Fresh out of undergrad in New Jersey, the motivated and bright combustion engineering student Silken Jones was making the manifest destiny migration from the East to the West.
Having grown up in California, she had her eyes around the familiar weather of the Washington-Georgia area. But lo and behold, when she entered into the sprightly pink admissions lobby of Caltech, Silken was sold on the spot. “Their lobby was bright pink and I was like, it’s meant for me! I love pink!” (Jones)
Silken had initially shot for a formal degree in aeronautics but ended up doing research in combustion engineering. She essentially deals with engineering jet propulsion and other combustors in the same vein. During undergrad, she’d interned at JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) down in Pasadena.
“But the actual work I was doing felt really boring to me and like, I felt like I was just drawing boxes over and over again and I really wanted something a little bit more exciting. And so I decided that I wanted to go to grad school because I wanted to do stuf that was more interesting.”
“Just had a good vibe there.” - Jones
“Just had a good vibe there.” Jones
Anders, a bio-engineer who also attended graduate school at Caltech with Silken, initially went for a bachelors in chemical engineering. That career pertained to factory work in creating compounds, ensuring a reaction occurs and the equipment is working properly.
But just like Silken, Anders decided he wanted to do something diferent, and it led him to a protein biophysics lab in undergraduate. “When I started in that lab, I had done very little biology before, so I had taken a class in high school and otherwise I had done very little on the biology side, but I found that I really enjoyed the overall question. This protein- folding problem.
-folding problem. And so even though I fnished my undergraduate, so I got my bachelor’s in chemical engineering, by the end of that I wanted to shift and do something more on the biological side and biological engineering.” (Knight)
Essentially, undergraduate served as a precursor to discovering what they really wanted to do. Interestingly, graduate school seems very diferent from the credit-system of high school or undergraduate. Ander’s started in a research lab the very frst year, but in Silken’s aerospace program they’d had to complete one year before starting any hands-on research.
“I was spending very little time doing my courses since I was spending the time in the research lab instead, whereas Silken was spending all of her time doing homework. So she was always jokingly upset with me for having so little coursework.” (Knight)
For a research PhD at Caltech, there are a certain amount of classes one has to take, and in order to test your understanding you’d have to get up in front of fve or so professors who would pick your brain in no particular order. Essentially, you propose the kind of research you want your PhD to be based on. Pretty stressful stuf!
When it comes to a career in STEM, and any career for that matter, there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear: It’s never a straight line. “And one thing I’ve learned since leaving grad school, like fnishing my PHD and actually going to work is [that] most people don’t actually have a plan when...” you talk to people, they don’t really have a path.” (Jones)
5-6 years of a grueling PHD program isn’t for everyone, and it turns out some people just go with the fow and take whatever opportunity comes their way. Very few times someone will have a defnitive answer for their career, especially with something as expansive as the STEM feld.
Though the wild paths you take in any feld can come with benefts. With experience in diferent felds, they can become applicable to others. Anders had been into process and chemical engineering, but upon switching his path to bio-engineering he found he could apply the same concepts.”I would be much more excited to get up every day going and working on this problem that I was now excited about.” (Knight)
At the end of the day, a job is a job, one must make money to participate in capitalism. But out of all the paths you can take, you might as well do something you feel good about.
“But beyond that, I think the most important thing is to fnd a a topic that excites you and you’re passionate about-because… some days you’re not going to be that excited to do the work and, it’s going to be easier to get up and go if you really care about the thing that you’re doing.” (Knight)
Ariel Bentley is an MVHS student who attends Freestyle and tried her best to relay the words of geniuses.