LM: My name is Linet Mera. I am a graduate student at UCSF, and today I am interviewing Anita Sil,
who is a professor at UCSF and is also an HHMI Early Career Investigator.
and a mother of two kids, and a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
LM: Tell me a little bit more about what it is like to be an HHMI Early Career Investigator,
and how is that different from just being an HHMI investigator in general?
AS: So the HHMI investigator program has been around for awhile,
and is generally for more established scientists.
So a few years ago, HHMI decided that especially with the current state of funding,
that it would be really... that they could have a big impact if they
decided to fund scientists at an earlier stage of their career.
So they had their first Early Career Scientist competition in around 2009,
and selected 50 people to be part of this program.
It is a 6 year program with graduated levels of funding that increase over that 6 years.
And unlike the investigator program, it is not a renewable program, but it's designed to give people a real boost
at the time in their career that could have a lot of impact for them.
LM: Let's talk about Tae Kwon Do. What is Tae Kwon Do all about,
and how did you get into it? You know, what was the training like?
AS: Those are great questions.
So formally Tae Kwon Do translates into something that means "The Way of the Hand and the Foot".
And it is a martial art. It is a striking martial art that involves kicking--different types of kicks.
In my...there are some different styles of Tae Kwon Do
and the one that I learned we also emphasized a lot of hand techniques.
And we used a sparring style that included both the hand techniques to the head
as well as kicking techniques to the head, and other targets, other body targets. [
I really just fell into Tae Kwon Do by accident, really, so in the middle of graduate school,
I was looking around for a different workout.
I was a graduate student at UCSF, and here at Milberry Union,
just across the street from my lab, in the gym, they were offering a Tae Kwon Do class.
For some reason I stuck with it even though
I definitely didn't get into it with the idea of getting a black belt.
And in fact if you had told me as a beginning student that
I would one day earn a black belt and teach Tae Kwon Do, I would have laughed.
I mean I would have not believed that that was even remotely possible.
But you know, we had a very supportive group of people.
It was a UCSF studio, so we had some people from the community,
but a lot of UCSF graduate students and medical students,
and so I guess in some ways it was kind of an environment of you know, nerdy, 20-40 year olds to begin with.
And it wasn't a very testosterone driven environment.
It was definitely an ambitious environment, but in the sense that
people wanted to push students to the maximum but in a really positive kind of way.
LM: How do you even get from starting out to black belt?
I am sure it is a little bit different in different dojos, or studios.
In ours we had belt tests. That is probably fairly common in the Tae Kwon Do realm.
So there was kind of a progression from white belt to yellow belt, green belt, blue belt, red belt, and black belt.
And I think a lot of people made it from white belt to sort of to green belt, kind of the intermediate stages,
but then there was... So I think even for those people who came in with a lot of natural talent,
at some point in a martial art, you get to a stage where you are going to have to
put a lot of work and effort in to move beyond that comfort zone and learn to do things that you,
you know there is only so much that comes naturally before you have to put some amount of work into it.
So we tended to lose people at that stage.
For me it took six years to go in between white belt and black belt,
and for other people it was a shorter time frame. And for others it was longer.
So you didn't necessarily know, especially as a beginning student,
when the next belt test was going to be because our belt tests were a long affair.
So let's say, for an earlier belt, it was maybe a minimum of a four hour test,
up through black belt, which is a two day test.
LM: Oh wow. AS: They are big time commitments from the instructors point of view,
so they weren't just, it was rarely just one person testing.
You would get to know beforehand when your belt test was going to be.
Which was really important I think especially for the higher belts
because for me and the two people from UCSF that I took my black belt test with,
we trained for nine months, about 20 hours a week
A lot of that training together, which is a real bonding experience for sure.
LM: So what are the tests like? Do you just kick things? I don't know...what do they involve?
AS: The nature of the test is really defined by the instructor.
And I had a few different instructors over the time that I was a Tae Kwon Do student,
but the person who I think had the most influence on our tests
was the instructor that I had for the longest period of time, Philip Moore,
who is now a professor at George Washington University.
But he is great at pushing people to be the best that they can be.
And his general philosophy of testing was that
if you push people to the point of mental and physical exhaustion,
then you can see what they are really capable of doing.
So if you are fresh, there is a number of kicks or techniques that of course you can do well,
but if you really know how to do them, then you should be able to do them at
the end of two days of physical hardship, I think was the idea.
So our tests would include running. We would run sets of stairs.
There's two hundred steps between Kirkham and Lawton street in San Francisco.
On 15th Avenue, there's a steep set of stairs outside so we would run to those stairs.
We would have to run there holding some of those big exercise balls from the gym.
We would run sets of stairs. We would row.
We would of course do a lot of kicking techniques and hand techniques,
and sparring as a component of the tests.
We would do board breaks.
Formal techniques where there are...
so Tae Kwon Do has specific forms or kata, where you do sort of a set of techniques.
It's a group of techniquest that you do together, like a set of kicks or hand techniques.
And they get progressively more complicated as you move up and learn different types of techniques.
LM: So you spoke a little bit about how to manage your schedule.
Can you talk about how you've juggled all of those things?
AS: Yeah, I think the juggling is a challenge.
I always smile internally when people call it balance because it doesn't feel like balance in any kind of way.
I think a lot of it is compartmentalizing different things at different times.
So when I have to... when I know I am going to have to go home and
make 30 cupcakes because my son is celebrating his birthday
in class the next day, I don't worry about it when I am at work.
I am like, OK, I am going to deal with that later.
And when one of my kids is sick, and my husband is with them,
and I can't be there, and I am at work, I try not to think about that either.
I basically have to be very organized and focus on whatever is the task at hand.
and get it done.
There's... I think a lot of it is about figuring out how to be really efficient
and what types of things... you know what can I do when I am tired?
And do that then.
What do I have to be really on the ball to get done?
And sort of figure out times of the day that maximize my productivity.
LM: So do you see a lot of parallels or connections between your training and your scientific career?
AS: I think they definitely influence each other, probably in ways that I didn't fully appreciate at the time.
They are very similar journeys where there is a big picture goal at the end of it,
but to get there you have to focus on the day to day
and lose some of the anxiety about is this ultimately going to add up to something.
Am I ever going to graduate?
Am I ever going to get this side kick to work?
You just sort of have some faith that, at least,
I am going to give it the best that I can and I am going to take it one step at a time.
And before you know it you've actually gotten somewhere that you might not have imagined you were capable of.