To be with people who are a lot more steeped in the intellect exploring the frontiers and possibilities of where we could go in future is in itself exhilarating but when that group includes folks who are young high schoolers from around the world as also volunteers who are faculty who have travelled to attend an event to engage with these young achievers produced what I consider an apex moment in volunteering for me.

Almost like bookends of a continuing journey of us, I will describe my experience meeting two individuals without naming them, besides naming is dangerous as it is like giving impressions and understanding colored and limited by my own perception a reality that defines them from a narrow and limited perspective of interaction from one event.

I volunteered as a judge at the 2023 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair held in Dallas, Texas. I was assigned to the section that was my second choice. My first choice was Molecular and Cellular Biology because I had worked as a biochemist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, which was my second post doctoral opportunity that had brought me to this area. My second choice was dictated by my going back to graduate school in 2016 to study data science in an online program offered by a local university, Southern Methodist University that was designed for working professionals. That choice was Computational Biology. That course gave me opportunities to work with fellow students from around the US on various projects over the course of a two year program of study where every course had a collaborative project to work on and submit. My capstone project allowed me to reconnect with my previous career through extending the PhD work of a SMU graduate who was an advisor along with his mentor, a Statistics faculty member from SMU, into a tool that could be used by biochemists to use simulation results summarized into a corpus that was then wrapped by a data visualization built in Microsoft’s tool Power BI.

One of my team mates was a Microsoft executive who was adept at the tool. I used the Bioconductor package in R to extend the simulations that my advisor had done for his PhD. So in a way to see many high schoolers doing projects along similar lines building tools to speed up research in biology was very gratifying. The reason I put it as a second choice was due to the fact that I had very little experience as a practitioner of data science since my experience with Enterprise Resource Planning software used in Supply Chain has served to pull me into more engaging roles using that experience than the one I gained from a masters degree in Data Science. I must mention though that corporate America has great mid level managers such as the one I reported to at Verizon. Little did I realize that my request to IT to install the RGUI on my work laptop from a self serve internal portal would result in a notification to him. It resulted in multiple one on one sessions with my immediate manager who challenged how I could apply R to meet the business objectives of Verizon and more specifically for his team. Here was a manager who had last been to school four decades ago joining a telecommunications firm right out of school, built a career in it serving as an employee over the four decades of his working life with entities that morphed into different companies through acquisitions and in that sense had served Verizon for all his working life. What I liked most was not that he wanted me to just present proposals on how R could be used, but it resulted in one on one sessions where I was by answering questions giving him a deep dive into how R worked. Those sessions led to me building a data visualization in Excel for a report that was not used previously which was then automated in R.

It is this continuous learning on the job that corporate America fosters which in my opinion converts the workplace into a university. I was more than happy not only to explain how but to teach R programming to another employee on the team so the team could maintain the tool we built. In exchange this employee taught me SQL on the Oracle platform that linked the ERP systems our team used that were interfaces with third party Logistics vendor’s ERP systems.

Getting back to my objective in this essay to speak about two individuals, one a student finalist at the science fair and the second, a fellow judge who was a faculty member at a university about three hours drive from Dallas where the fair is held.

I had reviewed the online materials for this student’s project and found it difficult to understand how it was all so well composed and thought out that it made me wonder what kind of mentoring he received. So, in my interview with him, I asked him to describe the “day in the life” aspect of doing this project and the duration of doing so. That is when I learnt from him, how he was exploring as a middle schooler software analyzing genomic sequences that are available to the public and found what appeared to him as a discrepancy in reported findings from a Stanford research lab. By writing to the lab he gained an audience discussing his findings which led them to invite him through a program that enables high schoolers to work in a research lab during summer. He spent three summers working with a postdoctoral researcher on his own ideas but with guidance on a day to day basis, working in the lab. This made me comfortable and I decided to ask him questions where he could teach me the aspects of his project I didn’t fully understand as well as speculate on possibilities, both of which he did with great gusto and enthusiasm.

We had a long caucus session where we as a group of judges had to work in a session where we were asked not to discuss the methodologies and process we received training in that we then used. I think the two co-chairs who conducted this caucus should be appointed to run caucuses in our legislative bodies because they were so effective in surfacing the two ends of evaluating- the evangelist and the devil’s advocate before putting the matter to vote.

In this blog I will include a photo with one of the two co-chairs I later hung out with at the judge mixer happy hour late in the evening.

This late evening mixer resulted in me getting to know another fellow judge, the faculty who had driven 3 hours and who was staying at a local hotel. I was so enthralled by his life journey that I ended u chatting with him in his room into the early morning hours of the next day. My fascination for his life journey was also because I could relate to it and gain a behind the scenes perspective as he was also an immigrant from India, like I was.

His early life as a high schooler himself was a tale of trials. His father was in an accident that prevented him from working, which meant that though he was top of the class and could get scholarship he could not afford the loss of possible income from working to support his family. Having assessed his situation then, he was steeped in sorrow which his father sensed and advised him how he had to learn and figure out how to be happy independent of life circumstances as those would toss around anyways our whole life. That focused his thinking into strategic moves that accounted for his limitations. He decided to take an exam for a government job that had the fastest track into entry through a competitive exam. That is how he became an insurance agent with the Life Insurance corporation which also spurred him to deepen his interest in Statistics. He then decided that he would earn extra income by teaching the subjects he needed to learn in order to qualify into gaining admission into another government institution. The attraction for government bodies was the stability in career it offered as he pursued his interests. This led him to his next role as an officer in India’s border security force. I will refrain from sharing those anecdotes but it essentially served as a leadership training academy and management school through working in sensitive and life threatening circumstances. Recognizing how good he was in learning technology, the service provided him opportunities to lead a large scale IT transformation that he loved to carry out as yet another way to learn hands on while also managing the project. Long story short the biggest risk he took was to abandon his well established career to join a PhD program in the US solely because he loved the idea of spending all the time studying and applying knowledge. He came here with a family and a child with special needs, sharing an apartment to save on costs and loved his time as a graduate student for the precise reason I loved it.

This reason was that one could raise one’s hand to take on more challenging roles to teach while being a student, which was something he had crafted as a strategy to survive and thrive. In fact this opportunity exists in corporate America and I say this based on my experience. When you raise your hands be ready not to calculate the gain and loss from a short term as it is always a steep loss unless you enjoy the loss, which is the demand placed on your time to study new subjects and not just skills to acquire.

This is how corporate America is in fact the real university. Imagine getting your hands on data anywhere at a university in order to learn, it is almost impossible. Imagine the data you get access at a large corporation, that is like gaining access to the data flows in the supply chain which is not so different from the glow of information that goes on in biology that is now lifted into a new realm through computational technologies of data science.