Unrelenting curiosity: On knowing ourselves and the universe
In this episode of the Imagine A World podcast, host Max Du (2024 cohort) interviews Barkotel Zemenu (2024 cohort), who imagines a world where the mysteries of the physical universe are mysteries not just to those who are detectives, but also to those who are not.
Barkotel shares his journey from Addis Ababa to Stanford, discussing his first experience of the world beyond Ethiopia and his adaptation to new cultural contexts. He addresses the importance of cultivating deep and authentic relationships, and how writing became a valuable tool for reconnecting with himself. Barkotel also explores the role of community in life, his reflections on the role of chance in shaping our destinies, and his fascination with dark matter and the curiosity that fuels his physics studies.
Resources
- Barkotel announced as a 2024 Lindau Young Scientist
- Barkotel's journey with Yale's Society of Physics Students
- Barkotel's LinkedIn
- How Imagine A World began
Guest
Barkotel Zemenu, from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is pursuing a PhD in physics at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Yale University with a major in intensive physics. His research experience across three continents spans particle physics, quantum gravity, and observational astronomy. At Stanford, he plans to leverage this expansive background to investigate fundamental questions in cosmology, with a focus on the elusive neutrinos and the hidden dark sector.
As an undergraduate, Barkotel was selected to join the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Physics, named Top Oral Presenter at the annual international conference hosted by the American Physical Society, and awarded multiple national scholarships by the American Institute of Physics. At Yale, he enjoyed being a physics tutor and studying numerous foreign languages.
Imagine A World team
Imagine A World's theme music was composed and recorded by Taylor Goss (2021 cohort). The podcast was originally conceived and led by Briana Mullen (2020 cohort), Taylor Goss, and Willie Thompson (2022 cohort), along with Daniel Gajardo (2020 cohort) and Jordan Conger (2020 cohort).
Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
Barkotel Zemenu:
I asked my professor, "What do you want me to bring to this lab? Should I take this course? Should I do this training program, this bootcamp?" And he was like, "Hey," almost like "Honey, don't worry," kind of thing. "As long as you're..." He said three things, "You're passionate, you're diligent, and you're not doing that thing where you nod even though you're not understanding what I'm saying, I want you."
I am Barkotel Zemenu. I'm a member of the 2024 cohort and a rising second-year student doing a PhD in physics. I Imagine A World where the mysteries of the physical universe are mysteries not just to those who are detectives, but also to those who are not.
Sydney Hunt:
Welcome to the Imagine A World podcast from Knight-Hennessy Scholars. We are here to give you a glimpse into the Knight-Hennessy Scholar community of graduate students, spanning all seven Stanford schools, including business, education, engineering, humanities, law, medicine and sustainability. In each episode, we talk with scholars about the world they imagine and what they are doing to bring it to life.
Max Du:
Welcome to another Imagine A World podcast. Today's special guest is Barkotel Zemenu, a PhD student in physics from the 2024 cohort. Now, we are going to hear a lot about physics today. We're going to hear about what dark matter is, the history of famous physicists and what that means for the field of science. But one thing that I know even personally from my time with Barkotel, we're in the same cohort, is that Barkotel thinks so deeply about every aspect of life. So we're going to talk a lot about that here today as well, about friends and people you travel through life with and the ways that you can write it all down in a journal so you don't forget years later. You're not going to want to miss this episode of Imagine A World. Please stay with us.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Imagine A World. This is Max Du. I am a 2024 cohort Knight-Hennessy Scholar and also a rising second-year PhD in computer science, and I'm here with Barkotel. Before we talk about the world you imagine, let's talk about the world that you are born into. Where are you from and what was your journey like here?
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah. I am born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Lived there for pretty much two decades. The first time I set foot in the US was for college, which is somewhat of an ambiguous statement. I didn't say the first time I set foot in the US was to begin college, but it was for a college summer program. I did it at Yale in my 11th grade summer. That was the first time I was exposed to the world outside of Ethiopia. That was the first time I ever hopped on an international flight. That was the time that I really improved my English in a lot of ways. But yeah, after that summer, I was pretty much brainwashed to apply to Yale for undergrad and I got in early and I think that kind of set the trajectory of my college career and beyond.
I applied to Yale as a history major and then thought of applied math and then thought of philosophy and at some point just settled into physics, but physics became more of a hobby and I started dabbling in a number of other courses, a lot of language courses, a lot of humanities courses, but I still enjoyed physics research so I applied for grad school and now we're here.
Max Du:
I want to go back to when you were, this was 11th grade summer and you decided to come to the US for the first time. What was that like? What was it like stepping off that plane for the first time?
Barkotel Zemenu:
The number one thing I wanted to make sure was have they portrayed America in the movies correctly? I landed in the US in DC. My family was living in Virginia, and I remember just looking at those suburbs and I'm like, "OMG, this is exactly like in the movies. It's so pristine." It feels very like, it's a country already well done, ready made. There's a lot of talk about developing countries in the most little sense of the word. Back home, you see development on the go and then you come here and you see what's on the other side of the development, like this is just a finished country. So yeah, I think I just populated my iPhone photo gallery, just pretty much probably 20, 30 pictures every day. I just take random pictures by the bridge, I see a deer, I see a two-story building, I see a villa, I see a bunch of people by the pool and fountains. It was just a lot of excitement. That was like a very childlike wonder, "Oh my gosh, I'm visiting and I just sent a bunch of pictures back home."
But yeah, at some point you just get used to it. I think it was an international summer program, the YYGS, Yale Young Global Scholars at Yale. You don't feel almost singled out for feeling or being non-American because 50% of the cohort is international. But yeah, you also just recognize that there's a whole world outside of Ethiopia, outside of what you grew up in, and you become so proud of how you were raised and the background and the story that you bring, but also you can no longer grow limited.
I had a classification of the world. There's two types of people in the world or there's two parts of the world. There's Ethiopia and there's non-Ethiopia, there's Ethiopians and non-Ethiopians. When you grow back home, this naivety is just lost on you and you come here and you just engage with people who've had so many different aspirations and desires and way of speaking and the things that make them smile or laugh, there are things that don't make me smile or laugh, because it is so not funny. Like the things that I find so amusing or is an inside joke that I don't even have to explain is stuff that requires a lot of explanation for them.
Max Du:
Give me examples, I'm so curious. Is there something that you remember? Is there something hilarious or some inside joke that just sticks out to you? Sometimes that happens.
Barkotel Zemenu:
This is less of an inside joke and more of an incident. Walking to the supermarket, and Americans are very, this is my initial feeling, they're very friendly. Wallet drops down at the supermarket and if someone sees it, they'll be like, "Oh, I'll get it." They bend down and try to get it for you. But the moment someone says, "I'll get it," you feel like they're going to steal it, from back home, "That's mine." And then reaching out for the wallet, they're going to pick up and give to you, but for you, it's like they're trampling on your spaces. And that was one incident where I was like, there's just a lot of subtleties of language that you have to learn when you come to a new world.
Max Du:
So this actually happened to you?
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah.
Max Du:
And how did this person react when you did it?
Barkotel Zemenu:
There was a mutual understanding. I think it was very clear. The realization settles in very quickly, right? Yeah.
Max Du:
How did you feel afterwards?
Barkotel Zemenu:
It was a bit embarrassing 'cause a very similar story happened to my uncle in Virginia and he told this, a very similar story. And I'm like, "Yeah," it did resonate a lot. It was a bit embarrassing.
Max Du:
Yeah. It's so interesting how, as you were saying, language is so subtle.
Barkotel Zemenu:
It is very subtle. It is very subtle, and that's where I learned of, even though I said 11th grade summer was the time when my English got sharpened a lot, it's not that I didn't know English or that I didn't know the grammar rules or even ways of saying because I'm watching movies and so on, but there's just a lot of subtleties and which your defaults for that to be our way of thinking.
Max Du:
Are there other examples of subtleties or cultural differences? Because I know you were saying there's Ethiopia in your head and non-Ethiopia, and I'm just so interested in seeing how that junction played out for you in your first summer and beyond?
Barkotel Zemenu:
Like saying goodbye. In Ethiopia, you say goodbye multiple times. It is a very interesting phenomena. If guests are visiting over and they're about to leave, they get up, they hug everyone, goodbye, goodbye, mom, dad, everyone. And then say, if some conversation starts, okay, just at the final moment, they start a conversation and then they repeat the whole goodbye process all over again. And then they go to the gate and they just turn around and do the whole waving thing, and then you have to come out and make sure that they have a warm, not just welcome, but a warm goodbye. So you stand on the door and wave, wave, wave. And this is not something I noticed back home, but after I came to the US and returned and I noticed the same thing. I remember saying, "Wow, this feels like such a waste of time. I already said bye to you. Why are you repeating it to me?"
But then I remembered having this conversation with my dad, and yeah, I think he just recognized that I was now suddenly exposed to a new world, and now this is almost reverse culture shock, where it was a very patient process of attuning myself and him helping me attune myself to this old new world where I was like, yeah, accepting it just the way it was. There's just this warmth that was desired and you just want to make sure people feel loved all the way through. But then in the US, initially I felt everyone was so cold. We had a really lovely conversation over dinner and I'm like, yeah, at the end people are like, "Okay, bye. See you." I'm like they just leave and for me, that's very cold. "See you later," I'm like, "Just like that?" There's no transition into a goodbye phase. And for them it's like just we're done, right, and onto something next. So that's something I noticed.
Max Du:
So you're someone who wants a long goodbye? You want to have a good relationship when you're meeting someone and you want that to be reflected in how they say goodbye?
Barkotel Zemenu:
Here's the thing. I've grown very flexible, flash, adaptable. So it's a lot less of I want it. It's a lot more like I notice that difference. And I have found myself being able to straddle these different worlds where, yeah, "As in Rome, do as Romans do," kind of tendency.
Max Du:
So when you straddle, do you pick one or the other or have you found a way to mix them together?
Barkotel Zemenu:
I pick one or the other. When I am back home, I pick that. When I'm here, I pick these. Yeah, it feels a lot less cognitive dissonance. The more you recognize it, the more you're aware of it.
Max Du:
The more you see it and the more you decide, "Oh, in this situation I want to act this way." Have you ever done an extended goodbye or use other parts of your life back at home here in the US?
Barkotel Zemenu:
Hmm. Here's another thing. Another Ethiopian in KH was sharing at one of the storytellings of how it's second nature for us to share. Like you get some chocolates or you get some treats and your first thing is not to open it and ingest it. Your first thing is like, "Oh, I can't wait till I get home and share it with my sister or my mom," or anyone else.
Max Du:
This is in Ethiopia?
Barkotel Zemenu:
This is back home, yeah. I also have to preface this immediately by saying it's a country of 125 million people. I grew up in the capital city, grew up not super exposed to everyone in the capital city, so somewhat like Ethiopia with an asterisk, my Ethiopian upbringing with my family.
Max Du:
Well, it's your experience.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Exactly. But there was just that sense of I want to share with someone. Like you get a chewing gum, you don't swallow the, I never swallowed the whole thing. I was like I cut it into two and give it to my sister. It's a way of saying we're eating from the same source, but just it's shared. And I remember taking out, like onetime my friend asked me, "Oh, Barkotel, do you have a gum?" And I'm like, I take it out and I just cut it into two and I give it to him and he's like, "Wait, what the heck?" And I was like, "Oh, sorry." I just gave him the whole thing. These kind of subtleties. I'm sure more examples would come into my mind. I'm not the most satisfied with the examples I gave you so far, but I'm sure more will-
Max Du:
But I'm getting the picture of it. From what I understand, it's almost like the place you come from is very community oriented.
Barkotel Zemenu:
It is community oriented.
Max Du:
You get something cool, you're like, "Oh, I can't wait to share this family, with other people," whereas it does feel like in the US, it's very much be yourself, do the cool things that you will do, but it's always so focused on the individual.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah. Another thing I learned in the US though is the V word, vulnerability. That was a very strange concept to me. Initially, the whole concept of grabbing meals, maybe it's a very college thing and you don't notice it in high school, but "Hey, let's grab a meal. Are you free next Thursday?" I remember coming here and I'm like, "Oh, what are we going to do?" So, eat and talk, eat and talk? It felt, I don't want to say a time-waster, but it felt that it was going to interrupt my momentum throughout the day. If I'm going to grab a meal with you lunchtime, so between classes, I am going to be distracted and then I try to go back to my studies afterwards 'cause I did have a very, not workaholic mindset, but work-comes-first mindset in college.
And this desire to just get to know people just for the sake of it, make friends just for the sake of the friend themselves and "do life together" was a very foreign thing that I had to grow to learn to, because even sitting down across someone on a dining table and just go deep immediately as opposed to warm up slowly, just ask the basic questions. And again, there are people who did that, but there are people who just wanted to know, "Yeah, what's been heavy in your heart this past week" or, "What's been the most exciting and the most difficult part of the past three months?"
And I'm like, "What do you want this answer to be? Do you want me to spill over all my authentic self, but then after this conversation, you're never going to see me again? So you carry a part of me with you that you're never going to follow up with, or are you genuinely interested in this question or are you asking this to everyone and you're just interviewing me or is this genuine desire to get to know me? And if I ask you the same question, am I actually going to get to know you or have you just a rehearsed answer at the back of your head?" So that was something that the meal culture or just getting to know people, sitting with people taught me in college in the US.
I never really experienced that back in high school back home. Maybe it's because it was the nature of the high school or the home. That's a new practice I brought into or a new me I brought into Denning House, for instance. I think my Denning House lunch interactions would've been very different with that old mindset. I would've come here, got my lunch, sat down, just listened to people, and just gave a bunch of shallow answers and left, as opposed to just allowing room for depth, for going deeper, for poking and poking and allowing others to poke me.
Max Du:
So you discovered depth when you came here?
Barkotel Zemenu:
I would say so, yeah. Again, discovered is not a, it's a tricky word, but I'll stick with that word, yeah, depth.
Max Du:
You unlocked it?
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah.
Max Du:
You found a gear in you that didn't exist-
Barkotel Zemenu:
A joy in it, a joy in it. Yeah.
Max Du:
You felt happy when someone asked you that for the first time or were you confused?
Barkotel Zemenu:
It took some time to develop trust that this was something that lasts. I think there's this desire for longevity in friendships and connections. No one really wants inauthentic deep questions. Fine, it's deep, but if it's just rehearsed, if it's just part of your vocabulary and at the end of the day after someone shares, all you're going to do is do like, "Uh-hm, yeah, I get it. I get it," and then just move on to talking about yourself or other things and just not follow up, then that very implicitly, subtly violates the trust of like, "Hey, I thought you cared. I thought you wanted more. I thought you wanted to go deeper and explore."
So I think that took time. That took, I think from sophomore year to senior year, there's just a lot of friends I grew to just experience the highest of highs and lowest of lows in their lives and they in mine. And that was the privilege of doing life together, of just experiencing someone and in all of their shape and form, and it's just at the end of the day, it's not about, "Hey, let's catch up," or "let's keep in touch after graduation," it's like you don't even have to say that, you've settled into that rhythm. So yeah, I would just say it took time.
Max Du:
And it's about showing up with your imperfections and everything that is not cool and just sitting down and being like, "I hear you."
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah, yeah.
Max Du:
"And we're going through that together." And it's like the flip side of that is, as you're seeing people who ask these deep questions, but they're not really deep, they're just there to do it because they rehearsed it, because they want to turn it to themselves. I agree it's so frustrating.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah. This is the nature of, partly the nature of an emotional intelligence or social intelligence in conversations. You want to adopt somewhat of a meta perspective during a conversation, not just like, "Okay, I have this 1:00 PM slot. I have to make sure this lunch happens or this dinner happens and I leave," kind of thing. It's the concept of almost sonder.
Sonder is this state of mind where you're just walking around and you notice people and like, "Oh my gosh, these people have their own lives. They have their own stories, just like I do. There's a soul behind it." That realization, but you can also have that sonder state in a one-on-one conversation like, "yeah, I'm bringing myself into this conversation, but so is this person." You can't force that, just like you can't force yourself into sleeping. The more you try to like, "Okay, I have to sleep, I have to sleep, I have to sleep," the less likely you're about to sleep. But maybe some people might say, I can do that, but I have a hard time doing that. It's one of those things like sneezing. If I try to sneeze, I can't. This is my problem.
Max Du:
It's about letting go?
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah, you just let go. You just lose yourself into it. The more you try to analyze it, the more you lose the beauty of it. Just go to Yosemite or Yellowstone or Grand Canyon, and the more you try to analyze it from a very scientific way of like, "Oh, how did the layers form and oh, this angle and that angle," you lose that beauty of it. But the more you just lose yourself in all the majesty and the grandeur, like, "Wow, I'm grasped by it," it's not that I'm grasping it.
Max Du:
Yes, you're grasped by it because there's something about beauty and other people that is impossible to explain intellectually, but you feel it deep inside of you.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's that quote by Blaise Pascal that I love, "The heart has its reasons that reason does not understand." And you can use this answer as a cop-out for everything, like, "Oh, why did you do it?" "Oh, the heart has its reason that reason does not understand." It's not a sustainable way of living, but deep down, there are certain decisions you make when it comes to aspects of say relationships or beauty or just impersonal parts of life or immaterial aspects of life and person-heavy aspects of life where deep down you just know it where no goes with that asterisk of like, "Don't ask me exactly the reason."
Max Du:
It's like, "Don't ask because I can't explain it. "
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah.
Max Du:
You see someone from across and you're like, "I think we're going to be great friends."
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah.
Max Du:
And you just feel it and you know it and you can't explain it. And that's beautiful.
Barkotel Zemenu:
It's beautiful.
Max Du:
But it's like you have to let go because you might also have that cognitive side of like, "I shouldn't do this or I shouldn't do that," or "Oh, look at how the layers on the Grand Canyon are forming."
Barkotel Zemenu:
Exactly.
Max Du:
But then you also have another voice that's like, "Just enjoy the moment."
Barkotel Zemenu:
For sure. Totally.
Max Du:
That's really beautiful and that's your discovering of vulnerability. It's also being vulnerable with yourself.
Barkotel Zemenu:
I think that's my KH improbable facts. My number one was, I've been journaling pretty much every day since sophomore year of college or first year of college, and that was an aspect of being vulnerable with myself. I first picked up journaling 2013 when I was 11, 12, but following my own train of thought, but also not just train of thought, but train of feelings, of emotions and seeing how they, like why I was actually feeling this way and going deeper and chasing it and chasing it while writing. Sometimes it felt weird. Sometimes I'm like, initially I started in 2013 when I was 12 because I thought I was going to be famous and everyone would be interested in reading my childhood, and I recounted my stories and what happened.
Max Du:
The Mighty Barkotel's beginnings. No, no. We were all like that. I was like that.
Barkotel Zemenu:
I wish I could acknowledge that, but I can't help it. There's just, when I opened my journal, I started from May 11, 2002, which is my birthday. I don't know if this is TMI to say on a public podcast, but...
Max Du:
How did you start your journal on your birthday?
Barkotel Zemenu:
So I started recording. I asked my parents what happened the day I was born, so the sources for this come from my parents. But yeah, when I was born, mom was at the hospital and dad was rushing from the office and this was how Barko came into the world. And then, I just walked through everything, but that was more of like a narrative part and I really still can't get how I was feeling as an 11-year-old.
Max Du:
Because you were a journalist to your own life.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Exactly, I was a journalist. But then I think college, I was more of like, it became a way of like if you just pressed your ears into my heart, that's how you'd hear. That's the impression you get from my journal. I didn't really hesitate to put that on my improbable facts of KH because for me, that was the most improbable thing that could have happened to high school Barkotel where I had already stopped journaling about high school. I was very academic focused. I had a very regimented approach to life. Even first year of me, I was just rushing through classes, through extracurriculars, didn't ever want to interrupt my momentum, wanted to go deep, but academically, intellectually deep. But yeah, that was just that softie part of me that I'm really grateful it came out. It made writing the KH essay really easy 'cause I just had to go back through my journals and piece a few sentences and just create some thread-
Max Du:
And it's so funny you say that 'cause I was literally the exact same. In high school, I was just so technically motivated, but in college, I found that side of me. And I'm very curious about how did you change, 'cause a lot of people just live their whole lives being technically oriented and they never discover that part of themselves.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Every time a how question is raised, there's always, like you think of how, what's the best way to approach this.
Max Du:
When was the first time that you started writing and you're like, "I feel my heart on that page?"
Barkotel Zemenu:
So that's one approach to do it. When someone poses a how question, I go back to the first time. But is it the first time that's really significant or is it how it built up through time and all the people that influenced it, or is it more even the underlying how of the how, how I really came to value that, is that what matters.
Max Du:
You're making it almost like a technical question.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah.
Max Du:
It's almost like, yeah, how do we even understand such a big shift in your life?
Barkotel Zemenu:
That's the tricky part of biographers. They try to reflect on someone else's life and how they changed. I was reading this book by Abraham Pais about Einstein's life, how did he came to embrace this or not embrace that, and it's really hard to make that, not just from a third person's point of view, but even if Einstein was writing an autobiography, I don't quite know how he would unpack that, but let me attempt to. People had a huge role in that journey. I think my first year, I still sporadically tried to journal, I still had that desire, but it was this one friend who journaled on Google Sheets and he showed me, he was a year above me, but he showed me, opened his Google Sheets and scrolled through different dates, and he's like easily, like September 22, he was doing this with his.
I just felt so much awe at that time because it was my first year and I just could imagine myself as a senior looking back at all my college journey and saying like, "Wow, I feel so lucky that I know this information in the first year because I could start it right now." So I decided to do Google Docs at the time and then every night, I started pretty much journaling and at some point it got tiring to just type it out, so I went to speech-to-text. So it was like every time before bed, I more like mumble as opposed to journal, but it really helped me be expressive. Yeah, there was no one in the room, I always had a single in college, so I was not disturbing anyone, but just that started my ability to just reflect on the day and somehow capture parts of the day that I didn't want to miss down the road.
Then at some point, I switched to the iPhone Journal app, but it just became a lot less of where I was doing it and how I was doing it, but why I was doing it. Initially, I was really just interested in capturing my day, and I'm like, "I don't want this day, just June 24th, 2020 to be forgotten." But later on, it became like it's not about what happened through the day, but how I was just developing as a person, how I felt at this lunch. Like fine, if I go through my iPhone gallery, I'll probably see a picture that I had a get-together, that we went to the Six Flags, but what was I feeling when we were on that trip? How did I feel on the journey back? And those are things that those pictures can't capture or even simply writing in my journal like, "Oh, I went with so-and-so and so-and-so," can't capture it.
So there was that aspect of it on the one hand, but on the other hand, just those friends who stayed, I think that's a very important part of my college story. It wasn't a bunch of transient friendships or just surface level, just like when you meet up, it's like, "Hey, we should catch up," and three months later, someone texts saying, "Oh my gosh, I saw you, sorry for your text," kind of like just distant kind of acquaintances, third-degree friends. Those are still valuable. You have your own life. You can't want that with, or you can't have that with everyone, but there were people who just, they never asked for my presence, I never asked for their presence, but we were just present in each other's lives. At some point, it became a lot less of a request, but became a lot more of just a fact of reality that we were not just going to let go of one another. And what I saw in those friends really almost internally converted me.
This is actually part of my KH essay, like this way of living just felt infinitely more valuable. It felt like this antidote to this self-consumed lifestyle, like a brand new script where the lead role is just not yours, it's shared. It's not your stage, you share it with others. But then a pivot that I wrote about in my KH essay too was Easter Sunday Service in my sophomore year, which was titled, What is Love? And the speaker dared to offer a very pithy response to that question. And I remember scribbling down in my journal, love is simply a fundamental other-centeredness, that at the depth of my being, I am thinking about the person next to me as much as I'm thinking about myself, and that just really rocked me. Even though on a more intellectual level I would call it aesthetically beautiful, fine, that makes sense, okay. I can even try to justify it culturally, yeah, I've seen people live that way back home and yeah, that's a good way to live, deep down, I don't know if I had internalized that, practiced that.
So that was a pivot, but again when you ask me how did you change, if I just mentioned that, that's only part of the story, that's not the whole story, just one step on the stairs that led me here and it's the stair that's still going on. I'm not pretending to have already gotten there, but it was just a series of those onetime events and extended events that just grew in me, this new personality, new dimension of approaching the world.
Max Du:
It sounds like you learned how to love yourself too. If you're looking at otherness and if you're looking at yourself almost as a different entity, you're like, "How did I feel today? Who was I today?"
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah.
Max Du:
And you're recording it down for your later self. It's almost another degree of love. It's an otherness that's also kind of weirdly centered on yourself.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Exactly. Exactly. That's a knee-jerk reaction you can have to other-centeredness, "Oh, so am I going to be a doormat?" Like, not quite.
Max Du:
No, you don't have to be.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah.
Max Du:
You can be your full self and also care deeply about other people. This is concept if you know of a ride-or-die, it's like if you find the right friends in your life, it's like you feel like any sort of crap you deal with in your life is shared and all the beauty is shared and everything. It's like it makes life a lot less burdensome 'cause you're walking through it together.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yes, yes. Stay in mine, mine and them. Yeah, and it's liberating.
Max Du:
It sounds like you found a really amazing group of people in your undergrad.
Barkotel Zemenu:
I did, and it just becomes not" an undergrad thing." For some of them, who graduated afterwards, I still, I don't want to say the word keep in touch as if it is just touching you once in a while over iMessage.
Max Du:
Yeah, it feels wrong. It's more than that.
Barkotel Zemenu:
It's more than that. Still present.
Max Du:
What is that like for you?
Barkotel Zemenu:
I think this is one of the fullest ways we can approach reality and the world as we live in. It's not the only way, I think, and we can talk about this later, but there's the physical universe aspect of this reality that's also just so beautiful and touching, but it feels very incomplete. Like especially my physics journey, I can say that it feels very incomplete without this human endeavor and those that you do it alongside with. Yeah, fine, I think as an article of faith, I can say the physical universe out there would exist independent of my imaginations and our pursuit and our relationships. But the pursuit of it becomes so much richer when it's supplemented or it goes alongside and parallel with this also just equally rich interpersonal life.
Max Du:
Yeah. It's like there's a world we're in, it's made of atoms, and we're humans and we're biological. But it's somehow the fact that we're living, the fact that we can exist with other people just makes that whole world so much more colorful.
Barkotel Zemenu:
That's why you can have a lot of instances of science gone wrong. You can also have a lot of instances of non-scientific way of life gone wrong, by non-scientific, I would quickly put an asterisk and say it's not saying anti-science, more like just a part of life that can't be broken down or analyzed by science like relationships or the artsy part of life. That could also go wrong when you miss the other component of it when you're like, "Oh, all I care about is feeling and emotions and what's underlying it," and you don't really quite care about investigating it, okay, from a logical or rational or scientific point of view though, at least somehow try to ground this and justify this. You lose a lot if you ignore that scientific aspect of it.
Also, when you approach science and look at the universe and think of the puniness of this earth or maybe the majesty of this earth and how it's just particularly habitable and particularly just a result of so much luck, you could phrase it that way, but if that's the only place that you stop, you just miss a component of reality that's just like, yeah, it's not that you're wrong. It's just incomplete. It feels very incomplete.
Max Du:
So what you're saying is for people who look at the earth and are just in confusion of how lucky they are, what would you say to them?
Barkotel Zemenu:
I think my concern is not this awesome realization of like wow, look at the series of pretty much unexpected, I don't want to say random, but a lot of open steps that were taken, open in the sense of it could have gone different ways, open steps that got us here, that's almost a fact. That's pretty much a fact, but it's purely fixating on that and forgetting the end product of that like where we are right now and what we have right now and just focusing on the process that in a sense you want to just label it as open or random or just thoughtless, and then you just forget it's a thoughtful creature at the end of that thoughtless process that's making these realizations and you're surrounded by other thoughtful creatures, and if that aspect is missing, it's just like it's not wrong, it's just incomplete.
How about we try to fit that other piece together? Fine. Initially, it doesn't seem that you fit a thoughtful creature with a thoughtless process, but maybe there's more to this story. There's more excitement and this doom of just looking at this world and say, "Oh, everything is pointless," or there's a more tempered way of approaching this world by saying, "Oh, we're the center of everything. Look at us, a thoughtful creature." It's uncomfortable from someone who just, if I just want a quick, easy answer to what is the point of it all. It humbles you when you recognize, "Oh, there's so much puniness in my tiny little puny mind."
Max Du:
And yet, it's so large for you-
Barkotel Zemenu:
It is.
Max Du:
... as someone who experiences and feels so deeply. And at some point, it's like it doesn't matter how rare it was, but that it matters that it's happening right now and we're living and we're somehow just breathing and alive and experiencing. But that's something I'm so curious about for you 'cause you're very technical. You're doing your PhD in physics and yet, in our conversation right now you have the mind of a writer as well. And I'm just so curious about how your journey has been like with those two worlds. You kind of think deeply in all aspects of it.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Again, I remind you the physics came after a lot of wrestling in college after applying as a double major in history and applied math and then wanting to do philosophy, physics, linguistics, and then suddenly just, it feels something I just cannot let go of, the physics aspect of it, 'cause it just fit reality or I should say physical reality at its most naked, at its barest, at its core, and there's just something so intellectually seductive about that. It's more of like a hobby at this point. It feels like, yeah, I don't consider my 9-to-5 as a job, it feels something I can do and think about. And even sometimes this complaint of like, "Oh, I go home and I can't stop thinking about work." For me, yeah, I can't stop thinking about it 'cause there's something tickled about me.
Again, it's not the fact that I have to get the slides prepared or this poster done or this graph for the next meeting. Those things, I rather not have to think about them after work hours, but that excitement that engenders about, like this big picture when you zoom out, sometimes you look at a picture at a museum, you can go to a museum and you look at a piece of and very closely, but then you take a few steps back and you're like, "Dang, this picture, she's really cute. I have no idea what the artist was thinking of, but it's not just a tiny part that I was focusing on." And same thing for me. I think the more I zoom out from my research and I think of, maybe it would help to give more details of what I work on.
Broadly, it's dark matter. What is dark matter? How can we find it, how can we detect it? How can we verify its existence? And it's a field that lies at the intersection of astronomy, of particle physics, of these days of a lot of quantum technology. Even it could venture into species like atomic physics. It definitely does venture into those species.
Max Du:
So before we go there, for listeners who aren't as familiar with dark matter, including me, what is dark matter?
Barkotel Zemenu:
This is why I love studying history 'cause I could just give you what it is, like a definition and not really enlightening you why it's actually called dark. But then the attempt to tell you why it's called dark is like sometimes there's not even much reason except for the fact that it's non-luminous. It doesn't emit light. Okay, let me attempt a definition. It's not even a definition, just one aspect of approaching it. Dark matter is this component of this universe that shows us its existence gravitationally through its attraction, i.e., it's matter, it's not radiation, but it doesn't emit light or it doesn't interact with light, which is why we call it dark.
Some comments here. Like stars, they're matter, okay? They're actually made out of atoms and the protons and the neutrons and whatever constitutes of that, quarks deep inside. But at the same time, they also emit light. They also interact with the electromagnetic part of physics, in which sense we can actually detect them. Our instruments can actually verify their presence, not just through their gravitational pull, and not just through [inaudible 00:34:32] just tug of war with each other, but also what they emit. But dark matter, it only manifests itself through, for instance, how it speeds up other galactic bodies or other stars, or how it distorts space-time, i.e., how it just says because I am here and because I have mass, I can actually change the fabric of space-time and this is only something that matter can do. But, yeah, at the end of the day if I can just boil it down, it's like yeah, dark matter is just this non-luminous, non-radiating gravitationally present something out there.
Max Du:
So it sounds like it's something defined almost in terms of what's lacking.
Barkotel Zemenu:
It is, but there's also something that's so present. Two things on that. Number one, it forms pretty much 85% of the universe, almost like a one-to-five ratio for every matter part, luminous matter particle, what we call non-dark matter. There's this five times more abundant as far as its density is concerned, so in that sense, it's very present, it's very not lacking. Another sense in which very present is that, yeah, it's influence on the way galaxies form, on how they form, it's influence on the underlying structure of the universe, it's very pronounced. What is lacking is, if you ask me, so what is it made of and how much does it weigh? How much do the constituent particles of dark matter, if it's actually particles, how much do they weigh and how do we detect them and how do we verify them? Or is it perhaps the way you're approaching gravity, perhaps that's wrong. Perhaps you have to modify this old Newtonian way of looking at the world or even this Einstein way of looking at the world. Perhaps that's the problem, and you don't have to invent this new thing out there.
If you keep adding these questions, then it becomes a lot more complicated and you see what's lacking is additional evidence to provide an answer to this question. I could volunteer some answers to these questions, but I don't quite know how to back them up and that's what a lot of experiments around the world are trying to do. That's what my research group is currently trying to do, participating in one experiment that attempts to address this particular flavor of this question. But yeah, and the more you get deeper into it, it gets technical and it's just easy to miss the grand beauty of it. This almost philosophical/epistemological aspect of it. If you ask me about it, how do you know that dark matter exists? My answer evolves. Literally, it would be totally fair to say I trust my advisor or I trust these papers that I read.
It starts being based on some level of trust, but not entirely on that. Fine, I kind of know how these equations are derived, I kind of remember them from my undergrad class, but then you can ask me, "How do you know those equations are real 'cause I'm sorry, but you're telling me this is something like 85% of the universe? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What is your evidence?" And initially it's just it's almost an esteem of I trust it so I go deeper into it. It's not like I enter it. It's not like anyone enters it with full confidence knowing A to Z what the evidence line is, but you grow deeper and deeper into the realization of it.
You start reading more, and as I said, it is the intersection of many different fields, so an astronomer might not know everything that the particle physicists say about dark matter. Vice versa, a condensed matter physicist might not know the historical motivation of it, but probably definitely know very well how to experimentally detect it in a particular way and this synergy of different fields, it stops becoming a buzzword and you recognize it's actually making the fabric of your field. Actually working on the day-to-day aspect of the lab is also very stimulating because you see there are tiny contributions that at some point stop becoming tiny because you recognize okay, this experiment would not work without this particular contribution. And the more you add your own flair to your contribution, you're like, "Yeah, this experiment would not work without this particular flair because I was the one who provided this particular flair." But it becomes a lot less of a me thing, a lot less of an individual thing, it's an us thing. Physics is not one of those things you can do alone.
Max Du:
That reminds me of just so much the stuff we talked about before of like you're finding love in science, you're finding it in other people, and you're realizing, almost the same way that you're finding out in other friendships, that in science all the past works matter. You're defined in terms of everything else.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah. And that is partly what, I think I get asked a lot of this history to physics pivot. And that formed a core part of that, just seeing how, I was really into 18th and 19th century biographies. I just wanted a personal dimension to how they approached their work, so I was so much into reading their diaries and letters to their friends and to their partners, and I'm like, "Wow, there's so much life this scientific endeavor brings to their existence, but there's so much life other part of their existence brings to their science, like the way they approach their work, it's so much infused with this deeper realization of beauty."
I think James Clerk Maxwell, his biography, the Life of James Clerk Maxwell was published in 1883 by Campbell, Lewis Campbell. I was just in love. So many poems that he used to write alone to his dad, to his wife. So many reflections on his work back and forth with this other professor, this Pope, this friend of father. But yeah, sometimes he just infuses equations in the middle of his letters, and I'm like, "I understand his letter except for this equation or except for this what this thing is. I wonder what it actually means." And just tracing that history of how people come to know things and the way he was just talking about other physicists, like fellow physicists, which for now for me are like, "Oh, ancient physicists like Clausius, like Kelvin, Thomson." Like "Oh, those are just, I just know them names and equations," but for him, they were contemporaries and how it was just such a very social endeavor, together endeavor that landed us here. It just really humanized the process as opposed to looking at it from a distance and say, "Oh, wow, those are the detectives out there."
This is part of my Imagine A World statement when I was like, "I Imagine A World where the mysteries of the physical universe or mystery is not just for the detectives, but also for those who are not." Yeah, it's easy to just look at Maxwell and Newton and Kepler and all the other scientists and Einstein, and say, "Those are just the detectives and whatever the detectives declare," not just to be solutions to the mystery, but mystery itself, like, "Okay, we accept it." No, no, no. At least embrace the fact that it's a mystery. At least allow yourself to be confused, to be baffled by all the quandaries lying at the depth of the quantum physics, at the depth of astronomy and definitely, other parts of science where at least that's for everyone, like solving them, doing what Sherlock Holmes does. It might not be for every citizen, might not be for every public, it's okay.
At the end of the day, you can't have everyone trying to solve a mystery or trying to solve this particular aspect of the mystery. There's so many aspects of reality's mystery that's buried into different parts of life, but at least the mysteries of the physical universe. Fine, if someone wants to call themselves scientists and want to go deeper into it, let them explore it. But it shouldn't be relegated to who we consider to be the detectives of like, "Oh, so-and-so is a physicist. Of course, they must be right." No, ask.
I think I like it when I explain whole dark matter problem to someone and they'd look at me and they say, "Baloney," or "that's a fluke," or "Oh, come on. That's just a fudge factor. Come on. You're just making stuff up," as opposed to like, "Oh, wow, that's so cool, but I could tell you loved dark matter. That's amazing. Yeah, you must be so smart." Those are not the responses that elicit much motion in the conversation. I think there would be so much depth if you push and say, "But it sounds a bit ludicrous, doesn't it? Like five times as many."
Max Du:
I don't think so. It sounds like you don't want to be put on this pedestal of I am the investigator, my word is last.
Barkotel Zemenu:
You don't want to, I don't. Yeah, and I want someone to push back and say, "It feels so ludicrous though, five times as many like dark matter. How are you even going to detect it?" Sometimes I say a very confusing statement, if you ask me about a technical part of my research. I say, "Oh, we want to see if in the presence of a strong magnetic field, dark matters converts it to photons." And that's what we're trying to detect, and someone is like, "Wait, I thought you said it's dark. I thought you said it doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum. So how does it change into photons? I thought photons were electromagnetic." I'm like, "Thank you for paying attention," as opposed to someone listening to that and saying like, "Yeah, oh, that's so cool." I understand if someone says that because it's easy to just give this intimidating feel of like, "Oh, I work on this," and someone's like, "Oh, wow. You must be so smart. You must be so right. If I ask a question, it's going to be a dumb question."
But if you just imagine how the life of a first year or second year or third year or fourth year or fifth year of a grad student is just going through that, I'm so dumb process of just asking the dumbest of the dumbest questions, then you recognize, well, if everyone is asking those questions, then if these are necessary questions, then why am I calling them dumb? More necessary questions, more like unavoidable questions.
Max Du:
Yeah. It's this whole thing of you feel like an imposter. You feel like you're asking the dumb questions, but in reality you're asking the right questions. But it's asking the right questions doesn't take a genius. It just takes someone who is attuned to the things that are bothering them.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah, yeah, just pay attention. That's why they love it. I remember my first year of undergrad. I asked my professor, "Well, what do you want me to bring to this lab? Oh, should I take this course? Should I do this training program, this bootcamp?" And he's like, "Hey," almost like, "Honey, don't worry," kind of thing. "As long as you're..." He said three things, "You're passionate, you're diligent, and you're not doing that thing where you nod even though you're not understanding what I'm saying, I want you." Yeah, it's that attitude of... I think it was a grad student mentor who said that to me. That's what I want, as opposed to just this pretense of like, "Oh, I prepared. I know everything. I'm ready to contribute." I know you can only contribute so much, especially with all the other things going on in your life. Just bring that drive, curiosity and just unrelenting curiosity.
Max Du:
Yeah, unrelenting curiosity. And it seems like I see that in all aspects of your life when you're wondering about in your journals, your emotional reality, your physical reality. It's like it's all this curiosity on every aspect of your life.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah, it develops. It just makes you humble. It just makes you, okay, maybe I shouldn't say it makes you humble. I remember reading this book title saying Humility and How I Achieved It. I'm like hmm. I don't want to give that aura of like, oh-
Max Du:
Situational irony.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Exactly.
Max Du:
There we go.
Barkotel Zemenu:
I think the book was intended to convey that irony, but at the end of the day, it just makes you very conscious of your thought process. And in conversations, if you meet someone who just has a very different point of view, you're like, "You know what, let me first try to understand it, and then maybe I can go home and in my journal try to reflect on what I thought and why I'm too stubborn to still stick with my opinion or the way I see things."
Max Du:
But it's like yeah, curiosity will help us go through disagreements instead of being like, "I am right, and you're wrong." It's like, "Tell me why you think that."
Barkotel Zemenu:
Exactly. Exactly. And it's totally okay if at the end of the conversation you're like, "I'm glad you've told me why. I'm not sure if I still see why that should make me feel or think the way you do, but maybe at some point I will because where you've come to right now is not just the function of those things that you just told me, but of the time that has passed that has kind of cemented these things in your head and your convictions in your heart, and maybe I might need some time to come to that point. Or maybe at some point we'll realize we're not so different. Not to violate the law of non-contradiction, but at some point, we might recognize that it wasn't really contradicting or we're just approaching it from different ends."
Yeah, and you recognize it in a lot of the scientific endeavor too where we might not even call it empathy though. It is more like I have to use the H word again like humility. You can only know so much from this vantage point or from the tools that you're using and from how you're approaching it. Maybe you need to use different tools. Maybe you need to approach it differently.
Max Du:
Yeah. It's like all of those things at once.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah.
Max Du:
One of the things that I've just thought a lot about during the conversation today is as you're reading those biographies and you're realizing these famous scientists have all these personal lives and these deep lives, it's almost a situation here sometimes in our world today, you see a lot of really famous people, a lot of famous scientists and everything, and sometimes it's a little frustrating. Personally, seeing them working with them and they're so professional and they're so academic and you have a personal life, I feel like knowing is better for people.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah. That's one way I really benefited in college too, where I was part of Society of Physics Students in undergrad, and one of the things that we pioneered that I'm so happy for was Dinner with a Professor where they bring a professor, bring them to a dining hall and a bunch of students, and we just not grill them, but at least ask them about their life story and just no questions left unasked. Maybe they could leave it unanswered, it's their prerogative, but at least you're willing to pokey, pokey, pokey, pokey. Like "Oh, I was just asking when did this happen? Oh, when you moved, what did your wife say? Oh, was your husband in the area? Oh, how did that happen? Oh, what was it like with children? Oh, what happened at that moment, that semester? Oh, when those student evaluations were so harsh, how did you feel?" And then, yeah, you just get to see that non-professional aspect of them more. I don't even want to call it non-professional, just professional, but just infused with this personal dimension.
Max Du:
Yes.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah.
Max Du:
It adds just a whole another, it used to be a flat character, but now it's fully developed.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah.
Max Du:
Did you feel like after having dinner with a professor that you could approach that relationship differently?
Barkotel Zemenu:
Even e-mail them comfortably, like, "Hey professor, remember we had this chat last time at the dining hall? I was wondering about... Can you please help me..." Something like that. When trying to decide grad school stuff, for instance, "I'm at the same juncture that you mentioned last time. I'm experiencing the same problem. Can you hop on a call?" You have that freedom of approaching them. They no longer feel behind these mentally constructed ivory tower.
Max Du:
Yes. That I feel like is a core about you that I've learned. It's like you want to remove that pedestal. You want people to be like, "Hey, I know you and you've been through the same journey, and we should talk."
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah, yeah. Why the pretense? Yeah, why the pretense?
Max Du:
Yeah, why the pretense? Why the ivory tower in the first place? We're all humans.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Exactly.
Max Du:
We're all living and experiencing these things.
Barkotel Zemenu:
For the 2025 cohort for Knight-Hennessy when giving them the immersion weekend welcome speech, that's something I really wanted them to take away. It's just, especially at that moment as finalists, there's that tendency to feel that, "Oh, I have to be the best of the best, king of king, queen of queens." To be on that aisle of the Knight-Hennessy Scholar experience or to go past the stage or to become a Knight-Hennessy Scholar entails having the sense of perfection to always be sitting at those peaks, to always having this grand, beautiful, clean story and I'm like, "No. Fine, I go through the scholar stories, and all you read about is peaks and achievements, and so-and-so who graduated Summa cum laude and was a Rhodes Scholar, got Forbes 101," kind of thing.
Max Du:
Yeah. No, it's literally that.
Barkotel Zemenu:
It's only the peak of the peaks, but that's the nature of these biographies. I remember one scholar who used to say, "We write those biographies to intimidate." It's almost the intention of, "Hey, these are all the things I've done." But that's just a very incomplete story, and I really wanted those, especially finalists to know that once you cross this aisle, it doesn't make you king of king, queen of queens or peak of peak. That's why I love the Knight-Hennessy. One question that they ask in the short answer is like, please tell us of a time when you fell short of expectations. And there's just that recognition of we will accept you, but whatever you write here, with some caveats. But wait, I do have something in mind when I see some caveats, so I just don't want to make an extreme statement. I don't want to be grilled by John or Dana. We're not looking for angels or saints. We're looking for just normal fallen human beings who are just willing to make themselves right as much as they want to make the world a better place.
Max Du:
And in some ways, these people who have seen nothing but success might not know how to handle failure.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah, yeah. But I think if someone says I've seen nothing but success, it's more like, okay, I've opened my eyes to my times of success and closed my eyes in those times of failure.
Max Du:
That is probably bad as well.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah, exactly.
Max Du:
Sometimes you talk to these people in academics or whatever, and it's like they're just so good at just pushing out their successes that you almost don't see them as a person anymore. And it's like, "I'd much rather hang out with someone who doesn't have any successes, but is just so grounded and so human as opposed to someone who is even literally a Nobel Prize winner."
Barkotel Zemenu:
Yeah. This is what I've done. Summer 2024, there's something called the Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting. It brings together, like the Olympics every four years, so every four years, the physics Nobel laureates and the chemistry and then econ and then medicine, and then physics, so it repeats every four years. The reason is it brings together those Nobel Prizes and then we get to meet young scientists, undergrads, grad students, postdocs. The intention is just so that you get to see this very personal component to their lives. Fine, they talk about their science, they have seminars, they have lectures where they tell you about what they did, but there's this intention of you get to see their stories and you just see that they're normal human beings. Don't touch them, but you can technically touch them and feel that they're humans just like you.
Max Du:
Are you human?
Barkotel Zemenu:
Exactly.
Max Du:
Boom, boom, boom, you are human.
Barkotel Zemenu:
I think those experiences really transformed my time too. Again, I come to the US and I'm like, "Oh," I think of institutions and I'm like, "All those professors, they must be like they have the swankiest mind on the planet, just so deep and so untouchable." But it's like even they don't want you really to feel that way. Like the Nobel Laureates, I went to that summer meeting and I'm like, "Oh, wow. I wonder what they're going to be like." But in the end, I didn't even want to take pictures, ask them for selfies or whatever.
But on the one hand, I felt they've gotten that so much that it would just make them feel almost objectified. But on the other hand, if I get this one-on-one opportunity with this human, after I take a selfie, I would feel satisfied and I'd want to leave. But if I start asking a question, he would start saying more, she'd start saying more, and I'd want to keep that conversation going. Because I noticed in the first one or two Nobel laureates, I remember I took a selfie with them and I just didn't want to ask them any more questions. And I just reflected on it, like at night I just zoomed in on the picture, zoomed in, zoomed out and I was like, "Whoa, I got a picture with Gerard't Hooft. This is so cool." And I'm like, "But I didn't ask him anything." And that was early in the conference and later on I was just, "You know what, I'll just let other people take their pictures and then I'll just ask my questions."
Max Du:
Yeah. You started out feeling like you were extracting something.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Exactly, exactly. But at some point, even when others were asking, I'm like, "I'll just be comfortable with their questions and with the answers that they get to their questions. I don't even have to ask 'cause I'm here to get this personal dimension to it."
Max Du:
Absolutely. So we're running out on the hour, but before we finish here, this amazing conversation that we've had, there's just a few things that we typically like to talk about in this podcast, especially 'cause a lot of the audience here are listening and they want to apply to Stanford and they might want to apply to become a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and us too, we're both Knight-Hennessy Scholars. And so I'd be very curious to hear about if you had any advice for people trying to apply for Stanford or Knight-Hennessy or anything like that who might not know if they're the best fit or anything like that.
Barkotel Zemenu:
With some disclaimers, right? I don't want to be agnostic to the fact that it's growing to be a very tricky application season, like the application economy, especially in a lot of departments. Whatever I say for now, I don't want it to be agnostic to that. I'll use disclaimers. Sometimes you want to say something, but it feels almost too cliché that it's going to land on deaf ears. But I'm just going to say it nonetheless. The process really matters a lot more than the outcome. And if the only intention at the end of the day is I want to maximize the outcome and therefore compromise the process, it becomes almost less worth it. And by this, I mean if as you're writing the Connect the Dots essay, if while you're writing your personal statement and trying to reflect on your research, it becomes a lot less of you pausing and really thinking about what you did over research over the past year or three years. Or as you reflect on your Connect the Dots essay and you're focusing instead more on, "Oh, are the admissions officers going to like this more? Is this going to sound fancy?" And then you look at scholar profiles or you talk to scholars and like, "Oh, is my story similar to them," the focus suddenly becomes a lot more on the outcome and you're just not quite reflecting on your life. You're not quite reflecting on the dots or your research experience or how you're really a great fit for this department that you're trying to apply for. You'll lose a lot of this very rare season 'cause it's not a lot of times where you'll actually get almost force yourself or be forced to reflect on your life in this way, at least your past three years or so this way. Again, the outcome matters. You do want to get into, if you're applying to Stanford, if you're applying to KH. And yeah, I don't want to negate or lie of the fact that how much I try to optimize for that, as much as I also wanted to optimize for the process, but just don't forget the process. And the more emotionally demanding it is, the better.
Max Du:
Yes.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Unfortunately, the better. If it's very simple, just like write the story, it's like maybe dig a little deeper.
Max Du:
If it's easy, you're not trying hard enough.
Barkotel Zemenu:
If there's a story that you default to, "Oh, tell me about yourself," if there's an immediate story that you default to, maybe find a new default or maybe let that not be your default. Maybe let it just be like, let lose certain chains that you have constructed that, "Okay, this territory, I can't even talk about it." And just like maybe, maybe it might be okay to talk about that. Maybe not, right? But maybe it might be okay to talk about those things you never default to. And yeah, I think the process really matters. The earlier the better, but I know people who, one of my friends just learned about Knight-Hennessy two weeks before the deadline and still got it right. So that's possible. If you start early, it is really helpful to start reflecting on the whole process.
And then my second point would be something on the flip side. It doesn't really matter how early you start. I started somewhat early, but I submitted the night or the day before. I was like this almost obsession with every detail and trying to make sure it's all good. It will last all the way through October if you let it. So at some point, you have to almost construct an artificial deadline in your mind and say, "I'm not going to submit this in October. It has to be in September," or "it has to be five days before, three days before." If you just let lose the deadline to the literal deadline, then you might chase it all the way till the end. And it compromised some aspects of my life, sleep, in my final year of college. So yeah, start early, but know that starting early doesn't mean finishing early. You could also finish very late.
Max Du:
Yeah, that's a core part of writing. It's like you write till a deadline, you'll never feel like you're going to be done writing. And you know that's just how it is. I think it's amazing advice and also it's a lot less cliché than you think because when people think about an application, they think about very much not journey, they think about destination 'cause it's literally you're applying to be something. But it's so true that it's like as you're writing, as you're excavating these parts of yourselves, you will discover parts of you that you didn't know existed. And to default or to avoid things that you default to normally is that opportunity to go beyond and to understand a part of you that you even didn't know.
Barkotel Zemenu:
Exactly. If you're a senior, you only have one senior year of college, so don't miss out on that. I don't know how else to add, like what caveat to add to this apart from saying, "I know you're busy, blah-blah-blah," but there's just only one senior year. Some people are like five years out of work, out of college, deep in work. And for that, ask the more mature, less... This is all coming from a young boy who is still 23, so what do I know?
Max Du:
It's so important to keep living, as we've heard a lot in your story. This has been such an amazing hour with you, and I've learned so much about your journey and your very wide degree of curiosities and your very amazing and unique way of seeing the science and the emotion and writing and everything like that. So it's been my pleasure to talk to you. And this has been Imagine A World. I'll see you next episode.
Barkotel Zemenu:
It's been my deepest way of talking with you, Max.
Max Du:
Likewise. All right. And we're out of here.
Sydney Hunt:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Imagine A World where we hear from inspiring members of the KHS community who are making significant contributions in their respective fields, challenging the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible as they imagine the world they want to see.
Willie Thompson:
This podcast is sponsored by Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, a multidisciplinary, multicultural graduate fellowship program providing scholars with financial support to pursue graduate studies at Stanford while helping equip them to be visionary, courageous and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world.
Follow us on social media at Knight-Hennessy and visit our website at kh.stanford.edu to learn more about the program and our community.
