Learning, Growing, and Coding : My November
Read to see some learnings from the past month, some stuff I've done, and to gain some value recommendation-wise.
Hey!
Knock knock? Who’s there? To. To who? Nope, it’s to whom. Not a science joke this month, but this one made me chuckle a lot.
Welcome back to my newsletter. Hope you had a snazzy November.
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 14-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 been focusing on Biotein, schoolwork, and training my coding skills! As always, I’ve been avidly reading.
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Biotein
This month was full of Biotein progress, fun, and results. We’ve been working on many things this month, ranging from analysis of proteins for our assay to gauging interest in said assay!
A bit more about the assay: We’re basically going to be measuring protein concentrations in samples to (hopefully, if all goes well) gauge biological age/disease risk in individuals.
On the analysis side, we’ve done a lot of narrowing down of our protein candidates for the test through computational analysis and lots of database searching. We’ve got about 18 candidates right now, that we’re narrowing down to 5 to study the week of the 30th (as I’m writing this, it’s November 25th).
On the interest/marketing side, we put out a survey earlier this month that garnered 175+ responses, which we are analyzing and finding patterns in. The responses generally look affirmative of the want for a biological age test, and there were many good suggestions.
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Mindsets and Philosophy
I love this section so much: It’s basically a free pass for me to nerd out about cool ways of thinking. Note: these are all theories, and no matter how definite they may be phrased, they aren’t close to definite. If you have thoughts/want to debate me on this, reply-email! I’d love to hear your thoughts.
People are constantly iterating versions of themselves. I’m different now than I was a year ago, because I’ve grown and learned. I’m also different now than I was a month, a week, a day, or an hour ago for that same reason. Sometimes people coevolve, which leads to growing relationships, and sometimes people don’t, which tends to push people apart.
Everything inexplicable that we do now seems to be rooted from evolution. Competition came from scarcity of resources and a need for survival, social media from a need for validation and support, and so on. This is really fascinating, and I wonder if we had appeared on the world today (with more resources, etc) what would happen.
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Getting Better at Coding
I love coding so much. I just want to get that out there. Currently, I code decently in HTML, CSS, Python, Swift, and Javascript.
So, naturally, I began learning Java in September, and I’ve really enjoyed it.
Examples of fun projects I’ve built: A solo battleship to guess the identities of numbers at specific points on a grid (I built this in different levels with a 3-dimensional array), a program to plot data (random numbers for now haha), and it’s been exhilarating.
As I’m writing this, I’m thinking of new ways to extend my battleship game. I have a lot of ideas.
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Knowledge Bytes
Here are some recommendations from the month!
- A great song: Anything by Angèle. She’s an awesome Belgian singer who talks about important topics. Mind you, they’re in French, but there are English translations. Stromae’s pretty good too.
- Coolest mindset: Debunking perceived risk. Risk is something that varies per person, but often the stuff we view as risky really isn’t that risky when you think about it. We need to objectively see if something is actually a risk (aka a thing that has the potential to be dangerous/blow up in our faces). If you have a good way to gauge whether real risk is there, and you can predict its size, you’ll have a good hand on decisions to make.
- A great book: Candide by Voltaire. I haven’t gotten very far yet, but I’ve been enjoying reading it so far. As you may have guessed it’s in French, but there’s an English version online at Project Gutenberg.
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Shoutouts
Here are some fun shoutouts:
- Alex Chen for an enthusiastic and fun call. I really enjoyed talking to you about research and anti-aging.
- Del Johnson for an interesting call, I really loved chatting and the insights you provided.
- The Biotein team for many fun teambuildings and calls. I still don’t appreciate my constant Among Us deaths, though…
- Natalie Panek for a really fascinating talk on insecurity, imposter syndrome, and life’s challenges. I really enjoyed listening to you, and thank you for speaking to all of us at Boss Ladies.
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 December, I’ll be continuing school, working more on Biotein's assay and paper, reading, writing, and coding. Also, it’ll be the holidays! Yay!
Reach out to me if you want to talk about human longevity (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)