My Second week as a Visiting Researcher

It’s been a week

• Do I feel jaded about the opportunity? Absolutely not!
• Do I feel comfortable? I didn’t start out that way. I stayed at home Monday through Wednesday, working from home. It was raining, and I have an inexpensive grocery store next to where I am staying, which makes it easy to rationalize not going anywhere except for groceries, when needed. That changed, however, once I attended the reading group on Pseudorandomness online on Wednesday evening. For one, the room was packed. Secondly, the scientist leading the group did so much to include me, even though I was the only person online during the session. I decided that I absolutely did have to make it to the lab on Thursday.
• I did not regret it. The energy here is insane. We have tea time at 3pm each day, researchers are writing on white boards, and quite frankly, I’ve been so productive in the lab. A friendly wave in the morning and a “Good morning” greeted me, as a fellow researcher sat next to me, and we were off to work, except to stop for coffee and tea breaks, or occasional friendly chatter. There are zoom rooms for those who want to attend meetings. What is wonderful is that, being so productive, I’ve been able to celebrate wins, when I have been able to focus long enough on a problem that I make headway.
• Things seem “effortless” here, in that we just have what we need. What else does one need besides whiteboards, friendly and collaborative people, coffee and tea, snacks, happy hour, open problem session, reading groups, and soon…pitches for open research collaboration with smaller groups? It’s just been a dream, and more than I could have ever hoped for having had the opportunity to attend so far.
• Oh, there was also a Theoretical Computer Science conference this week, which I heard was really awesome! I tried to get work done this week, so I skipped out on it, but a paper I had read after being recommended to me this summer was presented at the workshop (in fact, the author had 2 or 3 papers in the workshop!). I did, however, head to the 1st floor to scout some macarons during Tea time. I must have tried about six, but my friend (a postdoc), was right in telling me that the vanilla and pistachio ones were probably the tastiest!

Wandering

• Every time I meet up with my host, they are so kind to me, and they treat me with respect and with the promise that I, too, can be a senior researcher in this community, and it fills me with so much joy.
• This week, I also wandered a couple streets in the “wrong” direction, visited the Physics building and got to see the Oppenheimer display, and even chatted casually with a Psychedelics undergraduate major on campus.
• I got to see and hear some of my labmates make music while I could hear the rain outside, while eating macarons.
• To be honest, I haven’t met any undergraduate Computer Science majors on campus, but I have met undergrads majoring in Physics, Economics and of course, Psychedelics. I’ve been able to see students weave in and out on their scooters down Bancroft, while others casually chatted with each other, holding cups of boba drinks.
• It’s been a welcome respite and to top it off, I heard that I got funding to two Post-Quantum Cryptography workshops today, so I guess I’ll be going to those in a couple months; one is in Toronto, and the other is in Pasadena, California! Also, our team won my first ever Quantum Hackathon!!! Super cool, considering all the hackathons I’ve ever participated in, I’ve been on the winning team! I thought about how years ago, in my first hackathon in LA, I tried to talk to a team and they just stared at me, no one responded, and I eventually left (it was in Node.js anyways, so no biggie lol). Their loss haha. Anyways, in terms of the upcoming workshops; I’m very much looking forward to it all!
• What was interesting was that as I did a small happy dance, a labmate asked me what happened, and I told him, and he just said “Congratulations!”. And I realized it had been a long time since I had really heard that in a, “I feel really happy for you in earnest” way. And it felt nice to just be able to say “Thank you” and bask in just feeling good about having access to some really great opportunities that will lead to my growth and learning as researcher / academic. There was no feeling of “why didn’t you share this opportunity with us?” or diminishing of the joy I felt. Just a space to let me enjoy it.
• In other news, I had been craving rice balls all week, and skipped Happy Hour drinking and eats this evening to find them, and I regret nothing!

• I took notice of this, which is near the lab, because this particular plant actually grew in our yard growing up. We call it the “bottle-brush tree”. Alas, it grows no more in our yard, but I saw this by the lab and immediately it warmed my heart!

• The name of this church, which is strangely the closest to campus, is also the name of the church I spent the most time in growing up. So many things seem so nostalgic and familiar, like visiting a place for the first time, while feeling like you’ve been there before.

• On Saturday, I hung out with my friend, Tyler, who I met in grad school (Combinatorialist), who became a Rustacean. We went to Chinatown in SF and had a grand time for the New Year. It was crazy packed, and a lot of fun!

This week

• I stayed up until after 2am watching this video. Besides being communicated so well that it has over a million views, it’s insightful in terms of digging at the heart of what made me join this community. He talks about not just having a taste for interesting problems, but championing unpopular ideas. When I left for grad school, there was this feeling I had, hanging out with some of the JPL scientists (one in particular), where I was seeking a community to which I could belong. Hanging out with them made me feel more at home than I had ever really felt being sort of this weird, half-science, half-art person trying to force my way through the entertainment industry, thinking about Snell’s law casually in CAD class when the teacher was talking about surface subscattering. Being here has felt like getting that feeling back, where I can just be myself, in a way I haven’t felt for a while. And it’s quite wonderful. There isn’t some sort of rigid definition of what a scientist should be here, but moreso a place to learn, play, collaborate and engage in one’s curiosities. And it’s wonderful.

And that’s it