Resume and Career Goals

Professional Summary:

Picture the scene:

Disaster struck, and we have a few hours to figure out how to fix it now using just what's on that table over there, or lives/the project are at risk. While I definitely don't want that to be a common occurrence, if/when it does happen, you'll be glad you had me on your team. Ideally, I would have prevented such an issue from popping up to begin with. Though not listed on my resume, my first part time job was working as a student at the Vanderbilt Dining Hall, to help pay for my tuition. Although most of what I did was scoop food prepped by the professional chefs, I moved as quickly and accurately as I could, since I was serving fellow students, and I knew we had places to be. My hard work earned me the compliment, "Oh good, Patrick has arrived, we can all relax now", as well as generous portions of my favorite foods whenever I came back to eat as student. (Shh, don't tell)

In both work and life, I always strive to find ways to do things better, without losing sight of the big picture, and fixing what isn't broken. Click the links for anecdotes that explore my points in further detail, or continue reading for more concrete details about my career goals, resume highlights, and projects I've worked on.

Looking for the other Patrick Meng that also went to Vanderbilt, currently located in Washington DC? Click here for his LinkedIn. 

Career Goals:

Academic + Experience Highlights:

Roles of Particular Interest To Me:

Desired Work Setting + Professional Goals

I'm seeking a long-term position where I can learn and grow professionally. I would prefer to have regular collaborations with team members or serve clients. Ideally, I would have multiple responsibilities in my role, in a dynamic environment where my problem-solving abilities can be put to the test regularly. However, given my current experience level, I understand that I'm likely to start in a more foundational role with more routine responsibilities while learning from more experienced professionals. I would prefer in-person or hybrid work but I'm open to remote work. Business travel as part of job duties is a plus for me.

I'm currently in the Cleveland area, but I would gladly relocate to a city like Boston or New York City for a suitable opportunity. I prefer a standard 9-to-5 schedule, even though I'm okay with occasional after-hour interruptions due to emergencies or travel. However, I would expect high compensation if work regularly exceeds 40 hours a week.

My prior position was in academia, but I'm seeking to switch to industry for better stability. I am flexible on the exact career type, as my skills are transferable to many industry types as shown above. 

My Resume

linkedin patrick resume.pdf

An Aside About Ethics of Any Role I Consider

If you were my parents, you'd wonder why I stubbornly went into neuroscience research, when I have the ability to write code, a skill that is far more economically valued.

In short, those that I love suffer from mental illnesses that modern medicines are insufficient in treating, and as a headstrong 15 year old I refused to accept the research's realist answer of "we're trying our best, but the brain is a complete mystery still, maybe in 50 years we can figure this out and have targeted treatments".

As a promising youngster, bright but perhaps naive, I wasn't going to take that as a satisfactory answer, and be content JUST using my healthy brain to get a CS degree, get a 6 figure job fresh out of undergrad, and relax in a big house while those I love get picked off one at a time by the apathy of society. I was going to try and do something, and if everyone told me it couldn't be done I was happy to ignore them. Apologies if that was dramatic, I hope you've interacted with teens before, they aren't known for being level headed.

Now that I've finished my first stint in academia, the reality has set in. I have to work for 60 hours a week for years, getting paid 30k a year, to have the hope of becoming a professor and get paid okay, but still get overworked and in all likelihood, not achieve my goal.

I don't have family or a spouse that can be breadwinner for me to continue pursuing "the dream", and as an actual adult, I need to provide for myself. Therefore, the transfer to industry.

That doesn't mean I gave up, I can now spend more time offering my kindness and presence to loved ones, rather than run off solo and try to save the whole world, while being isolated and miserable.

Not to say I didn't have a good times in my prior role, its just that now that I've finished all the goals we set out at the start, I realize I committed to much "to the cause", and I need to take care of myself.

I think it would be healthiest for me to do research as a hobby rather than a career. Once I settle into a good career, if I like I can still read academic journals, and if I come up with any insights, I could email researchers, spin up a cloud compute cluster in my own time and try some stuff. Academia might not pay well for insights, but they do a good job of listening so long as you are correct.

To conclude: I won't take a job designing weapons or coming up with creative barely legal ways to scam people. If that's the job, I'm not interested. I don't mind taking a job that's "boring". I would prefer building spaceships over manufacturing cardboard boxes, but if you think about it, everything comes in a cardboard box, even if its boring, its vital for society. And if a job is boring but stable and important, hey, that's a job, ideally there's 8 more hours each day outside of work to pursue interests, of any sort.

Ingenuity in the Face of Disaster

If this is your first time hearing about Apollo 13, settle in, it was a wild ride. Not the 13th actual crewed mission to the moon, but #3, so while exciting, hardly uncharted space. 

That was, until the oxygen tank blew up halfway there, and what followed set the example for how I personally strive to approach disasters. First, off, the calm statement: "Houston, we have a problem". They had every right to panic, but didn't, and it was unnecessary to assign blame, for now, everyone was still alive, and if they wanted to stay that way, it was time to get to work.

The main command module was failing but luckily, they had a fully functioning lunar module. Unluckily, it was not designed to fit all three astronauts on board, and it didn't have the CO2 scrubbing capability, and without it, they'd all suffocate. What followed, was literally a team of scientists on the ground, with a list of every item that was on the rocket, and the following task:

Movie Clip of the Scene from the Movie Adaptation of Apollo 13

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Spoiler alert, they were successful.

Now, I don't have the guts to be an astronaut. I actually don't take risks when it comes to my own safety. Even with the Boeing stuff in the news, overall I respect what the airline industry has been up to. Although its normal to be nervous while flying, I have never been nervous on flights, and in fact, I look forward to it. This is an industry that had a tragic history of disaster, and over time, has almost entirely eliminated the risk by continuously learning from mistakes, and staying on top of everything safety related with checklists, and tons of redundant systems.

In my detailed resume section, or in my projects, I will go into more detail about the specific accomplishments I did at my former role. But I will say, we often had tight deadlines to finish experiments, and things didn't always go smoothly. There were times when we either did the neuronal recording that day, or the data was lost because the window passed, and we just discovered a new thing we needed to implement to cover for a new complication that we just figured out the day before. 

And I'm proud to say, there were plenty of times when I showed up, was told we needed to get a fix for "some problem", and within a few minutes, I had whipped up the code or a quick fix to get us by, and then designed a more permanent solution once it was over to either prevent it from happening next time, or to have something robust for "repeated use".

For example, one time, we had a ton of micro wires that attached to a specific neural probe, and we needed it to interface with an entirely different model of neural probe. There was a lot of noise (caused by interference from the ungrounded wires just floating in air, and when capturing neural signals, even the extra signal from Wi-Fi, cellular, and the literal wires carrying electricity in the walls can be picked up and make the data unreadable), and the professor originally suggested we try soldering them together, but the wires were also shielded, and we didn't have a microfine wire stripper that would have gotten the job done. I then suggested, we have medical saline, and we have beakers, why not just immerse all of them in the conductive salt water, and then run a grounding wire into the same beaker? The professor was skeptical, but since it would take only a minute to try, and we didn't have other ideas, we gave it a go.

It did in fact work, and funny enough, when we tried to come up with a better solution, despite spending a few hours trying to do the soldering/ wire stripping by hand when we had more time and the proper tools, it turned out the most efficient solution is "the bucket of salt water" as I had jokingly called.

Getting Better Every Day, In Part By Not Fixing What's Not Broken

At my high school, my principal repeated this phrase to us, "Get Better Every Day" or GBED for short. That's overall good advice, and I enjoyed my interactions with him as a high schooler. However, the more specific adage I heard, is "it is not the tallest boulders that impede your progress most in climbing the mountain, but rather, then stone in your shoe". 

I was able to take both pieces of advice to my prior role. After losing valuable data due to a simple oversight, I pushed for having a checklist instead of just "doing it by memory", even though we had amassed plenty of experience in that area since then. I continuously refined the UI for software I wrote for fellow lab members to use, whenever they brought up a feature they had struggles with.

But I also made sure to pay attention to the small details. (The stone in your shoe). For example, when I was explaining how to use a piece of code to a coworker, I noticed the spacebar on his keyboard would get stuck. I asked, if it had been doing that. And he said yes, it had, and he had just been dealing with it, because most people don't like to rock the boat over "little things". I immediately replaced the keyboard with a perfectly functioning one from a computer we weren't going to be using for a couple of weeks, and placed an order for 2 replacement keyboards, since keyboards are cheap, and in a world of distractions, the last thing you want to worry about is unresponsive keys.

Adopting the latest tech can sometimes trivialize a previously difficult problem. However, its good to keep in mind why something works, and not just improve efficiency just for sake of efficiency. To illustrate that example, let's talk about the US National Parks. A task of the park rangers, is to clear fallen trees of the trails. For the longest time, they had went in with handsaws, and carried the wood away on foot. An outsider would consider, they should use a truck, and a chainsaw. Oh, trails not accessible to vehicles? Wheelbarrow and chainsaw? 

But let's think back to why people visit the park in the first place. For the quiet, and the chance to reconnect with nature. It's only sensible that the rules set out from the beginning banned all motorized vehicles, as well as equipment. Nothing would ruin a nice hike more than the din of a chainsaw. As for why the wheelbarrow isn't used, its because the traditional interpretation of the rules is that "no wheels", since bikes aren't allowed on most trails either, and as "the role models" the rangers thought it was only fair to not be hypocritical and use a wheelbarrow.

Some might argue its stupid, and that "we have the better technology, it would be faster". Faster is often better in business, but not always, its good to think about what you lose with speed. You can listen to music at double speed and hear twice the amount. You can eat your food faster by chewing harder, faster and fewer times. But its important to ask, what do you plan to do with all the time you've saved?

I'm happy to adopt some new tech if it has essentially all upsides and minimal downside. Sometimes, something just works. It's easy to focus on how some new tech can speed things along by some metric. And perhaps it does. But switch over at your peril, and after many hours, you might notice the 10% time savings was completely erased by the multitude of other problems that arose once more, that had previously been "invisibly handled" by tried and tested ancient technology.

I heard the story about the parks from a podcast called 99% Invisible. I've included a link to the episode in question here.