“How is it possible that you’re so far along in your career at twenty-one?” Cara asked.
“Oh god,” Kristen sighed and shook her head. “I’d need another drink for that tale. It’s pretty unspectacular really. I graduated high school young because I skipped just about every other grade of elementary and middle school. I have my parents to thank for that one. Then I hurried off to MIT and graduated in two years. The next thing I knew, I was here at Columbia working with Professor Vatruvia. Basically the tone of my life has been a hurry with no clear purpose.”
“Wow . . . I thought you looked young for your age . . .” Cara trailed off. “MIT in two years . . . that’s unheard of.”
“Yep,” Kristen sighed, greatly desiring a change in subject. Her age had always been a touchy issue, having generally been the youngest individual in any given social situation since as long as she could remember.
After graduating from MIT at the top of her class, Kristen Jordan had been unsure which direction to take her career. She knew she wanted to continue in the field, though into which specific sector she could not say. Working for some faceless pharmaceutical company in a lucrative attempt to cure obesity or male pattern baldness seemed so mundane and fruitless. Medical school felt like a colossal waste of time and effort: to spend the majority of your days fixing people who were either unwilling or simply too lazy to fix themselves.
Graduate school seemed to be a logical progression, but in truth Kristen did not know how much more there was to learn from textbooks and lectures. Furthermore, graduate school was merely a mechanism by which to delay her inevitable career decisions. Kristen had been only eighteen years old, staring down the barrel of the settle-down-and-get-a-salary world, and she resented it deeply.
It was during this post graduation stagnation that Kristen received an unexpected email from a research professor at Columbia University, the renowned synthetic biologist Professor Nicoli Vatruvia. Professor Vatruvia had happened upon Kristen’s senior thesis in an open-access journal to which she had uploaded it on a whim. The basic idea of her paper had stated that the DNA double helix was the most elegant model for an information network. Kristen had proposed further research into modeling computer and mechanical databases after natural ones, such as genetic codes. Most scholars had read her thesis and quickly shrugged it off as interesting, though purely theoretical. Even Kristen had thought it was a little lofty and out there, but nevertheless she had supported her data and presented an interesting case. Her professor at the time had given her an A, with a comment scribbled in red pen, Laudable work, with points defended appropriately, though ultimately impractical.
Evidently, the famous Professor Vatruvia had not agreed with her MIT professor, and Kristen was stunned one morning to see his name sitting amid the spam of her inbox.
Everyone in the upper echelon of academia and private sector research knew Professor Vatruvia of Columbia University. During the research for her senior thesis Kristen had read a number of his published papers. A few of Professor Vatruvia’s works had even been noted in Kristen’s lengthy citations section. Professor Vatruvia’s research in synthetic biology was on the cutting edge of modern science, and his creativity eclipsed all other minds in the field. Many people held the belief that Professor Nicoli Vatruvia would prove to be a modern visionary: a Da Vinci, Newton, or Einstein of the twenty-first century.