) ..etc...What impressed me even more was how carefree these people are.. After judging session, we all went out for dinner together..contestants and judges. On the bus and around dinning table, we chatted random stuff and joked around.. Without reading their Bio, I wouldn't be able to imagine these funny grandpas & uncles were among the greatest inventors of our times.
     We had a ceremony on Tuesday at Newseum in D.C., host by NPR's Neal Conan. ....and yes, we did had a round table chat with Dr. Holdren (Obama's science advisor) at the Whitehouse.

    I did't get a medal...well but that CIC trip was one of a lifetime experience.

Surreal week & amazing people - Part2

Saturday Nov 10th,
     I had three bikes to pick up: one from Creeside hotel next to my home, one at Arastradero apartment, one from at a house in Palo Alto. I walked to get the first one, stop-by to get the second one on my way to lab, and picked up the third one on my way back from lab. Besides lab and bike, I had a script to write for CIC and an MV appointment with Dusit. I'll talk about CIC in the next post.
     So, as many of you know, I have a youtube channel..with hundreds of random videos of me..playing guitar, giving a talk, acting, snowboarding, cooking...etc. The channel has nearly 20,000 view each month..mostly thank to a controversial political speech of a famous Thai actor I impersonated. I got pretty decent amount of  views from playing guitar/singing..but to get good viewer comments/rating, I need help from guest singers.
     Dusit has a deep & sexy voice according to many friends...also a serious singer..performing all Stanford Thai events as far as I remember and..actually went to the Star audition once. .this guy is available almost 100% of the time I called him out for singing.
      I stopped by Dusit's dorm that evening after finishing up CIC presentation script. There was a party next door from the music room..people were walking by and wondering wat-da-fak there two Asian guys were doing ..it 's difficult because we had a flip camera..but not tripod.. we put it on the piano..the field of view was narrow and the microphone was not perfect so we really need to find the perfect angle to be in the frame...and maximize voice quality. Oh by the way, we also wanna make sure that we look and smile at the camera most of the time. We worked on BeeGee's "How deep is your love."
      The final clip came out ok.. I think.

Surreal week & amazing people - part1

This blog post is dedicated to amazing people I have interacted with over the past week.
From time to time, I wondered how I ended up hanging out with them, given then I knew and contributed so little the world compared to what they did.

Friday Nov 9th,
      I and Abhijit had an appointment at 5 pm with Dr.Monique Lambert, a medical ethnographer of Palo Alto medical foundation. Yes, we were still trying to define the need and the scope our healthy food business. Thank to Abhijit creative mind and passion, the idea constantly mutated from group diet control app to grocery delivery service to non-invasive A1C hemoglobin analysis. Ideas were in the air and we didn't know how to move on. Monique is a friend Abhijit...and as an ethnographer she had interviewed lots of patients and extensively studied their behaviors in medical context. Talking to her, Abhijit pointed out, would likely to give us better picture of how these patients' problem (especially regarding diet) and where we might chime in.    
     We met her at a bar in Mountain View, about 20 min drive from Stanford. She did an excellent job explaining interview procedure..what to look for ..what common problems are and even offered help to run a group interview session if we like. We kept talking and talking..Abhijit spit out ideas after ideas..all of them are interesting but we didn't really know how to move on. Until when he mentioned grocery delivery service idea..and said that a female friend he pitched that idea too really hate it..
..That's when Monique' eyes lit up and argued that it was the best one so far ..she immediately laid out a series of possible plans to implement it.
"You guys gotta have me in the company if you wanna go with this idea," she said.
"Oh, we would love to! Wanna be our co-founder?" I said.
..and that's how we got a Ph.D. ethnographer ..with over a decade of experience to join the team.
      We continued talking for another 1/2 hr...all of sudden the next move become much clearer..we laid out plan, define MVP..set up regular meeting time. I'll have to keep the detail about what we plan to deliver secret for now (see my blog post in the future!) ..at least till after we deliver the first version.
      After the meeting, I asked Abhijit if he needed a ride home; he asked to drop him off at another bar (which I can't remember the name). He said he wanna go find some developers/hackers...there are many of them at that bar, according him.
       "what? you meeting you just gonna approach some random dudes in the bar and pitched the idea?" I asked. Apparently, that was his plan...I haven't asked him yet what the outcome was.
        I went back to lab a little after 8 pm, finished cloning before heading home.


     

User interview comment (for Startup Garage class)

Project: Redesigning the concept of neighborhood
Interviewer: Mike Duboe
Interviewee: David Liu

Like
-Starting with warm up questions that do not require much thinking, for example, by asking David to describe plain fact about the place he lives, without asking for any specific opinion (which requires more thinking).
-Very casual..lots of joking/laughing

Possible improvement
-When asking if David, as an EV RA, did anything to help people in the apartment to meet one another, David said he tried but it never worked. I think here is a good opportunity to dig deep into the detail about dynamics how people in the neighbor interact. However, Mike let go this opportunity and went back to sort of warm-up question again about time allocation. Mike should have asked follow-questions right away about when David actually did and how, specifically people responded (what kind of people showed up? what are their opinions..etc.).
-Noisy background in the middle of interview...should be more careful about choosing the place for interview;
-When discussing the fact that people in the apartment formed small groups based on ethnicity or thier undegrad schools, David said "They are not open, they should be more open." Again, I think this is a good opportunity to follow-up with detail questions like describing examples that made David think the way he said. Then, once these details are uncovered, Mike can ask David about possible solutions. In this interview, Mike jumped directly to question about possible solution. I think it is difficult for David to think of solutions before he has a chance to recall more specific detail about problems first.
-Before asking if social network will help, Mike should have asked plain background questions about how David and his friends typically use it first.

Let go for public good

Anyone remembers my posts from a few weeks ago about DNA outsourcing idea?

In brief, I learned that doing basic molecular biology in Thailand is very slow and expensive compared to in the US (about 3 times or more expensive and slower).

The reason is that the place like Thailand does not have local companies that provides cheap, fast, high quality reagents and analysis services; things need to be shipped in and out of the country many times especially for mulit-step works  like putting a few pieces of genes on one DNA. I recognized that as a business opportunity: outsourcing such multi-step tasks from the place like Thailand to the place like US. From back of envelope calculation, it is cheaper and faster to do multi-step works, all at once, here in the US and ship to Thailand than to do multi-step works in Thailand (but you have to ship things in and out from Thailand to  Malaysia or Taiwan multiple times in the process). I also realized that this is a great opportunity for a startup biotech business in the US, especially those specialized in basic molecular biology: there are researchers over there who really desperately need cheaper and faster ways to work...much more desperately than their peers in the US..and no other big companies really try to serve that need, thinking that the market is much smaller than in the US. Yet, these scientists in developing world, in my opinion, would likely to be early adopters of any new services that help them cut down cost and speed up work.
...when there are people with desperate needs...there is a market opportunity.

I had that high-level idea above..I didn't really know how to get start.
How do I help my fellow biologists in Thailand reducing cost and speeding up their work?
...(and maybe get some money for that!)
Yes, I did pitch the idea in Startup Garage..but it didn't really call attention from classmates who know very little about biology research.
Yes, I did get in touch with DIY community..but they aren't in the position to put something together without a heavy push from my side.

Luckily (or luckily), there is a startup company near Stanford. It's brand new..just opened for business less than six months ago..and currently has only three employees. It sells something I do want to sell: ability to researchers to outsources mulitsteps molecular biology works to them..to save money and time.
I was freaked out a little bit when I learned about it...the same feeling as getting scooped as a scientist.
The only missing thing is that the company hasn't really looked outside the US (which is intuitively make sense to start small and local before going international)..and hasn't really aware of a huge market opportunity on the other side of the planet.

..what should I have done?..be quiet and continue working on my plan? I don't know.
...but here is what I actually did.
1) I emailed that company, explaining the problem of cost+speed of molecular biology in Thailand, asking if they can help..and pointing out market opportunity. ..
....and yes, they're interested.
2) I had a phone call conversation with the founder last week..then one-on-one meeting today...and he's convinced that the company can help make thing faster and cheaper there in Thailand..and there is indeed an interesting market opportunity he didn't see before there.
3) I helped connect him, the founder, to my biologists friends in Thailand.

..ok, yeah..I probably just blew away my own business opportunity..but probably also for a good reason: those in desperate needs will be served.

Sex education, personal finance and business

I remember that, not very long ago, many conservatives back in Thailand argued against teaching sex education to kids for fear of prematurely invoking their sexual desire. The problem is these kids then growing up learning whatever they think is right by themselves...and yes, you can imagine how likely they are to be wrong and what the consequences would be.

Interestingly, I notice similar trend regarding personal finance. It is the same problem of not teaching kids how realistic adult world will be like when they grow up and how they should properly deal with it.
 
How many of you remember being taught, as a kid, that we you grow up you will need money and you would be better mastering the art of making money? ...probably not many.

But how many of you remember being taught that money is the source of greed..evilness...that working for money is not right way to do.. that one should be better devote his career for the public good..not personal greed..follow what're noble..follow your passion..not the money?...probably most of you.

These kids will grow up..developing their desire for money..(yeah, and developing their desire for sex).
..then they don't really know what to do with that...
..all they remember being taught as kids is "this is evil...suppress it!"
Ok, good luck with that.

I think the right way to do is to let kids know..at young age.. that they will grow up need more and more money...and there is nothing wrong with that (as long as they don't cheat, of course).  Then these kids should also be challenged, at young age, to figure out ways to make money. .something many of us don't really think of till we are about to finish school and get out to the the real world. Making money shouldn't be perceived as something noble, not evil..why? because, it means that one has successfully created goods or services that are valuable enough that other are willing to pay for. ..and once your personal finance is secured, you're free to do whatever you want.

Instead of preaching kids to follow their dreams, make other happy and forget about money..
..Let's teach them practically lesson to turn their dreams..whatever dreams..to something other will be HAPPY to pay for.