As I’ve come to understand the general quirks and habits which I partake with my everyday life and work, one thing I’ve noticed more and more is just how much of that has come from the way my mom has done things throughout my life. My mother trained me to be a laboratory scientist and an engineer, and I don’t think she realizes it.
Allow me to explain: my mother has two particular traits that I think present the root cause of this. First off, my mom takes cleanliness to a level akin to a germophobe. Secondly, my mom will fix up anything, and I mean anything. Need to make a table? Learns carpentry. Car not working? Grabs the tools, opens the hood of the car, figures it out. I don’t even know how to exaggerate this further: if she needs to do ANYTHING, given time, the problem will be solved.
Watching my mother do things in the way that she does has stuck with me extremely well. Now I don’t want to appear special here. It makes total sense that nearly all of us pick up a lot from our parents, and anyone who cared for us as we grew up, but hold on. My mother is not a scientist. She’s not an engineer either. Before anyone asks, dad was a doctor. When I try to explain to them the things that I work on in college, its all smiles and nods. They didn’t spoon feed me into these fields. I more so fell into it, I promise. With that, let me continue to enlighten you as to why I’ve inadvertently become the person that I am.
It is almost terrifying just how clean my house was all my life. I took walking barefoot across every corner of my home for granted, up until moving out. My mom keeps our house absolutely spotless, and to such a degree that messing with her standards is subject to real consequence. Coincidentally, I now take the same quality of cleanliness to the cell culture hood: everything is organized and cleaned down to a T. Someone could argue, “I like things to be really clean and organized too, what’s the point?”. I’m going to say this in the nicest way that I can: You DO NOT move my stuff. It is where it is supposed to be. If it moves, all hope is lost. And with respect to cleanliness, I don’t play around. Everything must be clean. EVERYTHING. This is the mom standard.
From a fixer-up standpoint, it appears as though my mom tackles problems like this. She basically asks herself the following questions:
- What is my problem?
- What do I have that I can use to fix it?
- What don’t I have that I can/may need to use to fix it?
- Where can I get things I don’t have that I may want to/need to use?
- How long will each task take?
And so on.
My mom has been doing project scoping and design analysis before I knew there was terminology for it. Granted, the above list is a fairly simple and reasonable set of questions one might ask themselves. However, the way my mom did it was just different. She seemed to be able to figure out anything and everything. It seemed insane in hindsight to see her fix up a piano when she knew nothing about it from the inside. When something looks complicated, and it’s got problems, the first things I’ll do are ask a lot of questions, find a book on it, and then mess with it, safely of course ([looks left], [looks right], okay no one is looking).
I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to solve an engineering-related problem by asking someone to do it for me. Using the mom method, I’ve never had to. It’s just the way my mom did it, and so I became accustomed to taking care of problems like that, the way she would.
I don’t believe that every lab rat/tinkerer gets their OCD-like/handy(wo)man abilities from some idol figure during their childhood stages. Boy do I know where I got mine though. I think it’s almost embarrassing how much I take for granted how I was really brought up. I can’t imagine all of the qualities I have now were planned out by my parents long ago. Funny though, how it sort of comes out that way regardless.
