Re:Life (August 3rd) / Homecoming?
My life condensed into variably interesting posts on the internet
Welcome to Re: Life, where I chronicle my life, thoughts, and work in biotechnology on the internet.
Why a newsletter? So that one day, a long, long time from now, aliens might find these little time capsules and put them in a museum.
Now that you know my motivations are pure, let’s get started.
In my last post, I mentioned that I’d be spending the better half of July in a learning experience at X (formerly Google[x]) that we decided to call Camp Moonshot.
For those of you who aren’t aware, this was the result of a partnership between TKS (an organization I’ve been a part of for about three years now), and X.
Honestly, this was the most awesome, mind-blowing thing I’ve ever done (no exaggeration), and now that I’m back from that, I’ll be sharing a bit of the story.
Getting There
:// I wake up at 2:08 AM. It’s July 17th, 2022, and I’m in a Quality Inn that sits directly across the road from Toronto Pearson Airport. After a certain amount of eye-rubbing, line-waiting and plane-sitting, I end up at the fabled SFO airport with five other friends from TKS.
Minor detail to remember: it’s 7 AM and we’re in San Fransisco. Our Airbnb is somewhere in San José, and we’re supposed to check in past noon. The original plan was to meet with everyone else in a park and play cards until then.
Our solution: No way. Parks are boring, and we were hungry.
And as it also turned out, we weren’t allowed back into the part of the airport where all the restaurants were. So we went ahead and took this bus to some other part of the city.
Did we know where we were going? That’s up for contention. But honestly, we just had to get somewhere away from the airport, because you could find a restaurant literally anywhere else.
Shortly after bussing ourselves to this other place in San Fransisco that Google Maps told us to go to, we dragged our bags along to a joint called “Peter’s Café”.
Looking back, I can only imagine the visceral sense of dread on the owner’s face when he saw us approaching (there wasn’t exactly room for our suitcases, so he reluctantly let us stack them up on an empty table).
I don’t remember much, but I’m pretty sure I ate a chicken sandwich while essentially everyone ate pancakes or other diabetes-inducing fare.
But whatever we ate, we really dragged it out since we managed to stay in that restaurant for a good five hours talking about our flights, quantum physics, Alaska, and human nature.
Honestly, I know it sounds weird to highlight this after I spent the past two weeks literally living and breathing X, but that conversation (and the many others we managed to have in that time) were some of the most memorable things for me.
The Actual Thing
:// Enough chitchat! Fast-forward to the first day our Uber arrived at X, and we were getting hit with a thousand different feelings at once that are kind of hard to describe in writing.
For starters, everything was bigger and cooler and awesomer than we could have imagined. The buildings, the people, the food (man, that stuff was good)…
But to be more specific, we spent hours and hours with people from essentially every core position at X (AI, safety, design - you name it!), toured the entire RLS campus, got advice from amazing Xers whenever we were in a tight spot (I’m looking at you, Sam and Ashley). Aaaand - oh my goodness - we had an AMA with Astro himself!
This will never get old: literally on the first day when we were getting breakfast, I saw Astro rollerblading through the cafeteria and said hi. He also hugged me (what?!). BTW, I know you’re reading this Astro…
Oh, and best for last - we had more or less free reign over X’s INSANE design kitchen, where my group spent ungodly amounts of time building an acoustic acquisition system for our own moonshot proposal (Project Beam*), which we eventually pitched to some of the decision-makers at X.
(*Project Beam deserves its own post, but long story short, our goal was to non-invasively detect any biomarker in the blood, and as we discovered very very quickly, that’s not a problem you can solve in a few days).
To be frank, I’m surprised X would ever let a bunch of teenagers do any of this…but I’m not exactly complaining either.
And Now, for Shoutouts!
Actually, this is the perfect segue to start profusely thanking Jillia and Nabeela from X for making this possible in the first place. And of course, Nadeem, Navid, and Damian from TKS for chaperoning us with infinite patience (I would’ve cracked a long time ago).
This list wouldn’t be complete without all the Rapid Evalers (again, I’m looking at Sam, Ashley, and Pritish here), Joe Sargent and Benoit Schillings for being all-around vibes, and the many, many Xers who volunteered their time to make this possible (direct reference to Dami, Jeannine, Eugenie, Luke, Jenny, Hemai…oh my goodness this is a lot of people!).
Okay, an exhaustive list probably isn’t possible here, but thank you to everyone that helped make these two weeks so fun :)
Once again, I probably botched that entire description, so to compensate, I’ll now carpet-bomb you with even more images.
:// As X winded (wound?) down, all eighteen of us got really close, too. You know, it’s interesting how much you begin to trust people if you just live or work together for a few days.
TL;DR: we did some...unconventional things in a really short amount of time. In retrospect, many of them don’t register as the smartest decisions to me anymore, but I guess they seemed lot smarter and more fun when we did them.
These include, but definitely aren’t limited to:
- Leaving the house and going to Palo Alto (>20km away) to eat gelato at midnight
- Visiting Stanford and playing volleyball with literal strangers (because why not?)
- Watching Black Mirror episodes and playing Just Dance to YMCA at 1 AM
- Hustling a meeting with the famous (or infamous) blogger Scott Alexander and then continually asking him about the nature of consciousness. Poor guy.
- Averaging 2-3 Red Bulls a day (or Starbucks Nitro Cold Brews) to pull through for our pitches. I don’t regret a bit of that, actually.
- Having the weirdest, multifaceted conversations about Schrödinger’s cats, X, relationships, and human nature in various Ubers and Caltrain rides.
The Return
Going back to Canada was relatively easy. You didn’t even need to take the laptop out of your bag or anything, and customs sort of just waved us off - maybe because we were kids, but I don’t really know.
In fact, coming back was more of a shock than arriving, and for what it’s worth, it still feels a bit weird and depressing to be back to my old normal.
Still, I’m more than glad this happened at all and I’m sure I’ll get back in the groove. After all, the change of scenery did give me a few new ideas. Stay tuned for those.
Thought of the Week
I think I’ve shared more than enough thoughts this time, so I’ll leave you with essentially nothing.
What’s a question you need to ask yourself that you should’ve asked yourself a long time ago?
//: Thanks for reading! I’m Aaryan - I’m a high-schooler from Sudbury, Canada. My main work lies at the intersection between hardware and medicine, trying to build better diagnostic / imaging systems to help us treat cancer.
When I’ve had enough of that, I watch the occasional episode of Silicon Valley. Frankly, I have no idea what I’m doing here, but that’s fine since no one else really does anyway ;)