Each month I discuss 3 life things I learned (with a good quote) recapping the past month, what I’m working on now, and at the end I leave you with one question to think about.
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Hey! I’m Julia, a 17-year old learning about the world. And right now I’m obsessed with long-term carbon-free energy & fuel solutions and about nanomedicine for drug delivery with magnetic & lipid NPs to combat brain and liver cancers!
Happy Holidays & End of Exams!
I officially completed my second university course (1st at an actual university lecture hall of 600 at the University of Waterloo!), Microeconomics: ECON101, on the 19th! I also found out that I definitely do NOT want to study economics!
So, with school wrapping up along with the holidays, it has been a hectic month to say the least. But I'm so grateful I got to escape the cold in Canada and spend the holidays with my family in Brazil (even if it meant sacrificing my quiet head by usually living with 4 people to living with 9 for 2 and a half weeks!).
December’s Quote 📖
“You’re not wrong or right until you prove it!” - My English teacher
In school, we are taught that there is only ever ONE correct answer, and we must strive to achieve that answer through the single path we are taught in class. And this year, I’ve learned that this is simply not true!
In every area of our life's there is a component of negotiation, and as my English teacher says, "your not wrong or right until you prove it," because ideas, perspectives, opinions, and stories subjective, so we need to be able to communicate these ideas to others effectively, or did they ever really happen at all?
And I think to he has some truth here, we do need to be able to prove what we think is right or wrong, and to do that we need to seek understanding in why we as individuals believe something to be true.
This is something I really tried to do this month, to seek understanding: seek it in my work and the projects I am working on, and in myself on the things I value, believe in, do, want and why I value, believe, do, or want them.
So, this past month, I decided I wanted to build myself a personal website to showcase all my projects. And boy was WAY OFF in my expectations of how much more self-reflection was required for the task!
By looking at other’s websites I liked, I found that many of them had deep yet short personal descriptions and detailed future plans, yet I had no idea how to describe myself! Heck I couldn’t even think of 3 words to describe myself because whenever I found a label for myself like smart, curious, creative, I put in all my effort into to being that kind of person, leaving me exhausted and not feeling like me.
But this way of thinking: exploring and proving my rights or wrongs or accepted ideas, encouraged me to go out and seek understanding and share these ideas to others (like you!) which unexpectedly takes a lot of work.
And because of this, I have come to believe that you can’t stay indifferent about anything forever. Since trying to push a hard-to-understand concept or annoying problem away, will make it keep coming back. This is what I tried doing in my website, I didn’t know how to describe myself, so I pushed it away, but with university supplemental applications it just kept coming back until I did some real, deep thinking of how and why I have come to love the things I am working on, what I want to work on in the future, etc. and I still don’t have a concreate answer to these kinds of questions, not sure that I will, but I guess these things come with time! 😉
And for now…
I’m going to think of this as my superpower! Because I get to reinvent myself everyday! I get to be different everyday; be better, dream bigger, and do more than yesterday’s me every single day, and I don’t have to be confined to a bunch of labels that I’ll outgrow anyways.
And for now, I hope to advance humanity’s knowledge in how we approach unconventional problems, and along the way lead an exciting and spontaneous way of life in science, tech and business.
So it’s important to seek understanding in why we care about these things in life, and share these ideas with others to create even more wonderful and thought-provoking ideas. Since, an idea on it’s own is just a thought, but an idea shared with others and refined upon can move mountains.
A Retail Challenge 🎇
In the beginning of December I finished my first real-world business challenge!
My group and I were given 3 weeks to work alongside Walmart Blue Labs (their innovation sector)! And along with many other groups just like us all over the world, we were tasked with researching and presenting some innovative recommendations to Walmart by reimagining the in-person shopping experience as they move further into their digital journey!
December 9th, after the full week and a half of full-on grind mode we finally completed our slide deck, prototypes, and financial project plans, and learned so much along the way. And even though the results aren’t out yet for the winning group, I am so proud to have experienced this incredible opportunity with these amazing people below!
Throughout these three weeks I learned so much about reaching out to people and consulting retail professionals, doing market research to find the information I needed, and even memorized Walmart’s hex colour codes. 😅
Key Learnings: 🤔
Buffer periods: Breaks from constant feedback are important because without this crucial time, I found that I nor my teammates could internalize any new helpful info that was just given to us. It just went straight out the window after an hour!
Team dynamics: I never really had the chance to work on a big project this intense before and neither had the rest of my team, and it’s very important in a project like this to be able to communicate openly about the good and the bad parts of the project. And though we worked well together and had lots of fun, it was still hard to actively listen to each other’s criticism and ideas once we had already “finalized” our project idea in the short time we had.
We had become tunnel-visioned, as my physics teacher would say where you only focus on what’s in front of you and nothing else.
Nanotech Forward 🧬
This month I spent a lot of my time diving deep into exploring metal nanoparticles, mainly copper and silver, synthesizing them in the QNC lab, and learning about their effectiveness in killing bacteria via bandages!
As it turns out, copper is really good at killing a wide rage of microbes (bacteria, viruses, yeasts, fungi, etc.), but it is also been shown to help the body heal damaged tissue and this makes it a super attractive agent in preventing wound infections, delivering medications more precisely to combat diseases in the body, and in reducing infections contracted in hospitals (hospital-acquired infections, HAIs).
Copper nanoparticles can be imbedded into bandages to prevent infection of wounds, and so I build a simple digital version of how one of these bandages could look. (not to scale)
Cool Things I Found 😎
Fully Green Power: A group of scientists in England successfully powered a computer for over a full year on just algae! Their system works similar to an AA battery and they think it could even be used to power small devices renewably, by using synechocystis bacteria, a non-toxic type of cyanobacteria (used to be called blue-green algae) that photosynthesizes as biological solar panels.
Algae Batteries: is a 2-minute video about this super cool achievement
Cody’s Algae Panel: is a 20-minute video of a guy who built a solar panel, with algae instead of solar (photovoltaic) cells. 🤯
Bacteria you can see without a microscope: June 2022, the biggest bacteria, Thiomargarita magnifica, was found in the mangrove trees in the Caribbean island, Guadeloupe. This bacteria is around the size of an eye-lash and is over 5000x bigger than an average microbe!
A picture of Thiomargarita magnifica beside a dime at 1000x by Jean-Maries Volland at Berkeley Lab Incredibly Large 2cm Long Bacteria Breaks a Lot of Rules of Biology is a 10-minute video covering the problem this giant bacteria could provide to our current biology rules.
Time Zone Struggles: I recently began working with a group of students like myself, and our main focus right now is cancer research for non small lung cancer detection. However, each one of us are in drastically different time zones, I’m talking like 10-16 hours difference!
Something to Think About 🧠
What if time doesn’t exist?
Now this question can easily lead to a whole debate around how we can be sure anything exists at all, but let’s stick with time first. Does time exist?
There is a new idea in physics that could bring up this possibility that argues that we know things in front of use like tables and chairs exist due to their physics of particles that make them and everything else up in the universe. Time isn’t, even though clocks that tell passing time, and our aging bodies do exist, time itself may emerge from nothing in the fundamental universe, nobody actually knows how time came around, so the argument is how can we assume time exists if we don’t know how it came to exist.
And this 4-minute article brings up a great discussion with time and some easy-to-understand physics involved, Time May Not Exist at All, According to Physics.
Even if the existence of time could be up to debate in physics, it still does exist as a social construct. But then this brings up the possibility of everything else, like languages, manners, money; are these all just social constructs that don’t even really exist in the universe?
I’ll leave you to think a little, and see you in the rest of 2023! 👋
Into 2023
Personal Website: I’m going to continue seeking understanding in my life, and going to do that with building my website.
Cooking Bacteria: I’m going to focus my time on magnetic nanoparticles in January and their applications on cooking bacteria and cancer cells.
Lung Cancer Project: Going to get started on my lung cancer project with my group in the lab this coming month! 😁 (super excited!)
Medsplaining Podcast: I’m also starting a women and minorities health podcast with Latifah Alabbad, Naina Kumar and Vidushi Valli Surendran.
Thanks for reading! Here’s my Medium and LinkedIn if you want to read more from me, & feel free to subscribe for more monthly updates, cool things I find, and more questions (I’ve got thousands).
Ooh so excited for your womens' health podcast! Also, congrats on completing a university course in grade 12 that's HUGE! Keep it up girl :)
Fantastic, Julinha! I love it!!!
Can't wait to see what's coming up in 2023!