#66: A Handful of Magic Beans and Big Ideas

A description of a fun, enlightening, and even therapeutic, exercise in capturing the influence of our previous experiences.

Who or what influenced your path in life?

Specifically, what were the moments or meetings that solidified your steps forward - or caused you to turn about and travel in another direction?

For academic sorts, one can create their academic family tree: a map of your ancestry from Ivory Tower to Ivory Tower, supervisor to their supervisor, et cetera. Presumably, until you hit upon a sage or sorcerer. You can also include your own cohort of lab mates, as well as your predecssors; I suppose the idea there is that they, too, would have influenced the work your supervisor - and thus, you - did.

While I did try it (only at the supervisor level), and found the results mildly interesting, it made me wonder about a broader spectrum of influence on my own career path. (Formally speaking - although, as I type, it would also be interesting to try this with my writing influences.)

And, of course, when thinking about how to depict my own influences, I thought about ways to creatively communicate these to you.

My first crack at a personal science timeline. (I regret the pencil crayon over my usual Midliner, but sometimes a gal has to experiment.)

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The timeline starts with a bean sprout. I was in grade 2, and I read Dr. Zed’s (nee Gordon Penrose, an Ontario scientist, teacher, and author) second book of science activities many times over. In it, he details the “Solar Sprouter”, which was an experiment to see whether seeds grew better under a dome of plastic wrap than no covering at all. Even in my partly sunny basement, I remember watching the sprouts and other vegetable types hit the ceiling of my noble makeshift greenhouse, while their uncovered cousins made more modest gains.

I loved this book, a school book fair purchase, I believe.

Four years later, I was spending spring Saturdays in a local high school science lab. The district put on an “enrichment” camp of sorts. I don’t recall all the activities, except for the experiment where we put a copper wire in a flask of silver nitrate, and later collected the solid silver as it changed positions with the copper, and when we dissected squids and then wrote our names out using their ink.

The bionic woman next to the squid in my drawing represents, oddly, a grade nine math competition.¹ This particular one was held at the university in Fredericton, and once the impossible exam was completed in the morning, they arranged tours of facilities while the tests were graded. We got to visit nursing labs, where we got finger casts, and a biomedical engineering lab that discussed prosthetics. It made enough of an indent on my psyche that I considered engineering for a very brief period.

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Once I was in high school, I was leaning into chemistry hard - hence, the green Erlenmeyer flask. I was enamoured with the possibilities of transformation, but something changed in first year university. I think part of it was mental health - I was burning out hard - but it was also this new mistress that appeared in my schedule as an elective.

I switched degrees that year, and dove into psychology - which, yes, included a human brain dissection at the neighbouring hospital. A humbling experience, to see the seat of our entire being in a 3lb lump of tissue the colour of canned mushrooms.

Throughout all this, there was my own emerging area of study - young adults’ mental health, as it is influenced by early parental relationships - but as I’ve discussed on here previously, I didn’t want to be an academic. So I broadened horizons, applying research skills in projects like “engaging with” and surveying communities about salmon fisheries, and how a loved one’s favourite music can soothe their symptoms of dementia. Funny how both of those projects actually have ties to more recent work, and also my own personal experience with my nan.

Work experiences are represented by building blocks (data analysis and knowledge translation for a local cohort in a national study on children’s mental health), a hardhat (policy in workers’ compensation), and blood cells (health research, where one of my favourite project-based experiences was setting up a study on multiple myeloma).

And now (as of three months ago), a new job, back in mental health.

Struggling to best capture “mental health” as an image, I saw this drawing for mental health as a seedling being nurtured. It struck me as an apt image when everything seems to have started with a similar sprout in a basement. 🌱

Sometimes, all it takes is a handful of beans to create some magic.

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1. Yes, I was a mathlete. Eat your heart out, popular kids!