An Inverse to Valediction

Happy Thanksgiving!

This past Monday, when I was riding the 1 bus back to Harvard Square from MIT, the digital clock at the front of the bus ticked from 11:59PM to 12:00AM and I realized how blessed I was to be among friends and family like mine.

I was going home after eating Thanksgiving leftovers that turned into Indian take-out with Nekke, drinking not quite pale ale and watching How I Met Your Mother and Heroes, all the while being completely confused by the ants circling the turkey blood on the kitchen counter and…Heroes in general. I made rounds in Burton, then met Mary for the first time in maybe two years, an absence during which she straightened her hair and mine grew about six inches. We sat in the lobby of McCormick realizing how much we needed to catch up, and I how much I’ve missed her.

November has been an interesting month.

In this month I turned twenty-one, spent most of my time in lab/caffeinated/staring at inDesign/writing papers/being drunk/lying in supine positions, and wondering where all my time and sanity went. As a result I’ve written some damn good papers, gotten positive results in lab, met new people, gone barhopping, developing abs from hangover puking (you didn’t need to know that), caught up with old friends, finished deadlines, and had a grand/stressful old time. I love the feeling of reaping the fruits of my labor. Would do it all over again.

The only thing I didn’t get to do between the paper/pset/production/protein expression/partying/not sleeping was to breathe. And maybe I have a little bit of a magpie in me, because when I saw the ghetto holiday lights around Central as the bus moved closer to home I realized how wonderful, vibrant, and brilliant my life is, full of people and passions I’d never let go of. If this is the rest of my life, if this is the only part of my life, then it’s a life well-lived, well-loved.

I am thankful.

Sky’s Falling (Blood and Tears)

When I say I love you
like the sky’s falling down,
I mean just that.
The ardour of our emotions
is heavy enough to raise the sea
and collapse the heavens
and we are the harbringers that
stand in the rubble we created,
watching love, oh tumultuous love,
crush the sand dunes and
scatter the foaming brine.
You’d call it blood and tears
if you were the maudlin sort,
but I’d say the sky’s falling down
outside the bedroom door,
outside our little bubble,
the sky’s falling down,
falling down,
and I will have to rebuild it
when you stop this tempest
and we part.

Empty Hours

For the first (and perhaps only) time in my college career, I am all caught up on required reading. This is what happens when you wait for unreliable people: you become astoundingly good at processing those empty hours intended for otherwise fruitless endeavors.

The One Thing You Won’t Catch Me Doing in Lecture

I hate taking notes during lecture. I really do.

If I’m taking them by hand, my hand gets sore about fifteen minutes in and I give up. If I’m typing them up, then my fingers get sore too and I go online and browse those oh-so-pretty-but-why-do-these-prices-even-exist-for-comforters on Anthropologie online (I give up). Either way, it’s a lost cause and I wind up never looking back at my lecture notes when I study for exams. if the professor thinks his or her lectures are important enough to be tested on, the lecture slides are usually posted online anyways.

I feel that academia is a dialogue between professor and student, and if we’re taking notes we’re being simply recipients of a knowledge that may not be entirely canonical–and who seriously can stand being a mindless sponge regurgitating someone’s perception of the universe?

Instead, I write commentaries of the lecture during lecture, or stick figures graphically depicting the material at hand (en garde, ribosomal RNA!) There will be a page of Oh No They Didn’t Say That and a page of What Is That Thing–Oh It’s a Shirt and other things I get distracted by while in class.

The irony is that I take meticulous study guide notes. These are a bit different from lecture notes, in that instead of a transcript of the professor’s lecture, I have a cleaned version of the course that highlights the most important details to be gleaned for studying. It is my way of reprocessing the information and turning it into a way I can comprehend. In that sense, these notes are much more important than lecture notes.

So, to another semester of sleeping and goofing off in class.

Throwaway Moment #9812 of Living in the City

This morning when I went to get coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, among all the pseudo-yuppies getting their medium iced with Splenda (you’re not a real yuppie if you still get your coffee at DD), three women in front of me were talking rather loudly about their “night shift” at the strip club.

Oh Boston, you are full of class.

Before You Take Your Memoir to the Printer….

I don’t update this blog enough.

Truth is, my personal life isn’t very exciting. What I find exciting happens to be pretty much cliché of what most people go through; what others find interesting about me I consider so status quo I don’t even notice it. For instance, breakups seem like such momentous events in our lives, but they come and go for everyone, ubiquitous.

I like reading and writing about such universal emotional experiences because they give a common voice to people of all sorts of diverse backgrounds. It’s a statement of our humanity despite the odds, an empathy that is indelibly marked despite our polymorphisms.

The problem with writing about personal emotions is that you can tend to get too self-indulgent in them, wallowing in self-pity and painting a biased account. It’s why so many blogs are tedious blocks of text, why no one reads the tons of memoirs that come out each year–we don’t want to read about how you think you’re awesome/repulsive/repentant/unrepentant, we want to read about how your life coincides with the larger act of our collective existence.

A good “emotional story” should illuminate a facet of our emotive processes that we have not recognized earlier, a subtle detail that comes unique from the teller. We share stories to entertain, to be listened to, to grow.

And our stories must grow with us. There needs to be a certain sort of detachment from the events occuring to gain perspective and to contextualize them into your, the author’s, grander scheme of things. Blogging is sort of an antithesis of this sort of introspection, as we trade immediacy of information with analysis of thought.

But to be honest, I’m always a better editor than I’m a writer; I say all these truisms about writing but can’t actually put pen to paper and execute any of my theories. It’s easier said and done, and it takes a certain admirable sort of openness (or shamelessness) for memoir-writers to open up their life to be inked (or cashed in).

My life is at the same time no more interesting and hugely more interesting than random memoir author #198 on some obscure newspaper’s bestseller list, and so is yours. So write, but reflect first.

Saving Face, Illuminating an Isolationist, Ying-Yang Asian-American Culture

Three years after I meant to watch it, I finally saw the Alice Wu-directed Saving Face, an alternative rom-com about two Chinese-American lesbians and their families and cultural conflicts. The film stays painfully true to the issues that plague Asian-American families attempting to preserve backwards, mainland traditions forty-decades old in the face of a progressively modern New York City. It is a witty and powerful commentary on the emancipation of individuality and free will against an isolationist, patriarchal society that is so strongly preserved under oppressive male figures engrained by Confucian principles two millennia back. I kept on pausing during various scenes in the movie to call up my friend to rant about how true this movie is to my own experiences as an Asian-American, and to the experiences of many of my friends.

The movie contains a two-fold plot: the main story deals with Wilhelmina “Wil” Pang, a successful, lesbian surgeon whose mother continually chastises her on her masculine attire and attempts to set her up with “nice Chinese boys.” During one of those Chinese family gatherings in Flushing, she meets and falls in love with Vivian Shing, a beautiful dancer who also happens to be the daughter of her boss. From there the two carry on an affair in which Wil must reconcile her closeted status with her love for Vivian, and Vivian must consider the importance of her career as the prima ballerina her father desires for her versus her love for modern dance. It is the archetypical love story of family honor versus personal happiness, something so common in Asian-American relationships that Wil and Vivian’s amour feels like a more beautiful remix of our own clichés.

The more interesting love mystery lies in Wil’s mother and her mysterious lover: Hwei-Lan Gao, a 48-year-old widow living in her parent’s home in Flushing, is found to be mysteriously pregnant. Despite her status as a grown woman, she is repudiated like a teenager by her father and cast out of the house, where she moves in with Wil. As Wil grapples with coming out for Vivian, Hwei-Lan is having a sexual revolution of her own: she experiences the kai fang—“sexually liberal”—environment of interracial couples and pornography of New York City compared to the isolationist 1940s sitting room of her parents’ home. “I’ve never had an opportunity to date,” she confesses around the end of the movie. “It feels nice.”

Hwei-Lan's first excursion into a non-Flushing video store enlightens her to a world outside of her traditionalist upbringing.

For non-Asian Americans watching this film, portions of the movie can feel unbearable—Wai Gung’s admonishment of her 48-year-old pregnant daughter seems completely unreasonable: how can a grown woman stand to endure a near-senile old man’s empty words of pride? Isn’t she a legal adult and therefore, in control of her own life? It’s appalling that these outdated, patronizing traditions can still exist in 21st century households, and yet it does, as I cringe at the accuracy of Wai Gung’s choice words, and Hwei-Lan’s crying acceptances of all the invectives she is hurled with. How many of us Asian-Americans have had this lecture on us for lesser crimes, been told we are the shame of our family name, and to gun-dan—to get the fuck out?

Wai Gung’s lecture is a relic of Chinese Confucian beliefs, where the duty of the family lies on the shoulders of the patriarch, and it is his responsibility to raise all his subordinates—I mean family members—“honorably.” Any sort of minor transgression on our parts becomes a form of emasculation of the patriarch, his inability to assert control over the kingdom that is his household.

If this description of the Chinese familial hierarchy sounds painfully outdated, it is. In modern, urbanized China, this sort of domestic infrastructure is beginning to crumble as the next generation of Chinese adults are from the single-child phenomena, where the kid is king and parents become unpaid labor grateful to catch even a glimpse of their grandchild amidst spoiled spending habits and a feckless lack of foresight into past and future. China itself is experiencing somewhat of a Gilded Age, a here-and-now debauchery in the urban middle-class.

But in the United States, first-generation Chinese do not get to reap the fruits of this cultural liberation—here, with our lack of connection with the mainland and bombarded with American society, we choose between assimilation and isolationism. For many of the younger generation seeking to move forward in corporate and academic America, we assimilate. For those older and unwilling to change, they hole themselves in the traditions they grew up in, whether it be 1940s prudishness or 1960s Maoist rigidity.

I’ve once described going home from school every day was like stepping backwards in time, into another world. I speak only Chinese at home, and am passive to the heads of my household, my parents. I stand when they lecture to me, I never speak back to them, even when they are blatantly wrong in their assumptions. Outside I am assertive and fiercely independent, but at home I am the lowest in the family hierarchy, a nothing, a voice that does not matter simply because I am the child, and I can never fault the people who made me from their flesh and blood.

Without contemporaries to compare notes, Asian patriarchs living in the United States are forced to hold onto the remnants of the Chinese upbringings against a foreign society they feel themselves too old to understand and adjust to. Their identities have to be reworked, their entire world-views, so they stick to the maddeningly archaic principles of their youth. Wai Gung unflinchingly practices tai-chi every morning in a basketball court where even the ballers become reluctant to drive an old man from his stone wall of isolationism.

The victims of man’s hoarding of his pride are, of course, women. We may be our father’s pride and joy, our husband’s devoted love, but we also become their property, their worth in flesh. For Vivian’s father, her achievements as a prima ballerina exceed her true love for modern dance. The importance of Hwei-Lan to be married respectfully overshadows whether she loves her fiancés, even at the age of 48. The illusion of legal adult means nothing if your entire life is entrenched by a lifetime’s worth of misogynistic propaganda in a culture you cannot help but to call your own.

Hwei-Lan's new family.

Saving Face offers a very optimistic solution: embracing yourself over your customs. Wil urges her mother to dress sexily and go on dates instead of holing herself watching Asian dramas, even though her mother continually insists that she is too old (at 48!) to even consider dating. Slowly, Hwei-Lan embraces Wil’s African-American neighbor, pornography, and eventually her own feelings towards her secret lover simply by emerging out of her oppressive parental family. Wil and Vivian do the same, and the movie ends resoundingly happy, as both couples enjoy life beyond the constraints of their traditionalist upbringing. It is the best-case scenario for a worst-case development, and is resoundingly feel-good, though perhaps unrealistic. It is a resolution anyone under the oppression of cultural conflict desires, but may not be brave or fortuitous enough to grasp it.

Though I am focusing a lot more on Hwei-Lan’s self-discovery a lot more than Wil and Vivian’s romance, I will say that the movie is not all srs bznz—there are also many throwaway moments throughout the film that hilariously poke fun at traditionalist Asian-American scruples. At the beginning of the movie, Hwei-Lan chastises her daughter for wearing a dress shirt “like a male,” and Hwei-Lan owns a yellow dress, despite claiming that yellow looks terrible on Chinese people, because it was on sale. Raymond, a prodigal son on Wall Street, is hailed like a demi-god by her mother despite his appalling manners and falls out of favor because he is dating a white girl, and Chinese soap operas rule over all as a housewife’s primary form of entertainment. There is a plethora of cultural gems to be mined from Saving Face, and many social issues to be delved. Saving Face is a movie everyone should watch to better understand the ying-yang culture of Asian-Americans.

Summer in the City, Market in the Square

One of the more aggravating things about Harvard Square (besides the interminable construction, terrible traffic, no parking, overcrowded sidewalks, jabbering tourists, and inevitably obnoxious student body) is the lack of affordable lunch options. Though the Square has done an admirable job preventing most bigwig fast-food franchises from ensconcing 02138 in favor of local businesses, the local businesses really…compensate for their uniqueness in their price tags. Harvard Square offers some of the highest quality foods and restaurants in the greater Boston area, but often at the price of an average student’s pinky and ring fingers.

Also, Harvard Square lacks a grocery store, so unless you like your meals to be CVS and 7-11’s gourmet frozen dinners, treks to either Porter or Central are needed for your daily foodstuffs. And no, as much as we dream Cardullo’s to be our daily foodstuffs, we don’t actually directly reap the rewards of that $50 billion endowment.

Market in the Square, a hipper, more feasible alternative for lunch.

A potential solution at hand may be the recently opened Market in the Square (60 Church St., Cambridge, MA 02138) at the corner of Church and Brattle Streets. It’s a very posh grocery store with a loft-esque layout, kitschy wall art, basic groceries (a bit pricier than if you actually learned how to navigate the MBTA system to Allston’s markets), and a by-the-pound buffet with seating.

I’ve actually been hesitant at visiting Market in the Square the first few weeks it opened; the location, though convenient for those perusing/working in the Square, was less than ideal for those on the farther side of campus: it’s a ten-minute walk from my work place. As well, it’s, erm, Harvard Square—with the exception of Felipe’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, everything is overpriced and catered to tourists (admittedly, attempting to make money from students and Cambridge locals will only result in blood and tears). I’ve actually been hopping on the T to Porter or Central Square for lunch or packing my own sandwiches, but desired something more convenient and less likely to spoil in the heat.

It was only when one of my Cambridge local friends recommended Market in the Square to me that we went. I was complaining that I tend to go hungry with snack-size portions but American-sized meals make me never want to eat again, and she suggested the $6.99 per pound buffet there.

Upon arriving, I was extremely surprised at the selection the buffet offered: there were Chinese food, mac and cheese, BBQ items, marinated salmon, various pre-tossed salads, cooked and fresh vegetables, peeled fruits, the works! The layout reminded me of dining hall food, but it was much more varied and tastier (albeit sometimes a bit bland) than anything I’ve had in the cafeterias. I had some stir-fried rice, kung-pao chicken, a few bits of celery, Greek salad, and a few grapefruit pieces, for 0.8 lbs. Buffet-by-the-pound is such a blessing for small eaters who like a lot of variety.

There are a few imperfections—for one, none of the food is labeled, and occasionally there aren’t enough common utensils to fork over the food. I didn’t see a weight in the food area before heading to the register, so if you’re really bad at estimating weights, this might be a slight problem for your wallet.

But overall, Market in the Square is a breath of fresh air in the over-crowded and red-brick-laden Harvard, and for many college students this summer, a rare chance to stay near campus and enjoy fresh fruit and a decently priced lunch.

NYTimes Column Suggests Women are “Less Inclined” Towards Hard Sciences. “Inclined” Women (Including Me) Call Bullshit.

I must be really good at predicting the news: two days after my personal views of being a woman in science (regardless of other interests), The New York Times features John Tierney’s article, A New Frontier for Title IX: Science, which rather shamelessly flits aside the apparent inequality of the sexes in science as disinterest on women’s part.

Though I have reams of paper (or would it be megabytes of data?) to say on Tierney’s misconception of women’s interest in science as a simple me gusto or non me gusto issue, the more interesting take is, of course, the reader-generated comments regarding this issue Tierney’s blog entry, Male Bias or Female Choice?

The advent of news blogging has given much voice to common readership that we have not previously seen in the paper-and-print age, where letters to the editor took much effort to write and send in, only to be filtered at the editor’s whimsy. In the Internet age all we need to do is to hide our identities, pen vitriol at 60 words a minute, and click send. No era has been so openly vicious and honest of its opinions.

Tierney may attempt to continue to color his opinions with out-of-context and poorly-chosen “comments of the moment,” but if you read through the 216 comments (as of 9:49 EST 7/17/08), the proportion of those who support his views is far dwarfed by the hundreds of articulate female students, postdocs, and faculty detailing their experiences with sexism, humiliation, and inequality in academe.

Though I’m not going to cite particular comments that moved or infuriated me (it took me about six hours reading through all the comments between waiting for my stock solutions to dissolve and filter), many of the women who have left academe claimed the following reasons:

1. Many women were sick of continuously having to prove themselves to be more adept than men while still being seen as inferior to many men.
2. The male-dominated workplaces in such fields were often socially-impaired and misogynistic, and they could not stand the pressures of such humiliation.
3. The age at which scientists pursued the tenure track, the late 20s to early 30s, was highly incompatible for many women to raise a stable family due to lack of benefits in many postdoctoral and tenure-track programs.

None of these women claimed disinterest in science, but rather a disheartenment of an area they loved in a system that failed them.

The opposite side claims that women are genetically inferior to men in terms of logical/mathematical reasoning, that more men have Asperger’s syndrome and are therefore better at math (what?), that women prefer interpersonal relationships than abstract principles, that women are too emotional to handle the hard sciences, etc.

Essentially, the same arguments that were used a century ago against female suffrage, against women attending college, against women getting jobs. What are you going to cite as evidence, the displacement of the humors?

I don’t believe science comes easily for anybody. I don’t think anything comes easily to anybody in general—there’s always an aberrant genius every few years who defies the odds and shapes history, but on a whole if anyone wants to be good at a field they need to work their butts off. A child who is gifted in art will come to a point in his/her life where the study of proportions or cubism is required. The talented musician will one day come to a piece he/she cannot play at the first go. We in the science tend to mock English majors mercilessly, but they’re the ones churning out four 15-20 page final papers every semester.

Everything takes effort. The issue is, how do we decide on where to allocate our efforts?

Aristotle once stated that to achieve the golden mean of efficiency within a state, the individual must choose a course that both interests him and is practical for his capabilities. Don’t become a violinist if you’re tone deaf. Don’t do debate if you are paralyzingly afraid of public speaking, not when you can allocate your energies on something you can do, and therefore not squander your talents.

However, the thing with these women in science defecting from academia is that they are very good in their field. Many have completed their PhDs and were in the process of pursuing a tenure track, so lack of capability cannot be an answer to less women in the sciences.

Tierney claims that women are simply “less interested” in the hard sciences than men. I interviewed a few of my male and female friends (yes, I know, very quantitative and scientific data-gathering, please don’t mock me :P), some in the sciences, some not, on why they liked or disliked science. A few of my non-science friends (both male and female) said that they do find science extremely interesting, but found it too difficult and too much work compared to other subjects. When asked how they came to that conclusion, the answer was that they did not see the culmination of science beyond figures to memorize and numbers to crunch.

My science friends admit that the work is very difficult and time-consuming, but said they were in the sciences because the field offered them an exciting, quantifiable way of looking at the universe. Many of them cite various role models, from their parents to high school teachers, as their first line of exposure into the field. “The humanities do come easier to me,” admits a Molecular and Cellular Biology junior, “but what fascinates me is science.”

But this fascination in science is often an uphill battle for many girls. From a very young age I’ve been told that I was poor in math, that I lack the inductive logic required to be proficient. I’ve been informed that girls who pursue higher degrees in the sciences won’t get married and have children (and therefore won’t be a “functionally normal adult” was always the subtext). These were often my relatives, family friends, countless tween literature, James Watson, and society at large. Every time there is a sexy assistant to the genius scientist in a Hollywood movie, we are reminded that we can only be facilitators to innovators, and not innovators ourselves. Every time a fashionable female student is objectified in her advanced physics lab we are being relegated to doll, accessory, and subordinate.

At the same time that society was whittling away my confidence in the sciences, I’ve had many fine teachers and mentors persuading me to enter the humanities. Oh the essays I could write! Oh the languages I could learn, the finicky details of history that I could unravel! The illustrations I could design, the manuscripts I could edit. These were the teachers who worked tirelessly with me on my college applications and research papers, who offered sage advice whenever I felt stressed, whom are often some of my closest friends during adolescence.

Humanities did tempt me all right, in its aestheticism and worldly prescience. I felt unconfident about my abilities in the sciences, where there were relatively fewer nurturing guiding figures compared to in the humanities, and wanted to play by my strengths. I also did not desire a subordinate role, which was what science seemingly offered me through various personal experiences with the sexism that existed in the area.

But how would I have known I was “bad” at math if I was too afraid to try? Admittedly, algebra 1 without the proofs explained did seem rather arbitrary to me in the 9th grade, but it was only through taking linear algebra my sophomore year in college (and acing it) was I able to appreciate the elegance behind linear functions. Many of the concepts in chemistry that were foreign to me in high school opened up in college when I took more advanced courses. Seeing the theoretical rationale gave me more comprehension, and therefore more interest.

I would have not been in the sciences if it was not for my father, and perhaps he was the most instrumental and significant of the role models in my life. As a research scientist, my father juggled his job with babysitting me, often asking fellow lab workers to take me on one-hour breaks from their experiments. I doodled caricatures of the people in his lab (including his PI) on the backs of his grant proposal drafts, I made spears out of hundreds and hundreds of pipet tips stacked together (and the PI always wondered why his lab went through pipets so quickly!). My first grade project my dad excitedly conceived for me to test antibacterial properties of natural substances, to which I asked, “If it’s bat-teria, then why can we only see little blobs on the agar and not wings?”

This is how I first became acquainted with research science, as a veritable playground where all the big kids got to play with lots more interesting stuff than I was allowed. (“No, you CANNOT climb into the fume hood!”)

My father also believes that the best way to be introduced to science is to see how it is applied. He’d explain how Tylenol works when you swallow it, why you get constipated if you don’t eat your vegetables and drink water, how your weight is heavier on Earth than on the moon. Science is only abstract if you don’t see it properly, he’d say. Science is everywhere and it is important.

And in the back of my mind, behind all the Vergils and Austens and Klimts, was those words, that fascination that one could take a thought and turn it into a function and turn it into a necessity.

It was not easy finding mentors beyond my father on this matter—many of my humanities mentors thought I was crazy to pursue science, and many of the science mentors we had to proactively try to reach out. I think when I finally reached college, I’ve received the most positive and phenomenal science mentorship beyond my direct family from the faculty. After two years of duking it out with p-sets and final exams, long lab protocols and interesting teaching fellows, I can say this is where I feel most at home: in science, thanks to my various advisers, supervisors, tutors, upperclassmen mentors, and professors.

The problem is that I’ve finally found my network of support in the sciences rather late in general education, the same sort of network of support I received much earlier in the humanities. If it wasn’t for my constant exposure to research through my father’s work, I wouldn’t have developed such an interest, especially not when society favors Barbie dolls to Legos for girls, Bake-Me-Cake to Make-Your-Own-Volcano. Bias and objectification are tilted against females, and we might simply cave to public opinion without examining all our options.

I’m aware I haven’t been answering why women are largely underrepresented in science faculties, and that’s something many of the female commenters have answered with much more depth than I’ve experienced. I’m here to say that this sort of predisposition of “disinterest” that females have towards science is most likely due to sexism, societal bias, and a lack of supportive science role models early in a girl’s life. Some time during the college years this playing field evens out a bit, and then the gap precipitates once more during the postdoc and tenure-track years. As Title IX seeks to even the bias present in faculties with an underrepresentation of women, we should also look to shape our pre-college mentorship more rigorously so that young girls have opportunity to experience all paths of academia before realizing their best fit.

A Woman in Science

Let me tell you a little about myself.

I am a junior at Harvard College concentrating (that’s the word we use for “major in,” along with the hundreds of other idiosyncrasies that only a school so presumptuous would use) in one of the hard sciences—one in particular that requires proficiency in advanced math, physics, chemistry, and biology. We jokingly call our concentration the hard science equivalent to a liberal arts education, but instead of Shakespeare and Proust we familiarize ourselves with Heisenberg and Meselson-Stahl.

It’s not an easy concentration—a chemist is extremely good at chemistry, a physicist good at physics, but when it comes to all the sciences, there are few people who are exemplary in all fields (of course, being at Harvard, there are a few of those people who are just that brilliant, and those are the folks we sneak secret looks of adoration and jealousy during lecture and silently curse them for screwing up our curves). This is because each discipline of science requires a different method of thinking: a different set of theories and axioms to be applied.

I do it because I love it. I love the challenge these different modes of thinking bring to me. As science becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, I believe in expanding our intellectual horizons so we can make the leaps of understanding to connect the sciences together, because only theory is ever actually one pure subject, and even that is contested. We cannot be hermits with our knowledge, but rather we must expand and spread and apply and rejoice in it.

I am also a girl.

I am a girl whose third language is English, who played around with the idea of being a classics major and a graphic designer, who can quote T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland in both its original and LOLcat form verbatim, who ostensibly adores the glossed-over mythology in RPGs, whom my English teachers kept teasing me throughout high school for defecting over to the sciences. I collect glossies regularly and am slightly obsessed with Proenza Schouler and the new class of rising New York fashion designers. I’ve had my picture taken for a local street style feature, and when asked what I do (my hard science concentration, I replied), the photographer immediately gasped and went, “How does a girl like you study something like that?”

My response to her about the beauty of secondary structures of enzymatic proteins that effect catalytic function did not come off quite well, of course.

I am a female in science who has hobbies and interests beyond science. It’s occasionally a bit difficult for others to fathom given our cultural stereotypes of women in the hard sciences as manly, ambitious, and inept in social skills (admittedly, my social skills are questionable). The hard sciences is supposedly “masculine,” requiring logic and numbers, long hours in lab and an education that might not end when you hit thirty years old. Women, with their “predications” towards emotions and sociability, are allegedly ill-suited for such an “unglamorous” and “calculated” career.

I call bullshit.

It was only a few decades ago when women who did not aspire to become housewives were ostracized for their passions and ambitions, and now most females work, not marry, immediately after college. This allegation against women pursuing advanced degrees in the sciences is simply one of the last bastions of an age-old misogyny that somehow a woman’s role is not at the forefront of technology and innovation, but in the kitchen.

One of the more blessed things about science (compared to a more subjective field as, say, law or business) is that often times meritocracy rules. If you’re good you’re good, regardless of sex. However, many females are often turned off by the long education process and the apparent lack of glamour in the work (a very sad, untrue, but popular reason). A molecular biologist isn’t compelling cocktail party gossip, and you can’t wear your new Louboutins to work when you’re probably going to be spilling some 10M of hydrochloric acid on yourself at some point during the day (translation: that stuff burns holes through everything except the strongest of plastics and glass). People do it because they love it. Some people do it because it’s all they can do and still love it.

Why not do it over everything else? From its most basic theories to its most applied aspects, science is exciting. As you’re learning the Nerst equation you’re quantifying what your brain does every millisecond at every perception of your senses. Your organic chemistry reactions are the backbones of the drugs you take and the metabolic processes that feed and maintain you. You are participating in discovery, in maintaining health, in building a better living.  Your surface-to-volume statistics can pave the way towards more efficient energy design, your math equations to designing a faster computer. You are actively contributing to the health and structure of our lives, of our world—how is this not glamorous? How is this not amazing? I chose science because of all the things I loved (and I loved a lot), I felt this was the area I could make a small yet discernable difference to society.

I plan on having at least two advanced degrees beyond my bachelor’s in the sciences; I plan on devoting most of my twenties to academic study and research. But of course this is not the entirety of my life. I’ll still throw dinner parties, I’ll still shop sample sales, I’ll still paint and write poetry and camp out in the sci-fi section of bookstores until I’ve finished reading every last of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels. Being devoted to the sciences doesn’t mean making science the only thing in your life, and if this is what girls fear about going in, then they shouldn’t fear at all.  Long incubation times are perfect for window-shopping, for one.

Never let anyone tell you that if you’re going into science, that is the only thing you’ll do. It’ll take a bit more effort to balance a social life with science than with a more effete major, but it’s completely doable.  Never let the stereotypes of geeky, gawky, unbrushed hair, tapered jeans, and a masculine reputation deter you, because it’s untrue. At the turn of the 20th century almost no women worked, and look at us now.

This is a treatise to all the girls who are thinking about science but don’t know if this is the path for them. Yes, the road is long and hard. Yes, you’ll probably fail an exam or two and feel utterly stupid as you stare at a problem set into the early hours of the morning. You’ll probably spend more time in the computer lab than in the coffee shop, you’ll probably need to divide your clothes into “can spill shit on” and “can’t spill shit on” when working in a lab. But don’t think that because you’re a girl who likes the girly things in life you can’t go into the sciences, because science is above all cerebral, and I haven’t heard of any differences between male and female brain physiology to date. And don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Ladies, be bold and scientific, daring and precise. Have your cake and eat it too.