Starting this pretty late today, at 10:19 am. Not really feeling like writing a blog post today, feeling kind of down after Alexandra’s appt. with the optometrist. She wouldn’t let them shine the light in her eyes to check her vision. They suggested we come back multiple times to get her used to the place, so I scheduled 5 visits. Hopefully, it won’t take that many. Maybe we should just try again when she’s older. It’s obvious that her right eye needs some correction though.
Yesterday highlights were meeting with a former undergrad student, Stephen Bergin, who is now a Neurosurgeon resident at Duke. Stephen was the most enthusiastic and productive undergrad researcher I had. We talked about trying to come up with a better spinal cage mostly.
Dinner last night was collard greens with turkey leg, green beans, and some chicken with green peppers. Very good as usual. After dinner, we took a walk and shortly after it began to pour on us. We waited at home for the rain to stop, then walked down to the playground. The kids played for like 5 seconds before we decided to buy a lemon cake with ice cream from the food truck.
9:05 am. Yesterday morning I was working on reviewing papers
for Nanoscale when I received a call from Mike Hunnicutt, a Duke chemistry alum
on the graduate board of visitors. A committee of board members has been tasked
with figuring out how we can further alumni engagement, and he wanted to talk
about how we can come up with a program that does so. After discussing a number
of activities that we’ve done, I noted that there’s been a lot of discussion of
activities but not of where we ultimately want these activities to lead. What
is our vision for what alumni engagement looks like in an ideal world? He liked
the idea of trying to formulate a vision to guide the development of a program
to achieve that vision.
My suggestion of a vision was inspired by this book I’ve
been listening to called “The Art of Possibility.” One of the chapters, called “Giving
an A”, relates how one of the authors in the book, a conductor of the Boston
Philharmonic and a teach of young musicians, told his students to write letters
at the beginning of the class to describe why they got an A in his course, and
how they became the person they would love to be. Thus, I thought it would be
good to create a vision of Alumni engagement that we love. In another section
of the book, in a chapter entitled “Creating Frameworks for Possibility”, the other
author, a social worker and therapist, lays out the criteria for creating a
vision of possibility:
1. A vision articulates a possibility.
2. A vision fulfills a desire fundamental to humankind that
does not exclude any person.
3. A vision does not refer to right and wrong.
4. A vision is stated as a picture for all time.
5. A vision is free-standing, it does not refer to a better
future or past.
6. A vision is a long line of possibility radiating outward,
it invites infinite means of expression.
7. Speaking a vision transforms the speaker, removing barriers
to the realization of the vision.
Examples of Visions include:
1. For an international food company: “A vision of a world
in ethnical sustainable partnership.”
2. For home products company: “The possibility of joy in the
everyday.”
This is the vision I came with for Alumni engagement:
A Vision for Alumni
Engagement with Duke Chemistry:
A Life-Long
Partnership with our Students
Specific Aspects:
We have a strong network of Alumni who
graduates can easily contact for career advice and employment opportunities.
We have financial support from Alumni and
their organizations for the department’s priority areas for improvement, and to
publicly recognize such support.
For recognition:
https://chemistry.mit.edu/support-chemistry/meet-our-major-supporters/
Alumni engage with graduate students to impart
wisdom gained over the course of their career.
Alumni feel their department is continuing to
support their goals.
Alumni who have made outstanding contributions
receive public recognition by the department.
We have ongoing discussions with Alumni about
ways in which we can support one another.
Creating this vision made me realize that our students are
our alumni, and vice versa. Therefore, developing a strong partnership might start
with finding out what our students who most like to receive from the department
but are not getting.
After dinner yesterday we decided to go to Maple view Farm
ice cream. Keira got black cherry, and I ordered chocolate chip cookie dough,
but gave it to Yingying. We also got a pint of double chocolate that I ate some
of. The chocolate chip cookie dough was super creamy. After eating, we went
outside to play with some bubbles. The kids chased the bubbles around on the grass.
Just as we were deciding to leave, a thunderstorm arrived. Perfect timing.
Its 8:58 am. Got to work a bit later today. Kids got up around 7:30 and I didn’t bother to prepare my lunch or gym stuff before then. We sang along with some kids songs at breakfast, head shoulder knees and toes, wheels on the bus, itsy bitsy spider, 5 little ducks. All of Alexandra’s favorites.
The day care center we checked out yesterday is in kind of a crappy neighborhood, near a desolate, half-abandoned plaza. The day care center seems fine but I’m not that excited about sending Alexandra and Harvey there for a full day. It seems a bit dirty, and there is a lot of kids per class, 9-10 kids per teacher. We’re still trying to figure out what exactly to do in the fall for child care since we let Jessica go.
I had a sushi lunch with Dushyanth at 11:30. I learned that at age 9 he moved from New Jersey to Indiana, a small town west of Indianapolis, and grew up feeling like a total outsider. It sounded like a pretty painful childhood. I could relate being that I also felt picked on a fair amount growing up, maybe in part because I was smarter than most kids. Or maybe because I gave off that feeling, haha. And that I didn’t respond to being picked on like I didn’t care. We also chatted about fatherhood, and the weird dichotomy in our mind’s that, when we’re away from our kids, we think about wishing to spend more time with them. But when we’re with them, it can be hard to be present and not be distracted about a “need” to do something else. It was fun to get to know him a bit better.
After lunch I met with Kelly Lindholm in regulatory affairs at Duke, and she gave me some information about creating a design history file for the cartilage implant, as well as answered some questions I had about doing a GLP study at Duke. Seems it’s not very common to do such a study. Mike Therien called and wanted me to update my CV before it’s sent out for the full professor evaluation. Later I met with Jennifer Roizen, Myung Jun, and Miles to talk about the electrosynthesis project. Myung Jun ruled out the role of methanol as causing us not to get higher yields. He’ll focus on thinner electrodes to further improve the difference between the results with high surface area and low surface area electrodes. Finally, I met with Heng Xu about the silver plate project, seems he’s got the reaction slowed down and is ready to perform experiments on single crystals.
At home, Keira cooked a great meal as usual, including fried pork belly, a spicy fish soup with noodles, rice, and brussel sprouts. After dinner we went to the pool. Alexandra floated around in her boat with Keira, playing with a watering can someone left at the pool. I carried Harvey around while he sat on a kickboard and held onto a plastic jellyfish.
Before bed, I read some of the first 1957 paper that proposed the many universes interpretation of quantum mechanics. My basic interpretation of the introduction is that the Schrodinger’s cat problem requires an outside observer to see whether the cat is in the box or not, but there is no outside observer for the universe. So, all possibiliteis must exist in the universe simultaneously, and the only way for this to happen is for the universe to actually be a multiverse. It’s 9:21 am.
