From the talents of Kobe Bryant to the brains of Mark Zuckerberg, I have noticed that Boston is an overlapping feature in what was required to achieve greatness. By no means am I saying there is some hidden correlation between the two, but I think this city does have something to offer, mass producing some of the most successful people in today’s world. In the Sports realm, there are legends like Kobe, Tom Brady, Lebron James, Stephen Curry, who played for Boston or had to go through Boston to reach their championship aspirations. In the academic community Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael Bloomberg, all were rooted in their time at some of the best universities the USA has to offer. What is it about Boston that is so different from other cities?
From all of my professional contacts, it is safe to say that a good majority of them have spent some time in Boston. At UC Santa Cruz, when I first began in research, I met Professor Razvan Marinescu, and later took a course with his partner Leilani Gilpin. Both spent significant time at MIT at the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and those two were among some of my first insights into what Boston had to offer. But among their many aspects of their resume, I was more impressed with the challenging problems they wanted to address upon arriving in Santa Cruz. From an early point in my career I had realized that these individuals were able to get something from Boston that us Californians were not able to. In brief they bring two areas of research that weren’t very common which was generative AI models in healthcare, and autonomous vehicles.
These thoughts became even more apparent during my time at UCLA conducting summer research. Every week we had seminars hosted by the director and it felt as if Harvard was just mass producing successful Ph.D. and Post doctoral students that later turned into professors in California. They didn’t all necessarily come from the same lab but in general it felt as if they had gone through the same department to get to this point. Perhaps it is just some coincidence in the biosciences field, but it definitely seems like there is some trend between Boston biosciences and producing my academic contacts.
Now that I am in Boston, I am proposing a theory that greatness just runs through Boston. It is definitely not the only path to greatness but I think it is a common path to it. Boston is very much a unique city in the way it is constructed and its demographic. Boston itself lacks a centrality in my opinion and has many high density locations scattered around a certain mile radius. In addition to its lack of centrality, it also has a young demographic. According to the United States Census Bureau, Boston has a median age of 31.4 as of 2020. To put it into perspective, the median age of San Francisco is 38.8 (2020), Los Angeles is 35.9 (2020), New York City is 36.9 (2020), Chicago is 34.8 (2020), etc. I’ve referred to Boston as a young person city, and I very much believe it is driven by the young minds that blossom and drive forward rich ideas and passions. The condensed environments of multiple colleges as well, I believe is a driving factor in its success. Though we’ve talked about Harvard and MIT, there is still the following to name a few:
And the list goes on and on and on. I think the last thing that makes Boston such a successful candidate as a city is the job market here. According to Boston.gov, the leading industries in Boston are higher education (duh), healthcare, finance, tech. I believe these industries are probably the most important and hard to be replaced industries which makes it an incentivizing place to be. Even from a company perspective, there are many incubators, young entrepreneurs trying to begin big companies due to the many success stories amongst its peers.
For all these reasons, I believe I am lucky to be able to spend my time here. I am not guaranteeing greatness from myself but if things go well 20 years from now, I now know why. All jokes aside, Boston has been a great environment for me. A lot of the people I have met here so far are really passionate and driven and it is far different from the lifestyle I have been accustomed to in California. And while I think I do face constant pressure and stress at work, the problems we are tackling are for a greater altruistic good and I do love the problem solving aspect. But among all things, I am just grateful to be able to develop my craft in the industry which has helped me prioritize what exactly I want in my life. All in all, everything is filled with good challenges with equal reward and I can’t wait for what’s to come with the rest of my time here. Thanks for reading.
Side Note: I apologize for the hiatus in blogs. Work and life were particularly stressful and the last thing I wanted to do was write poor blogs. However I should be back on a more consistent schedule to share more of what’s been going on in my life. Real soon, I will begin traveling across America, so expect a lot of content related to travel coming up. Although I had just finished traveling not too long ago, I felt as if I had already explored much of Boston and would like to take advantage of neighboring states and see some friends. Here are some initial destinations I have planned: