Scientist Artist Engineer

by Ru Kein

It was the summer of 2019. I owned my own marketing and video production company, had my own apartment in Hollywood, friends that cared about me, and a girlfriend I loved. So why was I so miserable? Why was I waking up every day filled with dread, and staying awake at night, restless and consumed by anxiety? I hated the way I was living, but I was even more afraid of dying. “Yet Another Existential Crisis” - I thought I knew who I was now, I thought I loved myself. Was all of it a lie?

Hope vs. Faith

Any of us can look back at different points of our life and identify the breaking points. Moments of incredible fear, followed by moments of tremendous courage. To me, this is the difference between “Hope” and “Faith”. Hope is static. It gets you through pain, but nothing changes if you don’t act. Faith is courageous action, carried by a belief in something greater than you. I had been hoping for so many things, but I didn’t even believe in myself.

Wild Imagination

Peter Pan has always been one of my favorite childhood stories. I identify with not wanting to grow up because there’s nothing worse than being a grown-up with responsibilities and chores and low-level depression instigated by going to work every day for a job you hate. Like Peter, my wild imagination is one of my greatest assets. It helps me laugh at the absurdity and irony of life, because it’s easy to take ourselves too seriously and get bent out of shape about things that don’t really matter. Imagination is what gives us art, it’s why we have spaceships and a mission to Mars. We need to have our wild ideas that everyone thinks are impossible, and we need to have faith in what is infinite and unknown to our limited minds as mortal human beings. But Peter’s greatest asset is not that he believes in fairies and lives in a fantasy world of playtime — it’s that he has tremendous courage. He is not afraid of death — he welcomes it.

This is the reason he can fly.

I thought to myself: why am I afraid of death? If I were to die young — if I were to die tomorrow, what would I feel then? And the answer came to me immediately — I would regret everything, I would feel like I had wasted so much time worrying about meeting other people’s expectations of me, and my life would feel meaningless. I’ve known since I was a child what I love doing. My life flashed before my eyes, but this time I didn’t see that parts where I struggled to fit in or find myself for twenty years. Instead, I saw the seven-year-old version of Ru trying to solder the last piece of a little 3-wheeled robot I was trying to build. I saw myself collecting data in composition notebooks on various species of mice, their habitats and diet. And another notebook classifying various dinosaur - and “wannabe” dinosaur - species.

Ru’s First DataFrame object (circa 1997)

Goofball Confused?

I saw myself as an eight-year old laughing as I watched each family member sit down and interact with the prompts of my first Mac Basic program “Goofball Confused?” on our Macintosh Special Edition II. 30+ years later, I discovered that the computer (circa 1987), its games and “Goofball Confused?” all still work. That’s good engineering.

“Closet Geek”

I saw myself at age nine building a spaceship out of legos and submitting it to an official contest (I didn’t win but the journey was the destination and they sent me a certificate which I promptly framed). I heard my fifth-grade science teacher asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up and ten-year-old me responding without hestitation: “ASTRONAUT”. And more recently, I saw myself holding my breath on my 32nd birthday when I finally went to boot up the PC I built for 4K video production. “Did I inadvertently short a circuit on the motherboard? Did I put too much paste between the CPU and cooler?” The lights come on, the fans whirr - and like magic - the BIOS screen appears on the monitor.

Artist - Scientist - Engineer

None of us know when our time on earth is going to run out. I now see life is a precious gift - that to live is the only point of living, and that if we were “created in God’s image”, then we should be creating, because that is how we bring Good into a world that would otherwise just be chaos. What I realized in the summer of 2019 was that if I spend my days doing those simple things that make me who I already am - coding, writing, and music - then I will wake up every day knowing why I exist, and I don’t need some grand meaning of life’s ultimate purpose to guide my destiny. So I started learning everything I could, from Python to multivariable calculus, and a year later graduated from one of the top data science bootcamps in the world. In the fall of 2020, I left Kinetik to work as an astronomical data scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD. During the day (and sometimes at night) I build machine learning algorithms for space telescope data and image processing. At night (and sometimes during the day) I write stories and poetry, or I sing and play guitar. There isn’t much time left for existential crises - I’m too busy enjoying existence now for that.

I created this blog to remind myself who I am and what I like to do. It also lets me share my passion with the world as a Scientist, Artist and Engineer. What are these occupations other than someone who creates, experiments and builds? For me they are more than just occupations. If I just do those three things every day, I could leave the world in absolute peace - no matter when my time is up - because I’ll know that I lived exactly the way I was meant to live.

Contact

If you want to contact me you can send a message on LinkedIn.

License

This project uses the following license: MIT License.