15 July 2005:
Yes, I realize I haven't updated this in, oddly enough, exactly two and a half years. Well, today my application to the Evening MBA program at Babson was due, so I thought it might be interesting (and conveniently lazy of me) to post my four entrance essays. I thought the essay questions were pretty cool. It's easiest to view them in Word format.
(1) Please describe your short-term and long-term career goals. How will your past professional experience, background, and interests combined with a Babson MBA position you for success in attaining these goals? (Essay 1 Word HTML)
(2) Identify a current business trend and predict its impact 10 years from now. How will the results of this trend impact your ability to attain your goals as described in essay one? (Essay 2 Word HTML)
(3) What unique contributions will you bring to the Babson community that will enhance the value of the classroom experience for your classmates? (Essay 3 Word HTML)
(4) (Optional) Is there anything else that you think we should know as we evaluate your application? If you believe your credentials and essays represent you fairly, you should not feel obligated to answer this question. (Essay 4 Word HTML)
15 January 2003:
PhD? Now let's just think twice about the ol' Pile it high and Deep degree... January of the new year has me settling into my job at Beyond Genomics, a biotech startup that does genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics research to aid in the detection, prevention and eventual cure of such diseases as cancer and Alzheimers, through the establishment of gene- and other bio-markers. I myself am (surprisingly) getting to use all my weird panoply of skills... from my ChemE training (yick) I am learning about chromatography and mass spectrometry, and dabbling in some protein chemistry techniques, such as Western blotting and 2D gel electrophoresis. I am also learning Perl and SQL to make some contributions in data mining on the bioinformatics side of things. Add to that the LIMS (Lab Information Management System) troubleshooting that I'm doing and I certainly have my hands full.
Current plans still vacillate between a graduate science degree (MS/PhD) and an MBA... or d) all of the above... stay tuned.
16 July 2002:
Well, I don't have time to include everything that has happened or all my plans since graduation. But to all those keeping tabs: yes, I finished my last required summer class a few weeks ago (Organic Chemistry and lab), and with that earned my B.S. in Chemical Engineering :) I didn't come as close to finishing the CS major as the following letter implies, since I took the opportunity in my last semester to pursue some other interests: namely Biochemistry (my favorite subject ever!), and a couple courses in Economics, which is another fascinating study. I'll include my plans for my year off when they're decided... and my long-evolved plans for what will happen after the PhD: that is, the company I will found.
22 October 2001:
Whew. Those of you who have looked at this page from time to time have seen a lot of dreams, a lot of majors flash by. So I'll keep it simple this time :) Well, I think I've finally settled into place; now that it's my senior year I thought I'd pick a major. So over the summer I officially affiliated ChemE. This won't come as much of a surprise to anyone, since by the time I affiliated I'd finished most of the classes in this department. But I made the step from College Program major in Chemical Engineering to the full monty, or the full major as it were. So for those of you keeping track I'm majoring in Chemical Engineering and (unofficially) minoring in Computer Science. I've pretty much decided (I think) against trying to complete the double-major, although I'll graduate just one class and one practicum short of the CS major as well as ChemE. (I still have two semesters of Organic Chemistry and lab to finish up over the summer for ChemE, which I'll probably do at some other school.)
And afterward? What the heck do I plan to do with ChemE and CS? Would you believe... I'm starting to get some focus! (I'll let you take a moment to recover from the shock) ...I am planning on going into the one thing that has held my interest since high school: the biological sciences. Taking a bioprocess engineering class now, I realize how much I love to study the biological systems (and my distaste for the engineering of them). I'm planning on doing some bio-related research next semester and taking some more bio-related classes, but the real deal is the research position I'm searching out for after graduation, looking at such things as modeling cell growth and cell differentiation, computational biology and genomics, or bioinformatics (see the Boston University Bioinformatics Department for an excellent description of this science). After a year or so of doing some research to make sure that this is what I want to do and to narrow down the field a bit more, I will go to graduate school in one of the aforementioned fields.
Yeah, just call me the jack of all trades, but master of none... ;-)
And speaking of which, here's my course schedules for any who are interested.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Return to my home.