Foreword
I am sad and hopeful as I write this, on a gray afternoon with the last of the February snow melting away. It has been as hard a winter as the epidemiologists foretold - as hard a winter as I hope we will ever see. More than two million people are dead worldwide, half a million in the United States, disproportionately people of color. We will be telling our grandchildren about this year.
At the same time, it is impossible not to feel hopeful for a spring which brings vaccines whose development will go down as one of the greatest scientific feats in history. Amid a maelstrom of misinformation, political chaos, and bureaucratic ineptitude, the scientists - TJ grads among them - have saved us.
That, in the end, is why I went into science, why places like TJ fill me with hope. There are many reasons to love scientific research - the thrill of discovering something no one else knows; the sheer elegance of the way the universe works; the awe on your family’s faces when you say “dimethylsulphoniopropionate”. But for me the primary reason is very simple: science lets you improve, even save, people’s lives.
I am writing this foreword to implore you to live up to that potential. The universe has given you minds like diamonds and a scientific education that is the envy of the world. Do not use these gifts merely to enrich yourselves; we need you desperately. You will be soldiers on the front lines of the next great war - against another virus, or climate change, or something really fun like a zombie invasion or supermassive black hole.
In light of the social inequality this year has illuminated and exacerbated, I have a second plea: that you will work to expand the circle of people who feel welcome in our scientific community. TJ was an extraordinary school I will always feel lucky to have attended, but it was not always the most inclusive one. When I attended the school a decade ago, I heard rape jokes and racist and homophobic slurs on a regular basis; I heard the men in my class speculate about whether we got in to MIT because we were women; I heard so many mocking comments from the more experienced students in my computer science class that for years I stopped taking computer science at all, even though I am now a computer science professor. But even as I write this I am hopeful that those graduating TJ today will find it a more welcoming place: that with each decade, we further realize the great costs of excluding the vast majority of the world from scientific discovery. We cannot continue to turn away geniuses; we cannot continue to run the human supercomputer with 90% of its cores turned off. Be part of those pushing for change.
Congratulations on your tremendous work in the face of this awful year. You fill me with hope. I know I will be calling many of you colleagues soon.
Emma Pierson Rhodes Scholar Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Population Health Sciences Cornell University