if you bake brownies [on STEM, women and the daily grind of lab work]

I was over at the Pike’s last Saturday night, the missionary family from Florida that moved here a couple months ago. The husband and teenage son were out for soccer and it was just the wife and daughter who would be home, so of course we planned some classic girl hangout time: dinner, a baking session and watercoloring.

Their 13-year-old daughter, Reid, being the mature teenager that she is, asked me what I did for work. 

I explained to her in simple terms about brain cancer, the problem of chemotherapy, what nano medicine can do – the way I normally do with any other adult with no background in my subject. 

“But what do you actually do as a grad student?” 

I think the concept of trying to cure brain cancer was still too abstract for her, and honestly, most of the time, for me too. 

We’re stirring the wet mixture of eggs and oil into our prepared dry brownie mix, as it turns a glistening, deep chocolate brown. 

I pause and think. “Well, it’s kinda like this,” I say, gesturing towards the brownie batter.

Her eyes light up, “Yeah?” And I know I’ve got her attention. 

This piece is inspired by Reid, the 13 year old teenage daughter of the missionary family I met here, who loves water-colour, baking and is just curious about the world (you see, we get along very well). 

And written to all the other 13-year-old Reids out there, who love baking brownies but are intimidated by science, because somewhere along the way, were told that boys are somehow better at science and math. 

This is for all of you.

Dear Reid,

You asked me what I actually do in lab. Here’s my best way of explaining it:

You know the feeling when you’re about to cook a marvellous chocolate cake and you walk into the kitchen ready with your printed-out recipe from a blog you follow, peppered with Instagram worthy pictures of cake?

That’s how I feel when I walk into lab in the mornings.

My bench is tidied from the night before: my stir bars categorized according to sizes in little Petri dishes, my centrifuge tubes of pre-prepared solutions lined up in a row.

It smells of freshly-squeezed ethanol: clean and crisp.

I put on my lab coat and wiggle my fingers into stretchy blue gloves.

Of course, my hair gets whipped up into a quick messy bun, because nothing gets done otherwise.

I then look at the protocol I have to follow – protocols are much like recipes, and we get them from papers where people write down their protocols and show pictures of the pretty things they made after.

Many of the protocols look the same – you measure out ingredients on a weighing scale, put them in cute little round-bottom flasks with a stir bar that helps mix the solution so you don’t have stand there mixing the whole time, dissolve the ingredients in solution and heat them up to a certain temperature.

Basically, a lot of weighing, mixing, heating, and cooling.

Oh and I mostly work in a fume hood, which is similar to the noisy thing above the stove that your Mom turns on just as she’s about to fry onions so the whole kitchen doesn’t smell.

Except that the fume hood sucks up chemicals so we don’t breathe them in.

So, I think if you like baking or cooking, you’d like working in my lab.

You get to multi-task a lot, the same way when you cook: letting the frying pan heat up while you chop garlic, simmering a tomato sauce as you boil the lasagna noodles.

And then there’s the satisfaction of seeing everything come together in the end.

When you look at what came out of the oven and breathe, “Wow I made that.”

Of course, the product is never near what they show you in the paper.

The same way cakes you make are always a bit misshapen compared to the perfectly fluffy ones in the blog.

Maybe they used a different brand of flour they didn’t tell you about, or mixed the dry and wet ingredients with half the strokes you used. You never really know.

I guess the difference is that even if your cake is misshapen, people will still eat it, but with experiments it’s more depressing because you can’t really do anything with your failed attempts and you are expected to find out what went wrong, which is one of the hardest parts about research (but people don’t really talk about this).

I hope that cooking analogy made sense. That’s a large part of what I do in lab.

The other major part that normally happens either at the beginning or end of the day is when I try to make sense of what’s going on and make plans for what I should do next.

It’s a bit like painting with water-colour.

You have an image in your mind of how you want the picture to turn out.

Often, the stroke comes out too thick or the color not quite right. But there’s not much you can do to fix it, because it’s not like you can undo that stroke.

So the best you can do is to squint at the strokes you have on paper and decide what other kind of strokes you need to add to make the painting beautiful.

For it to turn into something that communicates something meaningful. Something you’ll be somewhat satisfied with.

At the beginning of each day, I take a look at the experiments I’ve done so far and what new knowledge I’ve gained from them.

Then, I decide what extra things I need to add to make the story more complete.

It will never be comprehensive, and there will always be hundreds of other ways I could be painting the picture.

But I choose my way forward. I choose the particular strokes I want to make to complete the picture.

At the end of the day, when all my experiments are done, I always end with cleaning.

The glass flasks get scrubbed, rinsed out and put in a hot oven where they dry overnight. The stir bars get sorted by sizes into their respective Petri dishes.

And everything gets sprayed down with ethanol.

It is the feeling of calm when the chaos of my bench gets put back in order.

I finally understand my Mom’s insistence that everything has its place (‘shoes back on the shoe rack please! No, these knives go in this drawer not that one’)

Speaking of mothering, doing lab work is akin to having your own children.

You pour your heart out into cultivating the right environment for your organic synthesis reactions to go well. You diligently feed cells with fresh, pink media.

And still, no matter how hard you work at giving your experiments the most tender loving care possible, they often rebel and have a mind of their own.

You don’t create your desired product. The nanoparticles turn out to be ill-formed globs on the microscope. The cells die.

And you often have no idea why.

I envision mothering to be similar, where you can do everything in your strength to nurture your children, but how they ultimately turn out is outside of your control.

I like to think that working in a lab is good preparation for being a mother one day.

You also make a lot of mistakes in the lab, the same way I imagine I will one day as a mother.

Just this past week, I used the wrong type of tubes for the centrifuge, which is a machine that spins the tubes really fast.

The tubes ended up cracking in the centrifuge and all of my precious product I had worked the whole day to make leaked out into the machine.

It’s times like that when you have to laugh at yourself, clean up the mess and remind yourself that you are only human.

You try your best, and that’s really all you can do.

All this must sound pretty depressing to you. The failure, the uncertainty, not being able to control the final outcome.

There are days, however, when the universe works in your favour and you do manage to make some pretty interesting discoveries.

You know the feeling of seeing a tiny shoot emerge from the soil after days of watering, waiting and wondering if the seed you planted is doing anything?

Making a discovery in lab is like that.

It happens suddenly, many times unexpected, but it fills you with hope.

It makes you believe again in the laws of science and that the world does make sense after all.

Yet, it wasn’t really you that made the seed grow. All you did was to plant many seeds, faithfully water the soil each day and hope that something grows.

So it is with my lab work.

I don’t know when it is that I will make a discovery or that something will work.

Perhaps it will be in two months. Perhaps today.

All I can do is walk into lab each morning, pull on stretchy blue gloves and be faithful to the experiment that is in front of me.

You may think that being an engineering  graduate student must mean that I’m super smart, or that I memorize complicated physics equations and because you’re not that passionate about science class, it mustn’t be for you.

I think a lot of girls feel that way and don’t even consider a career in science or engineering.

To be honest, I was never a genius at math, or science for that matter.

I did reasonably well because I studied hard and was “conscientious”, or so my progress reports often said.

In fact, the margins of my Calculus notes are filled with sonnets I scribbled while my mind wandered in class.

And while it is true that you do have to be smart to be a graduate student in engineering, it isn’t the type of smart you typically think of.

People think smart means doing a crazy number of mental equations in your head and blurting out the answer before everyone else.

Or knowing 10 more digits of Pi than the average 13-year-old.

Or elaborating extensively on the theories Euler came up with and why they are important to Calculus.

I remember when my sister and I were the only two girls in a math enrichment class, feeling dumb because everyone else knew who Euler was and could spout digits of PI like their phone number.

On the other hand, the arts came a lot more naturally to me.

I loved words and how they sounded. I loved scouring the library for books on new DIY projects. I loved baking banana chocolate chip muffins.

I just didn’t know that these skills of reading, writing, following recipes and doing DIY projects would be so much more instrumental to the day-to-day of my life now than knowing an absurd number of Pi digits.

My definition of smart is being redefined.

Smart is more coming up with interesting ideas, seeing how disparate things connect, and communicating your thoughts in a clear and compelling way.

Smart is reading a paper and understanding what the author meant to say even when it isn’t stated explicitly.

Smart is being able to create meaning and purpose in your everyday, to see how you fit in with the greater picture when it is so much easier to get lost in the weeds.

These are qualities that are often associated with the arts and humanities, which is perhaps why many girls feel more drawn to them.

They see the arts as alive, full of color and passion, while the sciences as more dull and exhausting.

The arts are for the creative, where you get to read in between the lines and tell stories of your own. But there is only one x in the solution set to Problem #6 in your math homework.

Yet, this is exactly the type of smart that the sciences and engineering need –

for doing good research is a lot more like cooking, painting, cleaning, mothering and gardening than memorizing complicated equations.

And I wish that more girls would realize that they are nurturing valuable qualities in their seemingly frivolous hobbies –

that they are smarter than they think, more qualified than they believe.

So, consider doing science.

I believe you have what it takes.

But more than that, I think the sciences and engineering need your creative mind and nurturing spirit.

We need the writers and the painters, the knitters and the home-cooks, the mothers and the dreamers.

We may not be doing a good job of attracting them, but we need them, and so perhaps this letter will do some good in helping to kick-start your exploration in this area.

Meanwhile, keep baking those delicious brownies 😉

Love, Vivienne

Disclaimer:

I do not purport to speak for all engineering – arguably chemical and biological engineering is a lot more like baking than say electrical engineering. And perhaps other engineering fields require a lot more memorization of complicated equations than mine. 

I’m also not saying that girls are not good at math/science. Granted, there are a lot of girls to whom the equations and computer code make perfect sense. 

But, I do think there is a large swath of the female population who automatically discount themselves from the STEM fields because they find themselves more naturally inclined to activities like baking, painting, writing than math competitions. 

The purpose of this piece was to draw connections between both worlds and encourage the artistically inclined to also consider exploring STEM fields, because they have many invaluable and transferable skills that are not automatically deemed “STEM-worthy”. 

And being more of a stereotypical female myself, I believe there are many reasons a brownie-baking enthusiast could be a great scientist.

Or at least I tell myself that to endorse my indulgent baking habits…