Coding, Creating, and College: My April
Subtitles are lame (but informative!). Just kidding! Hope you have fun reading this :)
Hey!
I was wondering who the best target for my April Fools pranks was… then I realized it was obviously a baby born March 31st! They were, in fact, born yesterday.
Welcome back to my newsletter. Hope you had an amazing April.
For those who don't know, I'm Nina Khera. You may have met me during a meeting, or at the latest networking event in Boston. I'm a 17-year-old human longevity researcher who's working on projects from topics spanning cellular senescence (zombie cells) to epidermolysis bullosa (skin disease)!
This month I’ve done work on Biotein, a summer program idea, a project focused on Alzheimer’s, and school.
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Biotein
Our study is almost done — now we’re planning test development logistics and plans for our final validation study. Essentially, we’re figuring out our future roadmap while wet-lab work is being done :).
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Mindsets and Philosophy
Here are some thoughts I’ve been having!
It’s important to think your words through before you speak. Simple words that aren’t a big deal to the speaker can have a large effect on the audience. While there definitely is a threshold at which overthinking becomes a big problem, little things can have a large impact. Also, generally, thinking through how you speak and react seems somewhat helpful to forming more coherent thoughts. This is something I sometimes have a problem with (more so when with friends and very excited), because thinking through my words seems less ‘fun’ than the alternatives, but I’m excited to practice this. This might make me talk slower too :-).
There is a certain beauty in independence - it’s either incredibly hard (i.e. homesickness) or easy to see (i.e. yay, new fun and decisions i can make on my own!) at first but it feels meaningful to control your own decisions, even in the most inane of things. For example, try wearing mismatched socks one day. Nobody’s there to tell you not to. Nor does anyone truly care. You don’t have to overthink the little things. You’ve been prepared to leave the nest and you are flying up, up, and away. Your only responsibility is yourself (take care of it, though), but so is your only support.
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Knowledge Bytes
Here are some recommendations from the month!
- Interesting blog post forum (they think arguments through well and generally say cool stuff): LessWrong
- Cool GPT-4 Experiments: Here (thanks Uli for these! very cool read)
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Shoutouts
Here are some fun shoutouts:
Thanks to the Atlas and Agents of Change communities for helpful, kind, and cool conversations! I love getting to know all of you better.
Thank you to the Biotein team for being great collaborators and very kind and cool people!
Thank you to Ravi for all your dementia project-related help and enjoyable ideation sessions!
Thank you to everyone reading this. Even if I didn't mention you this month. you probably helped me a lot. Thank you!
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Next Month
In May, I’ll be working on Biotein, summer program planning, coding, and my work on Alzheimer’s!
Reach out to me if you want to talk about human longevity, brain aging, (or just life sciences in general) or anything else honestly!
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nina-khera-115b5a175/
Personal Website: https://ninakhera.com/
Email: kheranina@gmail.com (or just reply to this email)