Self Assembly

The long and short of it is this: I am the luckiest guy in the world. For one thing, after bouncing from sport to sport, I found one that really does it for me. Bike racing. If you didn't know.

But also, I think I've really found my niche in the academic world. Being a grad student, being in my lab, taking my classes... these things make me genuinely happy.

Hand in hand with deriving happiness from course- and lab-work goes geekiness. I am a closet geek, and I'm rather prone to complete geek-outs. I have a subscription to Science, and the book on my nightstand is Biomimetics. More often than not, the books I read for fun have homework problems at the end of each chapter.

So I needed to sign up for a course this semester. I only have one requirement left, a Life Science course, and I really don't want to take any Life Science classes being offered this spring. My only two mildly-useful alternates were Statistics and Neural Networks, I had a bit of a dilemma... both of those seem like a lot of work for very little payout.

Then Andrew told me about Self Assembly in BioEngineering. I signed up immediately, because it's being taught by Shinbrot, one of my favorite professors. Risky, I know, but the title seemed vaguely interesting, and I really like Doc Shins' teaching style. Today was the first class, and I was pleasantly surprised.

My entire post-bacc career has been about chasing the "ooh, that's cool" response. I call it the "cool-factor". Granted, the stuff that I call "cool" is generally anything but. The Fonz would not approve. Still, I get great pleasure from learning how to solve the great mysteries of the human body (like why do Meg's knees want to fall apart?)

Self Assembly is going to be cool. There are fantastic patterns that spontaneously form in nature, from chemotaxis in Dictyostelium to bifurcation and chaos in population growth. Many of them can be explained and explored with math. Lots and lots of ugly math.

If I can wade through the math, I'm going to really enjoy this class. This, of course, is like saying "If I can survive the 3 mile swim to shore, I'm going to really enjoy the view of the ship". It will be a bit of work, but unlike (shudder) Statistics, there will actually be a payout.

The Fonz thinks it's cool