Eleven pieces of advice from Eberly college alumnus Bruce Booth
Bruce Booth, a Penn State Eberly College of Science alumnus, recently spoke to Eberly College of Science Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Program students on his career journey after Penn State as well as his advice for future scientists.
1. Embrace life’s central dogma.
Everything, your happiness and self-worth, flows from you outwards not the other way around. If you don’t invest in yourself, you’ll never achieve the happiness and goals you’re looking for.
2. Be a heterodimer.
A heterodimer brings two interesting proteins together to form interesting results. You, in your work, need to bring together your science and society to yield interesting findings.
3. Don’t differentiate too quickly.
In your career it can be tempting to specialize in one thing early on. Instead, try to stay as broad as you can for as long as you can is super important. Maintain your “STEMness” to do many things.
4. Evolve and adapt.
You never know when the Cambrian explosion of your life will happen. If you aren’t adapting, you aren’t growing and evolving.
5. Become a pattern recognition receptor.
Life is full of patterns, learn to see them. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
6. Phenotype vs genotype.
It’s not what’s on your resume, the school you went to, or your GPA (your genotype). It is all about what you really do when you show up (your phenotype).
7. Work life symbiosis.
Your “professional” and “personal” lives should be in mutualistic symbiosis. Try and find ways of integrating your passions into the workplace, create community, and followership.
8. Friday afternoon experiments.
Nothing important ever gets done on Friday afternoons, it’s the time for crazy experiments. Take the time to think outside the box, explore new areas, revisit workplace “beliefs,” write a blog, or do new analysis of datasets.
9. Make mistakes and fail greatly.
Take calculated risks, knowing you can and will lose sometimes. Most importantly, learn; only make “original mistakes.”
10. Celebrate the social animal.
Build deep professional relationships with mentors and colleagues. Most of our learnings come from interacting with others.
11. Acknowledge life’s randomness with humility.
Skill and luck are both important in our lives and careers.
Booth is a partner at Atlas Venture where he works with scientists to identify, develop, and discover therapeutics and biomedical technologies for the treatment of disease. In 1996 he received his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Penn State and in 1999 he received a doctoral degree in molecular immunology from Oxford University. Booth was awarded the Outstanding Science Alumni Award in 2019 and is a member of the Penn State Research Foundation Board and Board of Visitors and Eberly College of Science Board of Visitors. He is also a donor to the Eberly College of Science Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, a 10-week summer training program for Penn State Eberly undergrads to gain research experience and professional development. Booth expanded upon his presentation to the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience students in a recent blog post.