Chapter 37 and 38: College and First College Job

Chapter 37: College

              College was a great formative experience in my life where I went from pretentious academic asshole to quality Human Being, and certainly not without the help of some very good friends. When I first got to college at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU), I made up my mind that I didn’t need to make friends because "what was the point if I would just go off to Grad school with a whole different community in 4 years?" I don’t feel the need to explain that this was an incredibly dumb decision. I met my roommate, Kyle, who somehow was graceful enough to never be annoyed by my antics. Early in college I discovered my propensity to seek isolation and to become depressed and not to seek help. Shortly after college started it was November, which meant it was National Novel Writing Month. During this time I talked to almost no one and spent all of my free time trying to write a novel. Somehow the other people in the dorm including Kyle tried to keep me involved as part of the dorm group and still invited me to activities. They were kind and would check in with my writing and tell me that what I was trying to do was impressive while trying to start college at the same time. The novel was a depressing dystopia inspired mildly by “Brave New World,” that followed an ostracized and isolated main character who could not fit in because he did not want to do the same fun activities or be social like everyone else. Alcohol was used surreptitiously in the world (like Soma in Huxley’s novel) in order to keep people from analyzing their situation too deeply. The main character was required to go to therapy sessions for not fitting in. I realize now that writing this novel was really me trying to express how much I disliked the general call to conformity, especially within school settings, and how in trying to avoid this I was feeling isolated. I shared the novel with the dorm friends who had continued to try and include me. Most feedback was that they really liked it (I was surprised) but hated the main character. I expected this. I didn’t particularly like the character and made him purposefully unlikeable. After finishing the novel I started spending more time with the dorm friends. We played games and watched movies and generally bonded. It was especially helpful spending time with Kyle, who had a great knack at enjoying and valuing the present moment, which directly opposed my constant anxiety and thinking about the future. I definitely gained a lot from these times. We were in the same Honors class and on one occasion we had a group paper/ project together. Anxious to be done like usual I wrote the whole first draft and Kyle edited it. His edit was tremendously better than my draft and we received a fantastic grade. I began to realize that I didn’t have to chose between dedicating all my time to academics or having fun in general. I remember one time Kyle had left a half-eaten sandwich on his desk which I found to be gross. He was always leaving things around and it was driving me insane. So, I took the sandwich and put it on his bed, hoping He’d get the message. When he saw it he actually thanked me because he thought I was trying to remind him so he didn’t forget to eat the rest. He was always seeing the best in people, which would be fortuitous for me. Later I would meet Micah, who initially thought me to be pretentious and full of myself. He wasn’t necessarily wrong. Through Kyle I began hanging out with the two often. With Micah being honest about the way I came off to people (which I initially resented), and Kyle telling me the qualities he liked best and reinforcing them with complements and encouragement, it was a bit like  classical conditioning. Nonetheless, between the two of them, I certainly became a better and more likeable version of myself, and happier. It was around that time that I became interested in reading philosophy in addition to my other slew of nerdy nonfiction books.  I began to think about what truly makes a meaningful life and what it would mean to go into medicine (casting away old desires to make huge scientific discoveries and immortalized in books). It was the seed that would grow into my interest in Narratives and narrative theory, which would later dictate my desires in medicine. Collin and Kyle were interested in what I was reading and my thoughts about it. Collin, with his strong science background, would look at the topics with objectivity and the scientific method. He was also interested in Buddhism and would try to incorporate some Buddhist philosophy, which was expansive. Kyle would analyze this from the perspective of the narrative and the present and making connections with other people and in general the subject areas that people may consider “softer.” Eventually I would pick up more of Kyle’s philosophies, especially much later when I was eventually forced to with a Cancer diagnosis.

              I quickly decided to be a chemistry major; Collin did as well, which was certainly fun. Collin would do a physics focus with his, I would do a biology focus given my desire to go into medicine. My first chemistry class was Organic chemistry because of having done general chemistry during running start in high school. I loved how mechanistic and logical it was—how you could figure out the answer using general base concepts and principles. Everything felt like a puzzle that could be solved with some general knowledge and a bit of practice. The professor was a delightful older gentleman who frequently mountaineered and shared pictures of his trip before each class. By the end of the class I was nearly convinced to choose a career in chemistry rather than medicine. In retrospect my favorite classes were the honors humanities classes, which were topic based, and each topic would be explored from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including historical, political, religious, philosophical, and so on. These would become the most helpful classes in terms of personal growth and developing skills for medicine. More than any physics class, these classes taught me how to systematically approach problems from a variety of angles and areas, as well as to understand some of the unsaid meaning in narrative writing and dialog, which certainly was helpful when learning to talk to patients or read a chart, and even with diagnostic reasoning when starting medical school. When I eventually took the MCAT, my strongest area was the humanities, which surprised me because I always felt much stronger in the sciences than in the humanities, and in general approached problems from a scientific approach. I was even bold enough to one time tell a professor that when it came to finding the truth with a capitol T, science and math were the only disciplines that mattered or could make progress. I would later discover how wrong this understanding was—well what’s the point of college if you don’t learn something.

Chapter 38: First College Job

              The next year I would become a Lab TA for organic chemistry, which was fun and netted me a little extra cash along with any from playing gigs in a quartet I had joined. The TA experience turned out to be incredibly educational. Each week we would go through the labs and common pitfalls to look out for, and then go over the last week’s labs and grading on the reports.

              In the lab it was rather procedural. I walked around and observed the other students, giving help when needed, checking products and techniques, and intervening when it felt necessary. Learning to explain complex techniques and procedures in an easy-to-understand, bite-sized way would become a skill that would help later when discussing complex topics in general. Attempting to explain and intervene preemptively when something looked dangerous or incorrect certainly taught me a lot about how I understood the specific topics, as well as how I learned to understand topics in general, and cultivated in me a sense of urgency and action in dangerous situations. There were comedic moments as well. The final product of most organic synthesis or purification experiments is a white powder. And the process of making it usually involved using filter paper in some way. I became very familiar with the spectral data for filter paper, as many students would accidently scrape filter paper into a powder into their final product vial and call it the finished product. I had done that plenty of times when I was a student in that lab. There would also be the times when we worked with sulphuric acid. During transfer to a vial some students would take it out from under the hood and move it to their work desks, dripping a fine trail along the way leaving a burnt line in what was once carpet and occasionally almost a hole in the top of their shoes. Since before the lab we would always go over proper transfer technique they would always deny incorrect technique. But showing them the carpet and the forming hole in their shoes was usually enough to convince them to try to be safer.

              The second half of being a TA was grading the lab reports the next week from the lab I had just assisted in. Even with an easy-to-follow rubric, I learned quickly that there is a lot of subjectivity in what I would previously think was just objective truth. Grading those reports blurred the lines of subjectivity and objectivity for me in a way that would later make me much open to different forms of knowledge or epistemologies, and that objectivity was usually a product of the doctrine, which in some ways was manufactured, and so on it’s own was a bit of a false prophet. I also learned that my handwriting must have been truly dreadful; trying to get through some of these student’s handwriting I felt deeply sorry for any professor or TA that had to decipher my handwriting in the past. After that I attempted to improve my handwriting, although not with appreciable results.

Given my chemistry and TA experience, by senior year I decided that I would eventually make my own home lab after becoming established in life in order to do interesting extractions, purifications, and syntheses even without a career in chemistry. Alas, even the best laid plans.