I used to think that some limits were meant to be broken.

After painfully hitting a knowledge ceiling I have now learned to respect these innate limitations. I still hold great respect and gratitude towards MIT and other institutions but have accepted that it is better for me to depart from previous academic accomplishment goals.

It is hard to leave things behind until recognizing them in a safe, contained, and orderly manner that considers potential harm if kept secret versus shared. I am publishing this to hold myself accountable for some previous ignorance and not having enough patience, time, and understanding to fully appreciate the creation process and functions of the advanced tools I was eventually asked to use.

I only recommend reading beyond this point if you have a strong technical background in machine learning and chemistry as I severly overstepped my personal technical limitations and compromised/violated my academic focus by getting access to information and methods I refer to below and interpret my following struggles as divine punishment for such. For innately limited humans it is extremely disrespectful to seek too much knowledge.

Some details may be of questionable accuracy, i.e. the precise mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease. 

After spending some time developing basic science and math fundamentals, my curiosity led me astray for a few months. In the past, I have found the most purpose while working to achieve a concrete, well-defined goal.

The first lab I had the chance to gain experience in allowed me to follow along in a highly structured program but some circumstances outside of my control led me to seek opportunities elsewhere that were less biologically involved.

I applied to with the goal of acquiring enough technical competence to make myself directly useful in an engineering career right after graduation. However the next lab ended up to be too far off of where I intended to travel.

I quickly realized I lacked the inner drive to contribute to neuroscience research. It took me far too long to leave the environment though. I was working on a few different projects, one a literature review of decades of linguistic studies using a mixture of data types and techniques. Another involving data collection.

Trained to work in the lab. Discarded physical lab certification in 2024 spring to mark my permanent departure from the field. Linguistics focuses on meta analysis of human constructed patterns, and I found it more peaceful to use objective methods to model and understand natural order in the context of physics.

As I attempted to learn about linguistics and neuroscience, I quickly realized that I could not and did not want to fit all that knowledge inside of my head. The consequences of this path deviation from providing corporate and government utility were eventually severe.

So I wanted to leave that area in search of a purer science dependent on interactions between humans and nature, hoping to permanently delete all the knowledge impurity in the past.

This is ultimately what led me to switch my major to physics. This wasn't a decision I made alone, I talked with my dad, who graduated with an undergraduate degree in physics and pursued further education after in an engineering career. I also talked with my mom, who went to school for accounting and finance and worked in the area after. 

I had been considering this in the summer in 2023. Lab work didn’t seem to be carrying any of my original values or best interests forward though I did receive basic funding to work as an undergraduate assistant.

Due to this path that I realized was off of my original serious intention when applying to school and my lack of ability to separate myself from research interests that didn’t align with my direction, I overcommitted in the fall in an attempt to meet the demands of the lab I committed to part time work at, slowly and strategically pivot towards physics, and also practice and compete with the team. 

I was taking 60 credit hours worth of class spread across 5 classes, 3-4 technical. Spread out across work in the lab I no longer deem valuable to my life, and basic classes that would fulfill physics prerequisites. Working in the lab part time too and did not officially leave until the end of January/early February when I switched my major to physics.

In Feb/March 2024 I was an undergraduate, I had just changed my major to physics. After several email exchanges and meetings with a grad student supervisor and materials science faculty, I submitted a proposal to the department for academic credit for an undergraduate research opportunity. This credit proposal was approved.

However the scope of the project involved tools and methods far beyond my competence back then. The project focused on investigating and defining a possible relationship between sequence and structure of protein aggregates involved in the advancement of Alzheimer's function, which comes with neurodegeneration. inhibiting microglia function, and other biological details I have yet to be able to fully and accurately explain. The task involved using computational models that were trained on cryoEM images of folded proteins to predict the structure of more complex proteins with different confidence levels for different regions. The task asked for comparison of the ability of different encoding models to convert different sequences to vector form for further proccessing. Each letter of a protein sequence corresponds to a physical amino acid with differing physical and chemical properties. A researcher can choose to represent each amino acid differently: these methods contain different types and amounts of information. The two types of information I was asked to compare were sequences (and their various representations) and the confidence level of protein structure prediction.

I may add in more detail later on the exact methods I used but they did not extend very far beyond binary and multiclass classification tasks based on thresholds of accuracy set arbitrarily. I did not finish this semester successfully.