Reading, Reaching, and Racing: February
Subtitles are lame. Just kidding! Hope you have fun reading this.
Hey!
Worried about your singleness on Valentine’s day? Don’t worry! We all had a date for Valentine’s day: February 14.
Welcome back to my newsletter. Hope you had a great January.
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 16-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 worked on Biotein, Youth STEM Matters, read more about brain aging, a film including me came out, and worked on school (plus standardized testing)!
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Biotein
This month, our CRO made a lot of progress on our experiments — we faced delays because we had to mail our samples in again because of USPS delays due to a storm —, but we hope to have them done in the next few days! We also got to around 80-85 interviews, and are hoping to get to 100! If you know anyone semi (or more) interested in health, definitely refer them to this link. We’ve written customer profiles and synthesized our user interview data! We also wrote more articles (publishing soon!), prepped our application for a grant, and worked on tagline/ways to describe our product!
Next month, we’re planning to finish those experiments, begin development of our test, write more content, work on product tagline/description, and get to 100 interviews!
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Mindsets and Philosophy
Here are some thoughts I’ve been having!
I’ve been thinking about what differentiates a hobby from a career, and I think I know. Because anyone can make ice cream, and maybe sell it to a friend or two, but when does it turn into an actual job? A hobby and a pastime that is formed out of sheer curiosity and enjoyment, like, for example, collecting pressed flowers, is absolutely divine. This is a hobby that is free of stress and expectations. The only requirement is your interest, and you have a lot of it. But when people start to ask you for those pressed flowers, and maybe making cute pressed bouquets, the hobby begins to transition to a job. This is because a hobby is stress-free/you have no reliance on it, but a career/job has moments of stress, because you are financially dependent on the work you are making. That taints the hobby a bit in my opinion, and makes it a bit less enjoyable, especially when you want to do it in your free time. Of course, you should definitely maximize your strengths, so I think there is a way to fix this: with environment changes, etc - you can differentiate stressed-deadline flower pressing and out-of-curiosity flower pressing! This might be why so many students hate reading outside of school - they associate it with tests, and the stress of school.
I saw one meme that was talking about how wrong people were about Elizabeth Holmes and how their comments about how she’d be the next Steve Jobs were so misguided/essentially ridiculing them. That’s stupid. We all should admit that Holmes seemed successful, kind, and talented, and we are only understanding all the red flags she showed after she showed them. Also, should we really ridicule anyone for being wrong? People are wrong all the time. It really isn’t that funny.
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Knowledge Bytes
Here are some recommendations from the month!
- Great Netflix Series: Inventing Anna. So fascinating. Anna Delvey/Sorokin is so interesting. Of course, we shouldn’t just glamorize all the stuff she did. She did unideal things.
- Great Cookie Recipe: Tasty’s 2 day cookie recipe is very good! You probably don’t need to rest the dough for THAT long (36h) though, if you’re impatient.
- Good way to improve tomato sauce: Add a bit of Parmesan (thanks dad!) — it makes it so good.
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Shoutouts
Here are some fun shoutouts:
Dr. Moody - thank you for your help and being able to answer all our questions in our Biotein sync this month!
Thank you, 1517, for all your help this month with publicizing Biotein’s interviews and the advice during the update call!
Thank you Dr. Boyden for a great call and all your advice about paths within biology and engineering.
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 March, I’ll be working on Biotein, Youth STEM Matters, and school!
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)