Anthem for Disenchanted Youth pt. 1

All grad school results are in and it's officially a massacre. I actually did get rejected from everywhere besides Vanderbilt. Hilarious. Or so I hope it will be later. Preferably in an ironic "Einstein dropped out of high school," instead of a plain sadistic, manner. On the other hand, this may be an okay development. Plan B is in gear: I go to file my OPT application tomorrow, and have two, maybe three, tech openings lined up. The two definite ones are in molecular biophysics, which is the thing I'm trying to expand out from, but whatever, as long as the insurance is there.

Really, I don't know what I could possibly say about this that I haven't said already. My mother seems to think I'm becoming some sort of elitist: unable to accept doing work that isn't perfectly in line with my aspirations. The problem is, while my standards for prestige are low, my standards for substance are astronomical; when it comes to basic principles about what kind of research I want to spend my life doing, I'm utterly incapable of compromise.

People think I don't want to go to Vanderbilt because it doesn't have as big a name as MIT, Harvard, or UCSF, but the truth is, the work being done there is much different from what I ultimately want to do--or think I want to do. What they do down at Vanderbilt CPB is pretty much fundamental molecular biophysics, and I want to use that as a launchpad to explore systems biology theories and computational techniques. These are things I will have little opportunity to do at Vandy, and indeed in most molecular biophysics programs--recent feedback seems to imply I should have been applying to biomedical engineering programs all along. It seems more important to me that, as long as I have the time to do so, to get into the right graduate program, instead of any graduate program at all.

Does only wanting to work at the leading edge of my general field constitute elitism?

In another month and a half I will have graduated from the Johns Hopkins University with a BA in Biophysics. This means little. That statement probably seems callous and shocking to some, but the fact is, it's hard to focus at all on the significance of this juncture when all I see is the long twisted road beyond it. On top of that, a college degree is something I've always more or less taken for granted since before high school: I was always going to go to college, I was always going to graduate, probably with some science-related degree, I was always going to get a Ph. D. Making a living has never been an issue. Living was assumed; it was the ideals, the philosophies, that were at stake. Perhaps that is the true difference between the son of a self-made man, as my mother once described me, and the self-made man himself (I'll tell that story if it ever becomes relevant). What I'm getting at is--perhaps the standards I've set for myself have always been astronomical, but only now is it beginning to matter.

There are more aspects to this than I have the energy to think about tonight; this is only the most analytical link in my current train of thought. Hopefully the rest will fall in line in the morning.

Suffice to say, I have no idea where I am right now, or where I am headed in the near future.