Qing Zhang 尽付笑谈中

Transition to full-time Broadie

I graduated this May from HSPH with MS in Computational Biology and started new journey as full-time ACB at Getz lab where I did my thesis. I thought things could be smoothier since I am not technically a “new grad”, however I did learn some lessons that I feel confortable sharing.

(It’s my first Engish post, please let me know if you found my language weird - I really wany to improve my English lol)

“Be Water”

empty your minds, be formless, shapeless, like water. now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. you put it into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friends.

(Quote from Bruce Lee) Unlike graduate student, full-time ACB needs to be more mobile - it sort of like how you played Overcooked - the assignments you have discussed with your friends might hardly work out in real game, and the optimal niche have to be determined live.

I was assigned a more scientific project with another side project for benchmarking pipelies when I started my role, then I spent some time to explore the former as I waited for the results for the latter. It turned out to be a huge mistake because the pipeline is actually more time-sensitive and there are still lots of upstream blockers that we, as a team, need to resolve. The pipeline now is nearly functioning which is great, but I would have been more communicative in actively learning about the blockers, rather than waiting for results.

“Be water” also applies to how to deal with recent political unrests. When Trump seems to win those states, I was seriously thinking about joining Elon Musk and moving to Mars. It’s impossible to vote in China (for obvious reasons) other than by your feet and it will be a TOUGH choice between Xi and Trump if it’s him AGAIN. I’m glad that now Joe seems to be winning! Just be a little more patient!!

996.icu

Some Chinese software enigineers made this website available as Github pages where they complain about the long working hours that have obviously broken the China’s labor law. 996 means to start work at 9am, to go home at 9pm and repeat this routine for 6 days a week, and the suffix .icu means the ultimate result of this routine - “Intensive Care Unit”. Huawei, which tops the notorious list of Chinese tech companies, contributed to a more shocking story against labor law.

I imagined that I would have a lot of “free time” after work since it’s US where labor law is better obeyed. However I still found it difficult. When there is something block-free on your todo list, I found it hard to refrain myself from contining to work. This becomes exceptionally difficult when the deadline is urgent. Admittedly I was not a proficient coder in any sense, for a couple of weeks I did work even more than 996 scheme to catch up with the schedule I proposed for myself. Then it comes to the ICU karma that I become sick for about 10 days…

The sick days are pathetic. You know you have lots of tasks on your plate but just don’t have the strength to work on ANY of them. My mentor, Julian, did a good job telling me to rest but it turns out to be difficult. I have to figure out how my medical/dental insurance work, setting up a PCP (sorry I know it is ridiculious that I have not set up PCP until I got sick), making appointment for emergency which is more difficult in the COVID epoch. Yifat Geffen, a postdoc that I worked with, asked me if I have someone to take care of me and whether if I need her to deiliver anything. I’ll just copy her words here to remind myself of the her kindness -

I agree and you know with having kids hear I had to deal with the insurance multiple times even one hospitalization so I understand. Happy to help if you still have things to figure out or even deliver a chicken soup, I understand being a foreigner without family here. Just feel free to ask, you are not alone here!

I wish I know how to better take care of myself now. Things are getting better when I learned pomodoro technique (Thanks Julian) - I will get notified to get some streches, hard stops for zumba and activities. Partitioning to subtasks that could be finished within one interval helps me to concentrate better. Jean has a nice post on energy management that I also found useful.

WDILT

I have been asking myself to name one thing I learned today and that’s making me frustrated. Getz lab hosted weekly standups sharing todo lists. I feel jealous when I heard something like “today I will read a paper about …” because the last paper I read was still RSEM two months ago! I don’t particularly enjoyed pipeline coding and have been missing likelihoods, posteriors. IDK I guess I just missed science in general, any part of it. Quoting from Julian -

We have to do a good job with the pipelines so we don’t have to ever work on them again

Similar situations applies for benchmarking tasks - I want to make a superb benchmarking suite after I finish the pipeline so that I don’t need to work on them.

Well, honestly I did learn a lot, about docker, Git and general python. I hope I could someday make a summary of them just to Google less. But statistics, maths, modeling and even biology (e.g. immunology) are the ones that I would be more interested. Hope I can switch to those again some day.

Aims for next month

Written on November 6th, 2020 by Qing Zhang
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