Reflections from 2020

Ok. So 2020 wasn’t what we all expected it to be….

Many of my new year's resolutions/goals from last year involved traveling to different countries to spend time in nature and attending my favorite conferences in person. I couldn’t make those happen, but I’m still happy with the way that 2020 turned out. Instead of looking outwards, I took a lot more time working to work on my own personal growth and development as opposed to focusing on optimizing external metrics.

Top reflection topics from 2020

1. Consistency over intensity — How to set better goals
2. Live life in the present
3. The small things matter
4. Why is gratitude hard?
5. Am I really an introvert?
6. My experience with college essays
7. “Innocence” is nothing less than a superpower

Goals for 2021

Some highlights from 2020 — not in any particular order

Technical

• Receiving a 10K grant from emergent ventures
• Submitting a project to Regeneron STS
• Working with a mentor at Illumina to build a very simplified replica of SpliceAI.
• Building my first deep technical project – an LSTM to repurpose molecules for COVID (naïve looking back but wouldn’t be here without it :)
• Interning at a Canadian AI in medicine startup working to apply reinforcement learning to design synthetically accessible small molecules
• Spending a full quarter trying to learn how I might be able to design RNA aptamers (these three dimensional folded RNA structures as biologics) against COVID. I talked to a bunch of scientists at Novartis, SomaLogic, UCSB, and may or may not have hopped on an email thread with George Church.

Soft skills/Network

• Attending the Harvard-Stanford Drug Symposium. (Summary Twitter thread)
• Consulting for a childcare provider in Kenya (Kidogo)
• Doing a short but sweet podcasting experiment with a friend (got to interview people from the Doudna lab and Steven ten holder, founder at Acorn Biolabs)
• Joining a community called Biodojo. Meeting other passionate undergraduate students and high schoolers working in areas from stem cells to gene editing to cheminformatics. Leading two brainpods — one on protein engineering and the other on Alphafold 2.0.
• Giving talks at BostInno and General Assembly
• Going from 0 to 1 with my Twitter network.

Personal Growth-related

• Binging Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations
• Spending real quality time with my family (not just binging movies with my family, as my younger self would have thought is quality family time) in our last Christmas before I leave home.

I wish everyone an eventful 2021, filled with personal growth, reflection, happiness, and learning.

Mukundh 😊