Belated update from Mark Elenko

Hi everyone. I’m sorry that it has taken me over a month to finally post something; a delay that reflects both my current crazed schedule and the degree to which I was knocked for a loop by Matthew’s email. Part of that shock was going from my long held fond and fuzzy sense of my time at BJ as being the best part of my childhood to the realization that I don’t really retain many concrete memories, and that the people whom I remember as children had instantaneously gained a quarter century. Whew. In any case, I’ll try for an update somewhere between Tanya’s concision and Chris’s full-bore narrative.

I think I was at BJ from ’77 to ’82. As a diehard native New Yorker I had great trouble leaving the city – it ultimately took me three decades just to move from Manhattan to Brooklyn. In high school I was mostly interested in math and science and wound up taking a lot of courses at Columbia, where I then went to college. I dealt with the unfortunate proximity to my family (over protectiveness and distance seems to have come up in a few posts) by ignoring it and mostly staying on campus. My original primary areas were physics and math but I burned out on physics and started veering all over the academic map (without ever taking biology, which I’ll get to). More recently, when I was applying to grad schools, I looked at my transcript and was surprised that it listed four different departments: math, computer science, political science, and English – not exactly the tight focus I started with. While at Columbia I fell for one of my classmates. Angela and I just celebrated our 17th official unofficial anniversary (I figured out years later when we had met by looking up the date of the midterm I skipped after we bumped into each and started talking) and to my great surprise I’ve thus spent nearly two decades with my college sweetheart.

After college I settled down in software development, the area in which I had both the longest history of enjoyment and the most obvious path to local employment. I got a masters degree in computer science at NYU and wound up, naturally enough for New York, as a software development consultant around Wall Street. On the up side, Wall Street had money, a mania for the latest technologies, and a supply of smart and entertaining friends. The down side was a complete lack of interest on my part in the actual financial domain, an absence of socially redeeming purpose, an embarrassing amount of waste of both people and money, and a goodly number of people who were not so smart, entertaining, or friendly.

Eventually my interest in the technical aspects of the work were not enough to overcome the growing negatives and after a drawn out phase of exploration I became interested in molecular biology. I found a faculty member back at Columbia who was crazy enough to let me work in his lab. A side effect of this redirection was that on the morning of 9/11/2001, I didn’t get out at a usual downtown stop but instead stayed on one of the last trains thru the WTC area, relatively undistracted by the crazy talk, people, and smells, continuing uptown to Columbia to check out my first biology class.

The upshot is that I decided to go to grad school in biology. In 2003 Angela and I moved to the Boston area. I’m in a doctoral program at Harvard and Angela has been studying linguistics at MIT – she spent a decade or so working in publishing but always loved linguistics. I was once the youngest person in my classes, now I’m the oldest. During our first week, a new friend sat down next to me and asked if I had heard that there was someone over thirty in our class – it took a long time before people could believe someone who acted so immaturely could be that much older. It has been a challenging several years (and I’m not close to finishing) but the work here is too cool to resist. I still get to play with computers, but now I get lasers, microscopes, and all sorts of other toys. My daily run-of-the-mill experiment involves watching single molecules and my field of interest is the origins of life – really way way too cool to resist.

This post turned out to be longer than I planned, but I’ve been typing in between steps of an experiment which is taking awhile. I’ve really enjoyed reading other people’s updates and I look forward to more.

Cheers. - Mark