Welcome to the kick off Creator’s Roulette for March! I have George Styles with me today. I connected with him over Twitter and he has been a huge supporter of me and my work in the last couple months. We are talking about education and more!
George is a musician, writer, blogger with a PhD in biochemistry! I love meeting up with people who have eclectic tastes and I am curious to see what I will learn. I want to chat about music and writing (I am dying to delve into that combination) but we will keep this conversation to education, George’s university experiences and how that have influenced his writing.
This is a bit of a long conversation but I promoise you will learn a lot from it and really consider what our higher education system tries to do for our graduates.
On Academia & Education
I want to hear more about the PhD in biochemistry first. Why biochemistry, George?
Kriti! Thanks for having me at the great Roulette table! In short, it was because I wanted to dabble with things that would interface with living organisms. Therefore, I wanted to know the ‘magic’ of the sub-cellular realm. And for me, the road to biochemistry was actually kind of strange. It started way back after I dropped out of school to be in a band. Well, actually I was told to get out because I had uber-maxed out on my skipping days. And well, to be honest, I was pushing for that as I was spending my days practicing guitar and with my band. At that point in time, school was a dismal drag and the furthest thing on my mind. However, that’s another story in itself. Science was something I picked up off the hobby of fish-keeping during my off-time with my band. It didn’t take long before I constructed a Nano-Reef tank, it was 20-gallons and had two fish, some corals and a cleaner shrimp. Now, for this sort of tank, you have to monitor the water chemistry almost daily. Also, you have to have a special formulation of salts that mimic bona fide oceanic sea water.
As I began to play around with it, building the lighting, playing with the water chemistry testing kits, I began to get big ideas about better ways of doing this. When my band ended, I then went and did some tests and got enrolled in university (I never actually graduated high school). The sole reason for university was actually because I envisioned a system of real-time monitoring of an artificial environment, in my case, the model being a reef-aquarium. I pictured having a device that one could just place in the water, then hook up to USB on my laptop, then monitor in a real-time stream of data on some program on my laptop. Of course, there are such systems now, but they still have drawbacks. The major goal was that a bionic kidney might be modeled off such a system. This was my original motivation. Of course, I ended up straying far off from this, but in short, this eventually led me into becoming a biochemist. I wanted to know how life worked at the atomic-molecular level as I had a number of hair-brained schemes in mind.
Wow. That is fascinating, George! It is very rare to hear such stories where real interest drives education. Where did straying from this lead you to?
Oh, stray did I ever! I think it was more because, as focused and aimed as I was, the university runs programs. And these programs are aimed at earning degrees. Now in my case, my line of interests would have touched on a mixture of disciplines, but the degrees tended to be narrow and focused. Only specific classes were permitted in order to be granted a degree (At least at the time). Thus, I had to make a decision. What was the subject that was furthest from my intuition? Because, it would be that subject that would need to take. I always thought I had a natural inclination towards engineering, so, I decided that I might be able to pull out my autodidactic skills for that one. It did end up, through nights of philosophy and pondering that I came to the conclusion that I had no idea how ‘life’ works. And I am glad that I did pursue this, because it isn’t something that is immediately intuitive. Indeed, life works in rather mysterious ways. Thus, seeing I needed sub-atomic mental resolution about what was going on at the sub-cellular level, I decided that it was biochemistry that I should pursue. Now, mind you, it wasn’t my strong point, but my purpose to be there wasn’t to get high grades and shuttle off into med school. My reason was to build things. So I enrolled in the biochemistry program at the University of Ottawa and away I went. Years passed and suddenly I found myself at the end of a PhD in biochemistry.
But the issue was, throughout university, I had learned that the world of innovation is neither easy nor straightforward. It has very little protection and is incredibly risky. Thus, seeing that unless I would be willing to dilute my creative soul on such bland and blundering things like legal stuff and business, I kinda let my whole idea slowly fade off. I just can’t get myself to care about those things. I start to want to stay confined to my bed all day when I think about them. They depress me. It’s all just a bunch of blabber that is sadly necessary to keep away intellectual thieves. And humanity does not need ridiculous issues like this. Humanity needs help. But how can you help humanity if all you do is almost certain to get stolen and ruined? Thus, not wanting to potentially feed intellectual parasites, I abandoned all my creative pursuits in this manner. Now, I channel my creative processes through music and writing, because, even though they can get stolen, the thieves will come off looking very, very bad because, they will not be able to replicate my madness!
I really enjoyed being a Teaching Assistant (TA) during my graduate degrees. Does anything stand out from your time as a TA while you were in grad school in Ottawa? Did you run your classes by the books or did you do something different in them? Or were you a bit of a rebel? I ask because I actually ended up creating more materials for my undergrads and even a poem at one point haha.
If hatred had a target, I would’ve been the bullseye. I was labelled by the staff as the devil’s son. Renegade lunatic grad student that got out of his cage. I did not agree at all with how the university and most especially the coordinator ran the lab sessions. So, of course, this meant scrapping all these asinine tasks which stressed and pissed the students off. I did not make them do things when they were already saturated. And for this, boy-oh-boy, did I ever incur the wrath of the overlords! Aside from those things though, I also tried not to forget about fun! I made sure to take my students out to the bar. We’d get some pitchers of beer and then discuss what was important for them to know in terms of being actually good at the bench work. I felt this was what the university should have been teaching them, but it didn’t. It basically threw them into this insane lab with an insane lab manual and left them dizzy.
Overall, my issue was that I found young people being pushed more to endure stress and anxiety for some psycho faculty-driven insanity than they were towards developing the skills to empower themselves. The university’s claim, as I understood it, was that this was the learning process in action. My take on it was that it was that the university didn’t know how to teach. A process driven by shallow intentions and aims that would certainly end up with the worst results. And in this case, that meant creating cynical graduates. Cynical graduates, who thereafter would despise what they intended to pursue, thus likely only seeing science as a negative thing from there on. No one wants to engage something they find repulsive; they avoid it. And more so, this is not the greater purpose of science and research. The real aim, is to cure things… to find a way. But, it’s us up against the vast span of nature. And you have to be creative to the furthest reaches of the human capacity to be able to outthink things like viruses and cancer. So, if you need that kind of creative muscle, the last thing that is going to help you is to create people that hate what they’re doing.
Being at a university for many years, having gone through 2 Masters programs, I know the impact of positive results in academic publications – everyone is trying to be the best, yet hardly anyone finds papers about things that did not work. Do you think the cynicism also comes from this pressure of producing that kind of work, knowing that failures will likely never make to big publications?
The profiteer mindset is surely to be the demise of science-based knowledge. They publish only what can be profited from, and have less than zero respect for what didn’t work.
Yes, I think that there is too much of this sort of bureaucratic-mindset in science. There is not enough fostering of mad-geniuses. We need to let scientists play around with things, to ask stupid questions and most especially, not be evaluated on something as asinine as whether or not they handed a report in on time. But this is the bureaucratic-profiteer mindset at its best. An enormous problem I found was that university pedestalled only those students who were ‘good at school’ but were not actual thinkers. In fact, those were the only people it supported.
But let’s be honest, in a battle to outsmart disease and other problems like that, someone who is good at school isn’t necessarily someone who is in accord with reality.
School is a self-contained game. It’s not real life. You need thinkers – warriors – in this sort of situation.
Viruses do not care how many publications you have. Cancers do not care about your top grades and your degrees. You need everything that you can get, both positive and negative results, when suiting up for battle against things like disease and health issues. And the journals are stupid in this sense. They’re involved in this sort of Kardashian popularity contest! To me really, for this and other reasons, I think the whole scientific practice needs to reexamine itself and make note that it is no place for attention-seekers.
People aren’t donating money to it to sift out the next beauty-nerd-pageant-winner; they’re donating because they think researchers are serious. And by always making people publish or perish with positive results, it only selects for those who play it safe. Real innovators never played it safe. If you take a look in history, the biggest leaps came with serious risks. And all our contemporary system does is select for play-it-safe, narcissistic, fashion-show nerds, who think they’re doing something by publishing yet again another paper that their friends all like. Another paper, which if you look closely, is often just something that really isn’t making huge or worthy strides. But what it is doing is staying within the safety zone of the publishing (And hence, funding) game. And this is the last thing science and research should be doing. The hell with publications! Wanna do something worthy? Cure the common cold already!
During your time in graduate school and after, did you see any projects or research work make it to the industry in your field?
I sadly did not. Nothing came out of any of the extracurricular efforts or projects I did or was part of. I didn’t see anyone else really break through either. I felt everyone was tied up being obedient to their supervisors and their programs, which, is quite understandable. After all, if you are not, you could get kicked out of the program. And no one wants to be into a PhD for like six or more years only to get the boot. No one wants their lives wasted like that. And I completely understand that. However, this results in nobody willing to take risks. One is forced – and thus taught – to play it safe. This is great and all for the university as a business, but it’s a poor scheme for true innovation. Thus, as much as you wanted to take on the world, you really get stuck with blinders on. All you can do is finish your studies. And quite often even those don’t come through. Some of theses end up on a shelf as negative results that no one is interested in as it doesn’t immediately lead to some sort of profit. I would like to think there is a better way. Perhaps I can think one up? But first, the universities are gonna have to pay me well for that one. I’m not giving away answers to people who are already overly well paid to figure those things out! And neither should anyone else!
Influence of Writing
How are your books influenced by your experiences in academia and beyond?
The idea of my books is to examine the spirit of youth. Now, of course, they do not come off like that at first, but, the deeper the reader looks, the more that becomes unveiled. It is the opinion of this particular writer that something that is not given enough room in contemporary times is for kids to be kids. Indeed, we see kids now discussing world politics and issues as if they were crotchety, old and stale. Great and necessary as it is, however, I wonder just how well that will play out for those people later in life. Especially for these kids that are right into this sort of thing. I mean, the way I take it is that childhood has been seriously reduced from what it used to be. Everything is about profit and gain these days it seems, but this is not a set rule of life, it is just a take on it. It’s an opinion put in to motion, but it is not the only way that life can be conducted.
But the way the contemporary world would have you see it seems almost as if they want you to toss childhood altogether. Nothing, and I say nothing, is better than a good childhood. And there is tons of proof for this if one wishes to examine this point. But my issue is that kids need to be kids. You need to jump on the bed for no particular reason. You need to do silly things… for no particular reason. You need to run and laugh with your friends – for no particular reason. You need to annoy adults and play life on the edge a little, without any serious consequences. This is what it is to be a kid. And there is no better form of human than the kid. There is all sorts of time later on to be astonished at how F@#$ed up the world is. There is always that. You can ruin your brain with raging frustration about the state of the world when you’re boring and old. The human cerebral cortex is not wired like a CPU. It is wired differently. It does not always work straightforward. And we should be very happy that this is the case.
Social Media and Growth
I have been hearing lately that a lot of kids actually want to be youtubers and Instagram famous when they grow up. How has social media affected childhood in your mind?
Being a kid who grew up in the 80s, I had been fortunate enough to catch the tail end of the era that had just gone by. Thus, we had all sorts of kids who had different strengths and skills. And what I noticed that was different from us from kids today was that we admired those other kids and their skills. We didn’t write off their talents as something anyone could do. There were always kids who had unique things they were good at. Some were daredevils and would do crazy stunts, and actually pull them off. Some could beat video games faster than others. Some could play sports better than others. Some kids were great at fighting, some good at kicking high and punching fast. But the biggest difference was that nobody tried to ‘take’ someone else’s thing. There was more of an admiration for those who stood out a bit above the rest on some given talent or metric. What I find different today is that everyone thinks they can do anything as good as or better than anybody else. And this isn’t true. I like to run, but my sprinter acquaintances will always be faster than me. I don’t have the body type of a sprinter. They do. But it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t run. But it does say that most likely I won’t be faster than them without some sort of extreme conditioning, even if that could help. But let’s face it, it isn’t happening.
Now, I think that there was a generation of parents who convinced their kids that anyone can do anything and better than everyone else if they should so desire it. This is one point. But the thing that seems to accelerate this is social media. And this, in total, seems to have had the effect that no one really respects talent the way they used to. It is sadly rare to find anyone who genuinely compliments others with sincerity. And I think these two forces together have come together to create a difference that I don’t think is healthy. It’s okay not to be as good as others at the things they might be good at.
The real competition is within yourself against yourself. But by being convinced that no one is actually talented and just had ‘privileges,’ it has created a cynical competitiveness in young people which isn’t good at all. Indeed, it has created an epidemic of existential angst, mostly I believe, because young people are not taught to find their own way – essentially, they are taught to follow the crowd and compete against everyone and everything. And first place rarely has more than one seat. Thus, what you end up with is a bunch of heartbroken people who, because they had no other plans other than winning anything and everything, end up lost. But what they didn’t realize was that they entered the wrong race. Their competition is somewhere else. And that is something that they need to take time to discover for themselves.
Only the Young
What would be two things you would change in today’s environment to help young people? These could be changes we could take at home as parents, or wider changes in our education – run with it!
It seems like people grow up way too fast and get caught up with this idea that the world has only one particular way of working. Indeed, it’s the whole “go to school,” “go to college,” “get married,” “have children,” “retire and then die,” kind of thing. If there is one thing I would love people to truly question, it would be this. It is not written in some sacred stone or book that this is the only way one can or should live. But because it is so prevalent, people just go with what they see all around them. But it’s not the truth.
You don’t have to do this. You can do other things.
Far too often I see too many people surrender themselves to this scheme only to find themselves miserable and lost at the end. And this is the result of living on the terms of others. This is someone else’s take on how the world should spin. Someone else’s thoughts, someone else’s dream. It might be possible to live like everyone else does, but if you’re not happy, then clearly, it isn’t working for you. To live in the mundane template is not for everyone, and people need to know that the common way isn’t the only way. It’s okay to do life differently.
The final thing is to embrace the unknown.
We should not fear the darkness. More than often, the best thing to do is to walk straight into it. We need to stop being bound by needing guarantees for everything. Especially in a universe where there are none. Fear isn’t sense; it’s a reaction. And reactions are not conceived by thoughts. They’re reactions. Reflexes. Neural impulses designed to provoke a sudden response. Far too often, people stick to playing it safe with everything. And they will justify their safe-playing till the sun stops shining. But, on the other side of risk often lies our destinations. The things we really want. The things we dreamt the better portion of our lives for. And if that’s where they are, why let them go over a simple emotional reflex which contains neither reason nor thought?
The finer things in life, most often the things we truly want, are usually right behind some risky obstacle. But it turns out that everything in life is a risk. We just tend to forget that even the simple things are all drenched in risk. A mundane, everyday life contains great risks. Even simply leaving your house every morning is a risk. You may not come home. Hence, one needs to realize that nothing is certain and that risk will always be there. And it is there whether we wish to believe it or not. So, since we can never rid ourselves of risk, we need to save ourselves all our precious time that we can and just go straight after what it is that we truly and really want.
After all, life is too precious and short for anything else.
Is there a lesson that you have learned that you would like to share with youth of today?
Or
What was something you learned from you education experience?
Tell us in the comments.
Here are ways in which you can connect with George:
Image of Plasma: Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash
Paper on fire: Photo by Elijah O’Donnell on Unsplash
Library: Photo by Will van Wingerden on Unsplash
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