This is the last of my ski trip ponderings ... and it goes to the core of just what is science really? It's hard to know anymore with all the politicization that has characterized science on both sides of the liberal/conservative divide. It's almost like no one really wants to know what is true anymore ... they just want their side to win the day. And that is just sad. Pathetic really. Yet deep down, many of us still really want to know how the universe works in its myriads of functions.
Over time I have found that most of what gets in the way of my seeing the universe as it really is comes from me. Excitement, pride, preconceptions of what the universe should look like all get in my way, but the most common block is fear. Fear that I won't measure up, fear that I can't get the answer to open questions, fear that I will let others down, fear that I will shrink in the eyes of others and in my own esteem -- all of these can sit in between me and understanding. And I don't think I am alone in this.
When I scribbled "hold onto the doubt" on my statics exams back at OSU I was encouraging myself to breathe and let go of the fear so that I could sit beside the open question and really understand it. In a state of calm and with quiet contemplation, I could best answer the academic questions. It turns out that the same is true for real problems of life, health, innovation, and even leadership and personnel management.
Human curiosity is a powerful thing. It is, in fact, our curiosity that we need to engage and our fear that we need to hold at bay, or better yet release, if we are going to find what we are looking for. It is as if there are two forms of decision making in life: fear-based and curiosity-based. In fear-based decision making, we find ourselves wanting the answer as fast as possible. We don't really pay attention to, or care, what the answer is -- we just want something, because the open question makes us anxious and fearful. In curiosity-based decision making, we use one of the core traits of our species to pull apart, examine and wade into open questions. In my experience, this type of decision making yields much better solutions.
When you have groups of people working on a common problem then you must find a way for ideas to win rather than people, so it becomes a jousting contest between competing truths rather than competing egos or hierarchies. You really need to learn to like the people you're working with for this to happen ... and I've found that looking for a least one attribute that you can admire in everyone you work with can facilitate this. And I've come to the point in life that I want to genuinely like the people I spend my days with, if for no other reason than it makes life more enjoyable ... especially when you routinely work 11-12 hour days.
In the same way, my frustration with someone doesn't have to be with him or her fundamentally as a person. We can try to limit our frustration to just his or her behavior, because getting to the hard truths of life requires that people show affection and respect for one another at the same time they feel at ease showing complete disrespect for ideas that just aren't going to cut it. After all, we are social animals, and our brains work better in an environment where we are committed to one another and enjoy one another's company. That is the only environment in which it is safe enough for the small voice of real truth in each of us to clash with one another fearlessly and energetically.
The key to searching for the truth is to hold passionately to your beliefs while simultaneously not feeling entrenched in your position, to be able to let go of the need to defend it in order to save face. It's almost a Buddhist thing, where you're not necessarily free of ego and status, but you are able to sit with them and maintain some objective separation. It's about letting ideas win, not people. It's about finding what is right, not being right.
And, ironically, it has more to do with problem definition than it really does with problem solving. Holding on to the doubt means listening to the problem until the deepest truth presents itself. But that, of course, raises the question: How do you know when you've gotten down to the deepest truth? This is especially true in medicine, where we may have fifteen channels of measurement data giving us hard facts about any given patient but there might be five thousand other channels of data that we could possibly measure if we just knew how or perceived the need.
Before the Iraq War, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously spoke of the different bins into which states of knowledge can be cast. The hard facts are what he called the known knowns. We have plenty of these in medicine: temperature, heart rate, weight, respirations, blood pressure, blood chemistries and blood gases, etc. There are known unknowns, the things we know we don't know, like the calorie count of that burger I ate for lunch or the minute by minute fluctuations in renal glomerular filtration. The other two bins get more tricky. There is the bin of unknown knowns, which Rumsfeld has used to refer to things that you think you know but you do not. This is what I like to consider self-delusion. A cautious and honest mind might be lucky to largely avoid unknown knowns through self-questioning and asking others to set their eyes on your work. The final set, and perhaps the most important, is the unknown unknowns, the things you don't even know that you don't know. Intuition, which taps lightly into the irrational and, I believe, integrates a larger set of the rational than is available to our conscious mind, is a way of bringing in the unknown unknowns and of creating a broader model. Sometimes it can't be integrated at a conscious level. It appears to us as a "feeling."
Most of applied science is explicit -- it's all about the math, the physics or the biochemistry -- but there is also the "inner voice" of scientific judgment, your confidence in what you know to be true. Then there's your Spidey sense, the confidence in your gut that you learn to trust beyond your horizon of hard data. It is based on the data you have, but is also encompasses confident extrapolations. As such, Spidey sense is the essential counterbalance to the rational minimalists who deconstruct and analyze every argument into its elements and miss the intuitive altogether. It is the part of our awareness that is reaching out to get a grip on the unknown unknowns.
Our screwups today are most frequently errors of omission. Science has been pretty good at discarding the fictions we once used -- the four humors, the music of the spheres -- to fill in the physical laws we didn't understand. So when we settle for self-delusion these days, it is usually because we have stopped short in our search for truth seeking and have accepted a subset of the universe as our model as being the whole universe. In medicine we might omit a test because we didn't think it was that important ... too small to matter. More frequently, we omit a test or an analysis from our workup plan to save either time or money or both because we think we can get by without it. These are willful omissions, and although they can sometimes wreak havoc, they are never as truly dangerous as the unconscious omissions, the failures of imagination, the true unknown unknowns that have not been considered. For we do not ever debate the things we have failed to recognize as being important.
So the take home lesson I think, if there is one, is that no one's scientific judgment is foolproof. I believe in a determinant universe, one that (a) exists and (b) is ordered by laws that cannot be changed at will. The search for truth about such a universe invariably involves building a model of all that we know, which is an adjacent or surrogate universe.
A careful balance needs to be struck between our confidence in the parts of the universe that we know and our suspicion of the universe that we don't know. Drawing on Rumsfeldian parlance once again -- your known knowns, your known unknowns and your unknown unknowns, on "unk-unks" -- I think the art of applied science or even being successful in business or life, for that matter, lies in how one finds the unk-unks and makes them "kn-unks," and how one respects the possibility for more to be found ... or never discovered.
In my experience, the older and/or wiser one gets, the better one is at judging the unk-unks, sensing them, getting a feel for how vast they may or may not be given the issue at hand, and somehow managing them. This is all done, of course, without actual conscious, explicit description of or an actual counting of them, since doing so would immediately thrust them into the kn-unk category. I have known many very smart people who tend to underestimate the unk-unks. They are aware of their intelligence, and their model of the universe is one in which intelligence will always prevail.
Consider the next big expedition to Mars ... the rover used to collect core samples of the Martian surface will subsequently launch them into low Mars orbit where they will be retrieved by another unmanned spacecraft and returned to earth. One of the main challenges of this mission will be keeping all of the equipment very, very clean, so that when it is brought back into our world and is unsealed, we don't find Earth-born bacteria or other life forms that we put there and conclude, wrongly, that Mars is alive.
When you look closely at the super clean spacecraft being assembled in a special clean room at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA by technicians in head-to-toe white "bunny suits," you still find all sorts of microorganisms hanging out, waiting for a ride. So the challenge is big enough without the fact that biologists and physicists don't speak the same language. For biologists, microbiotic life is everywhere and very hard [if not impossible] to track. For physicists, microbes are just like any other particles bouncing and being blown through the air, and we should be able to track their motions. Bridging the gap requires that everyone recognize that each school is relying on a model of the universe that is NOT the universe per se. It is only when we recognize that our "truth" is only a model, and when we let our models compete with other models, that we get anywhere.
We humans are an innately curious species. Born through hips too narrow to pass a skull large enough to hold a fully formed human brain, we are born half-baked. Compared with those of other animals, very few of our behaviors are hardwired. We don't inherit genetic instructions for nest building, for instance, or for migrating south when the sun hits a certain angle in the sky. We come into this world programmed with very few instructions, save for one paramount piece of code: be curious.
Following that one command, each of us begins to construct his or her own understanding of the universe. I see it in my ten month old granddaughter and I see it in my colleagues nearing retirement. We all share the instinct, and we can all relate to it, which gives our curiosity-driven need to explore the added beauty that no one has to be forced to do it. People don't necessarily have to be incentivized with stock options and mega-salaries for curiosity-driven creativity to occur. The only essential is a work environment that is structured to encourage our innate drive to wonder, question and explore. Just as each of us built our understanding of the world during childhood, given the chance, everyone will follow the lure of their own curiosity and their own desire for mastery throughout their working lives.
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Monday, February 8, 2016
"To Bull" or "To Cow" ... That is the Question
As I mentioned in yesterday's post I have been reminiscing over my academic career ... both as a student [undergraduate and graduate] as well as faculty for the past nearly fifteen years. And it is from this context that I'd like to approach the above subject. We've all met these people ... both the cows and the bulls.
But I remember one such "bull" especially well. He was my first medical student reporting for Doctoring I practicum in my office in August 2001. His name was not Rick [but I will call him that just to be nice]. Not Rick had a lot going for him back in those days [he still does from what I understand]. Not Rick had been accepted into the inaugural medical school class at Florida State University's brand new College of Medicine the preceding spring and had just finished the Summer Semester mastering Gross Anatomy a week or two before and been cloaked in his short white lab coat common to most medical students.
Now at that time the FSU College of Medicine was quite the talk of both the City of Tallahassee as well as the State of Florida and was basically the brainchild of a powerful state senator, John Thrasher, who just so happens to now be President of the University. It was born with a rather unique mission among medical colleges ... one that would not be a clone of so many other medical colleges across the country ... which produce sub-specialists in droves. No, it would be a "community-based" medical school ... one which would start with 30 students in its charter class but quickly build to 120 students per year. It would not be centered in a large university teaching hospital but students in their third and fourth years would be divided among regional campuses scattered across the state of Florida [in Orlando, Pensacola, Sarasota, Daytona Beach, Fort Pierce, Tallahassee and even more rural places like Marianna and Thomasville, GA]. It's mission was to produce primary care physicians and geriatric physicians to care for those in Florida who seemed have the hardest time finding a physician.
So how exactly did Not Rick get accepted into the FSU College of Medicine Charter Class? I was all too eager to hear his story. It turns out that Not Rick had no desire to ever become a primary care physician nor a geriatrician either. His life's goal was to become a medical researcher at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. A worthy goal I'm sure, but one that in no way fit the mission of the school. So now I become very much intrigued as to how he was able to hide this career aspiration from the Admissions Committee of the FSU COM. It turns out that he wasn't at all. In fact, just the opposite occurred, as he told them straightaway at his interview of his exact career plans. And he was still accepted anyway. At this point, I seriously wondered just what kind of medical school faculty I had agreed to join in the first place. Were we really just going to be spinning our wheels? After all, there had not been a new medical school opened in the United States for just over twenty years at that point in time, and now I was wondering if the FSU College was really going to be any different from all the other cookie cutter schools out there.
And that is when I soon came face to face with Not Rick's gift of bull. Now it is not expected that a first year medical student would have much game clinically. Heck, I didn't even see my very first patient in medical school until I was nearly a month into my second year. So the bar to meet was pretty low, but Not Rick always had to try to clear the bar by several hundred feet it would seem. Week after week he came to clinic on Wednesday afternoon and saw patients first with me and then on his own, but I don't think I ever heard him say "I don't know" for nearly a semester before we had our first "Come to Jesus" meeting. Mostly I was just incredulous at the beginning because he could talk a very good game and he often even fooled my nurses at that time with his imagined competence but what he didn't know was that I knew he almost never knew what he was talking about. For awhile I wondered how long he would try to play the ruse and bluff his way by. After two to three months I began to realize that he would never know what he didn't know if I didn't step in and burst his bubble. So much for my hope to be basically a cheerleader for my first medial student. And he kept reminding me of an essay I had heard about during my English Composition 1013 class at Oklahoma State University back in the Spring of 1979.
Written by a Harvard teaching assistant, it told the story of an undergraduate student with too much time on his hands who followed one of his friends into an exam and took the test just for fun. On the essay portion, the test crasher got an A; his friend, who was actually enrolled in the course and had done all the reading, got a C.
The difference was that the friend, who had all the facts, didn't do much with them. Whereas the test crasher, who had no facts other than the few suggested in the way the question was posed, spun out an amazing exploration of what he assumed the issues to be.
The teaching assistant telling the story came up with two verbs to identify the different approaches. The first was "to cow," which boiled down to presenting facts as a substitute for understanding. The second was "to bull," which is to present evidence of an understanding of form, context, and frames of reference in order to suggest a nonexistent familiarity with the facts. Cow is data without a model, theory or connections. Bull is a model with no data to support it.
You cannot bull your way through life, and you certainly cannot bull your way through the medical sciences, engineering or any of the other hard sciences ... maybe that works in philosophy and the social sciences, but I doubt it works even there. But the converse is true as well ... you cannot cow through it either. Essentially the "cows" are the facts that link us to the observable universe and the "bulls" are the connections between the facts, the causal relationships between the observations. The bulls are our models of the universe -- they are what we use to predict as-yet-unobserved cows.
I have come realize that, in the business of restoring and preserving the health of humanity, most of our problems arise from a lack of bull. Rarely do we lose people because we lack facts or because a specific fact was wrong. We lose people because we did not appreciate the links or connections between the facts.
Constantly striving to find and understand those connections is the prime motive for science, but it is also critical for any other practical enterprise, including any business. It is not enough to log and tabulate the observables; it is essential to develop an actionable understanding of the underlying causes of the observables.
All of which somehow brings us back to Not Rick. I did have to confront him on not having to "know it all" and especially not in his first year. In fact, I let him know that it is actually much more important to "know what it is that he doesn't know" than it is to "know what it is that he knows." I wish I could say that was the only conversation like that I had to have with him that year, but it wasn't. It kept coming back up. Bulls are like that I think. But they also are the ones who ultimately shape our world ... if they can find the right balance. As for Not Rick, I think he turned out okay. He graduated with that Charter Class on time in May 2005 and ended up with a fellowship at the NIH where I believe he still works to this day.
But I remember one such "bull" especially well. He was my first medical student reporting for Doctoring I practicum in my office in August 2001. His name was not Rick [but I will call him that just to be nice]. Not Rick had a lot going for him back in those days [he still does from what I understand]. Not Rick had been accepted into the inaugural medical school class at Florida State University's brand new College of Medicine the preceding spring and had just finished the Summer Semester mastering Gross Anatomy a week or two before and been cloaked in his short white lab coat common to most medical students.
Now at that time the FSU College of Medicine was quite the talk of both the City of Tallahassee as well as the State of Florida and was basically the brainchild of a powerful state senator, John Thrasher, who just so happens to now be President of the University. It was born with a rather unique mission among medical colleges ... one that would not be a clone of so many other medical colleges across the country ... which produce sub-specialists in droves. No, it would be a "community-based" medical school ... one which would start with 30 students in its charter class but quickly build to 120 students per year. It would not be centered in a large university teaching hospital but students in their third and fourth years would be divided among regional campuses scattered across the state of Florida [in Orlando, Pensacola, Sarasota, Daytona Beach, Fort Pierce, Tallahassee and even more rural places like Marianna and Thomasville, GA]. It's mission was to produce primary care physicians and geriatric physicians to care for those in Florida who seemed have the hardest time finding a physician.
So how exactly did Not Rick get accepted into the FSU College of Medicine Charter Class? I was all too eager to hear his story. It turns out that Not Rick had no desire to ever become a primary care physician nor a geriatrician either. His life's goal was to become a medical researcher at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. A worthy goal I'm sure, but one that in no way fit the mission of the school. So now I become very much intrigued as to how he was able to hide this career aspiration from the Admissions Committee of the FSU COM. It turns out that he wasn't at all. In fact, just the opposite occurred, as he told them straightaway at his interview of his exact career plans. And he was still accepted anyway. At this point, I seriously wondered just what kind of medical school faculty I had agreed to join in the first place. Were we really just going to be spinning our wheels? After all, there had not been a new medical school opened in the United States for just over twenty years at that point in time, and now I was wondering if the FSU College was really going to be any different from all the other cookie cutter schools out there.
And that is when I soon came face to face with Not Rick's gift of bull. Now it is not expected that a first year medical student would have much game clinically. Heck, I didn't even see my very first patient in medical school until I was nearly a month into my second year. So the bar to meet was pretty low, but Not Rick always had to try to clear the bar by several hundred feet it would seem. Week after week he came to clinic on Wednesday afternoon and saw patients first with me and then on his own, but I don't think I ever heard him say "I don't know" for nearly a semester before we had our first "Come to Jesus" meeting. Mostly I was just incredulous at the beginning because he could talk a very good game and he often even fooled my nurses at that time with his imagined competence but what he didn't know was that I knew he almost never knew what he was talking about. For awhile I wondered how long he would try to play the ruse and bluff his way by. After two to three months I began to realize that he would never know what he didn't know if I didn't step in and burst his bubble. So much for my hope to be basically a cheerleader for my first medial student. And he kept reminding me of an essay I had heard about during my English Composition 1013 class at Oklahoma State University back in the Spring of 1979.
Written by a Harvard teaching assistant, it told the story of an undergraduate student with too much time on his hands who followed one of his friends into an exam and took the test just for fun. On the essay portion, the test crasher got an A; his friend, who was actually enrolled in the course and had done all the reading, got a C.
The difference was that the friend, who had all the facts, didn't do much with them. Whereas the test crasher, who had no facts other than the few suggested in the way the question was posed, spun out an amazing exploration of what he assumed the issues to be.
The teaching assistant telling the story came up with two verbs to identify the different approaches. The first was "to cow," which boiled down to presenting facts as a substitute for understanding. The second was "to bull," which is to present evidence of an understanding of form, context, and frames of reference in order to suggest a nonexistent familiarity with the facts. Cow is data without a model, theory or connections. Bull is a model with no data to support it.
You cannot bull your way through life, and you certainly cannot bull your way through the medical sciences, engineering or any of the other hard sciences ... maybe that works in philosophy and the social sciences, but I doubt it works even there. But the converse is true as well ... you cannot cow through it either. Essentially the "cows" are the facts that link us to the observable universe and the "bulls" are the connections between the facts, the causal relationships between the observations. The bulls are our models of the universe -- they are what we use to predict as-yet-unobserved cows.
I have come realize that, in the business of restoring and preserving the health of humanity, most of our problems arise from a lack of bull. Rarely do we lose people because we lack facts or because a specific fact was wrong. We lose people because we did not appreciate the links or connections between the facts.
Constantly striving to find and understand those connections is the prime motive for science, but it is also critical for any other practical enterprise, including any business. It is not enough to log and tabulate the observables; it is essential to develop an actionable understanding of the underlying causes of the observables.
All of which somehow brings us back to Not Rick. I did have to confront him on not having to "know it all" and especially not in his first year. In fact, I let him know that it is actually much more important to "know what it is that he doesn't know" than it is to "know what it is that he knows." I wish I could say that was the only conversation like that I had to have with him that year, but it wasn't. It kept coming back up. Bulls are like that I think. But they also are the ones who ultimately shape our world ... if they can find the right balance. As for Not Rick, I think he turned out okay. He graduated with that Charter Class on time in May 2005 and ended up with a fellowship at the NIH where I believe he still works to this day.
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Holding on to the Doubt
It is vacation time for me this week ... my one week each year to read, relax, engage in fun recreational activities [as much as skiing on a knee that needs replacement can be ... yes, this time it's the "other" knee ... and, yes, surgery is scheduled for April 20] and most of all take some time for thinking and introspection. How did I end up here? Where am I going? What is it going to take to finish the race? What adjustments are necessary? Where am I failing? And what might I actually be doing well? It somehow always seems to go back to my days at both Oklahoma State University as a budding engineer who just about walked away from college and life in the sciences after three semesters and my calling to Christ beginning a semester into my freshman year and culminating in His calling on my life into a career in the medical sciences and a transfer to Oral Roberts University eighteen months later.
What was really happening there on a cosmic, eternal scale? Is it even presumptuous to even go there? What makes one successful in the applied sciences? How much does the search for truth really even matter anyway? Can truth even ever really be known? And, if so, then how? Those are my thoughts ... at least for this week. Next week, sadly, it will likely be back to managing the chaos.
But not this week ... this week I am reflecting on a few specifics of my life in academics ... both as an undergraduate student still trying to "figure this science thing out" and then nearly fifteen years ago as first year medical school professor at Florida State University College of Medicine teaching my first ever medical student in his and their first ever medical school class. Did any of us even know what we were doing back then?
I remember nearly throwing in the towel on my college experience after a nearly disastrous fall semester in my sophomore year. I had to drop my Physics II class at mid-term because I had a "D" and I ended up making a C+ in my Thermodynamics class ostensibly because of a calculator malfunction during my final exam ... I was totally sunk at that point having to do all these crazy calculations longhand which was almost impossible, but the truth of the matter is that I never really had a clue as to what was really happening in that class, and the fact that I even had a low B entering the final exam was equal parts a miracle of God and lots of homework help from my dad. Differential Equations wasn't much better though I made a solid B in that class, but from the point in the semester that we reached LaPlace transformations I was totally lost and praying for partial credit on every question. Thankfully that was near the end of the course. I still have no idea how to do those problems to this day. So that Christmas holiday season was a time of deep soul-searching for me. Why was I even matriculating in college anyway? Was it just what came next? What it just what was expected? What would I do if I didn't go back? Where was God in all this anyway? It still never really occurred to me to seek His plan for my life, but more like I had to figure this out for myself anyway. But ultimately, I did feel like I needed to go back ... if for no other reason than to see what I could do if I really ever took my classes seriously. This just going to class but not studying until the night before the exam was not going to cut it anymore. That much was certain. But I had lingering doubts, despite what so many people had told me over so many years, that I was destined to succeed if I'd only put all my heart into it. So if for no other reason than that I felt like I had to go back and see if they were right.
And go back I did. I enrolled in 20 credit hours that semester ... 16 hours that were what was next on the engineering platform PLUS the 4 hour Physics II class that I had felt compelled to drop to preserve what was left of my GPA [3.50] at that point ... so this would be the test. And behind the scenes I now see that hand of God all through it. Though, to be truthful, I was more into MTXE ... the logo painted on the sidelines of my adopted hometown basketball team [Wichita State Shockers] after our family moved to tiny little Clearwater ... a Wichita suburb ... six months before. MTXE was short for "Mental Toughness Extra Effort" and became my mantra to get through my medical school and residency years. Later I would come to realize that it was always a lot more about God's grace than it ever was about MTXE on my part. That semester would become the high point of my undergraduate academic career as I made my first 4.0 semester since second grade that spring. Yes, I made an A in that Physics class I had previously dropped but that wasn't the class that changed my trajectory. That would be the engineering weed out class known as Statics and Strength of Materials [as it was typically taken BEFORE Thermodynamics and also before Dynamics. This was the class known to send nearly 50% of budding engineers back to their academic advisors to seek help in selecting a new major. And it was in that class that I made a perfect score for the entire semester including the final exam! A total shocker and a total game changer. My confidence began to soar following that semester and I was ready for what God ultimately had for me which really had nothing to do with engineering after all. But he had to get me to this point and then He called me to both a richer life in Him and one in serving His people often in their moments of greatest need.
But what I learned during that Statics class is something that I carry with me to this day and that is what I call "Holding on to the Doubt" ... this began with me staring at the blank space beneath each problem on my Statics exams. This was the kind of staring that often provoked such anxiety that it often caused students to rush into an ill-considered answer. But jumping too soon into solution space might cause me to miss some key element of the problem being posed or to answer a conceptually adjacent question [I did this all the time in Thermodynamics]. Not this time.
I resolved that the solution for my anxiety while staring at the unanswered question was to remain calm in the presence of the openness, to not close off the inquiry too soon and thus run at full speed into a solution that might not take the whole truth of the problem into account. Holding on to the doubt meant listening to all that the problem had to say and not making assumptions, and committing to a plan of action based on them, until the deepest truth presented itself. It was a philosophy that would serve me well in my last semester at OSU, through all of my Biology education at ORU and my subsequent medical training and in the thirty years that have followed. Often that semester I would end up with one of those "I see what you did there" smirks on my face when revelation would set in. That still often happens ... just hopefully without the smirk.
Holding on to the doubt is a big deal, and it is not always easy, but it has to happen, and it has to happen on many levels. Not only does HOTTD make us better thinkers ourselves but it also is indispensable in making a good thinking team/organization. Developing something new and novel is a nonlinear process and being a part of that process can be anxiety provoking because we may not know exactly where this is going and we may not be certain that we are really going to find a solution that works or meets our needs. The temptation to short-circuit the process can be strong. But it is only by HOTTD that we can allow ourselves to fully understand the problem we are trying to solve and to fully develop the best solution.
More about the Introduction to Doctoring Class I at FSU COM with the charter class to follow ... I haven't forgotten ... this has just gotten longer than I expected.
What was really happening there on a cosmic, eternal scale? Is it even presumptuous to even go there? What makes one successful in the applied sciences? How much does the search for truth really even matter anyway? Can truth even ever really be known? And, if so, then how? Those are my thoughts ... at least for this week. Next week, sadly, it will likely be back to managing the chaos.
But not this week ... this week I am reflecting on a few specifics of my life in academics ... both as an undergraduate student still trying to "figure this science thing out" and then nearly fifteen years ago as first year medical school professor at Florida State University College of Medicine teaching my first ever medical student in his and their first ever medical school class. Did any of us even know what we were doing back then?
I remember nearly throwing in the towel on my college experience after a nearly disastrous fall semester in my sophomore year. I had to drop my Physics II class at mid-term because I had a "D" and I ended up making a C+ in my Thermodynamics class ostensibly because of a calculator malfunction during my final exam ... I was totally sunk at that point having to do all these crazy calculations longhand which was almost impossible, but the truth of the matter is that I never really had a clue as to what was really happening in that class, and the fact that I even had a low B entering the final exam was equal parts a miracle of God and lots of homework help from my dad. Differential Equations wasn't much better though I made a solid B in that class, but from the point in the semester that we reached LaPlace transformations I was totally lost and praying for partial credit on every question. Thankfully that was near the end of the course. I still have no idea how to do those problems to this day. So that Christmas holiday season was a time of deep soul-searching for me. Why was I even matriculating in college anyway? Was it just what came next? What it just what was expected? What would I do if I didn't go back? Where was God in all this anyway? It still never really occurred to me to seek His plan for my life, but more like I had to figure this out for myself anyway. But ultimately, I did feel like I needed to go back ... if for no other reason than to see what I could do if I really ever took my classes seriously. This just going to class but not studying until the night before the exam was not going to cut it anymore. That much was certain. But I had lingering doubts, despite what so many people had told me over so many years, that I was destined to succeed if I'd only put all my heart into it. So if for no other reason than that I felt like I had to go back and see if they were right.
And go back I did. I enrolled in 20 credit hours that semester ... 16 hours that were what was next on the engineering platform PLUS the 4 hour Physics II class that I had felt compelled to drop to preserve what was left of my GPA [3.50] at that point ... so this would be the test. And behind the scenes I now see that hand of God all through it. Though, to be truthful, I was more into MTXE ... the logo painted on the sidelines of my adopted hometown basketball team [Wichita State Shockers] after our family moved to tiny little Clearwater ... a Wichita suburb ... six months before. MTXE was short for "Mental Toughness Extra Effort" and became my mantra to get through my medical school and residency years. Later I would come to realize that it was always a lot more about God's grace than it ever was about MTXE on my part. That semester would become the high point of my undergraduate academic career as I made my first 4.0 semester since second grade that spring. Yes, I made an A in that Physics class I had previously dropped but that wasn't the class that changed my trajectory. That would be the engineering weed out class known as Statics and Strength of Materials [as it was typically taken BEFORE Thermodynamics and also before Dynamics. This was the class known to send nearly 50% of budding engineers back to their academic advisors to seek help in selecting a new major. And it was in that class that I made a perfect score for the entire semester including the final exam! A total shocker and a total game changer. My confidence began to soar following that semester and I was ready for what God ultimately had for me which really had nothing to do with engineering after all. But he had to get me to this point and then He called me to both a richer life in Him and one in serving His people often in their moments of greatest need.
But what I learned during that Statics class is something that I carry with me to this day and that is what I call "Holding on to the Doubt" ... this began with me staring at the blank space beneath each problem on my Statics exams. This was the kind of staring that often provoked such anxiety that it often caused students to rush into an ill-considered answer. But jumping too soon into solution space might cause me to miss some key element of the problem being posed or to answer a conceptually adjacent question [I did this all the time in Thermodynamics]. Not this time.
I resolved that the solution for my anxiety while staring at the unanswered question was to remain calm in the presence of the openness, to not close off the inquiry too soon and thus run at full speed into a solution that might not take the whole truth of the problem into account. Holding on to the doubt meant listening to all that the problem had to say and not making assumptions, and committing to a plan of action based on them, until the deepest truth presented itself. It was a philosophy that would serve me well in my last semester at OSU, through all of my Biology education at ORU and my subsequent medical training and in the thirty years that have followed. Often that semester I would end up with one of those "I see what you did there" smirks on my face when revelation would set in. That still often happens ... just hopefully without the smirk.
Holding on to the doubt is a big deal, and it is not always easy, but it has to happen, and it has to happen on many levels. Not only does HOTTD make us better thinkers ourselves but it also is indispensable in making a good thinking team/organization. Developing something new and novel is a nonlinear process and being a part of that process can be anxiety provoking because we may not know exactly where this is going and we may not be certain that we are really going to find a solution that works or meets our needs. The temptation to short-circuit the process can be strong. But it is only by HOTTD that we can allow ourselves to fully understand the problem we are trying to solve and to fully develop the best solution.
More about the Introduction to Doctoring Class I at FSU COM with the charter class to follow ... I haven't forgotten ... this has just gotten longer than I expected.
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