TKS Session 26: Global Challenge 3 + TKS Velocity Session 16

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted, but I’ve been caught up wth a bunch of things. You can read about it in my latest monthly newsletter here. But we will jump right into this session and the stuff we have done in the past couple of sessions.

For velocity today, we talked a bit about outreach and caught up on what we were doing for focus work. I currently have a couple of things on the go for my focus. I am developing a CRISPR-Cas3 system that will be delivered to an E. coli bacteria to suppress its genes through phage-delivery. I am also doing lab work to run stability tests on phages and identify their optimal/non-optimal environments for infection/storage. As for reachouts, I have been talking to a variety of phage experts and making more and more connections. Something I could do to get better in this area is meet with more company-specific people rather than just PhD students/professors.

After a catch-up on our focus progress, we then got into the real session. We talked about the MotW, self-discipline. In order to have self-discipline, you need these things:

1. Understand the why

2. Optimize your environment for your goals

3. Would have, could have thinking

4. Forgiving and moving forward

5. Embracing the suck and the discomfort

6. Do it for you

The most important of these here is understanding the why. When you do something, like a project of yours and sport or commitment, you need to understand why you are doing it. When you are working on a project, it starts with your why, then your how, and then your what. The why is your belief/reasoning, the how is your process, and the what is your project. If you understand why you are doing what you’re doing, then the how comes easier, and finally, the what also comes easier.

We all then took time looking over our own why/how/what. It’s actually pretty difficult to write, as what you need to do is summarize all of your passion and beliefs about the project you’re working on and word it in a way that captures all of your reasoning. I’m still working on mine because it’s hard to put into words.

Then, we were given a list of things we could commit to for this week, and we had to choose 2 of them to practice self-discipline. The two I chose were:

1. 8+ hrs of sleep every night

2. No complaining

Then, we moved on to the actual bulk of our session.

In TKS, we have kicked off our second challenge. In this challenge, we had 3 companies to choose from: Samsung, Maverick, and Microsoft. Each company has its own prompt and focuses on something different. Here are the challenge prompts for challenge 2:

1. Samsung: How can Samsung leverage AI to redefine how people interact with their products, with a focus on accommodating people with diverse needs?

2. Maverick: How can we optimize and scale industrial biomanufacturing to produce economically feasible enzymes that disrupt stagnant industries?

3. Microsoft: As AI continues to grow and requires additional data centers, and energy usage – how can we sustainably continue the accelerated AI growth while saving our planet and optimizing costs?

Our group, with Sophia Dhami and Arissai Filleul, chose the Samsung challenge and are currently working towards developing accessible solutions for those with disabilities interacting with Samsung’s variety of products, but we won’t share too much now. Today’s session was getting to pitch our ideas to other groups, hear what others are working on, and then spend the rest of the time continuing to work on the challenge and getting work done.

Then, we ended the session there. It was very work-heavy today, but our group definitely found a new direction and is working to ideate and innovate something that aligns with Samsung’s mission. We have got a couple more weeks in the challenge, so we want to make the most of it!