#cjpatel

If you ever try to make tiramisu, it’s a somewhat haphazard project. You have these random ingredients like mascarpone cream, ladyfingers, and espresso. And while you’re making it, you end up asking, “Is this actually coming together? Am I actually making something?” Sure, you’ll have your mistakes and things you learn from, like there is such a thing as too much espresso, but at the end, you find you’re proud of what you’ve created and how you arrived there.

 So what’s my point with the Italian dessert? Often times, life is one big pile of Tiramisu, it’s complicated and messy. There are important ingredients and steps that get you to where you need to get, and more than often these unfamiliar pieces come together in ways you don’t necessarily expect to create something quite meaningful.

 It wasn’t until I was participating as an International Co-Op in Germany, interning at DLR, the German equivalent of NASA, where I learned what composed the realm of human spaceflight and what I wanted to do after completing my undergraduate degree in Cincinnati. In Germany, I was able to expand my professional network and develop a deeper insight to a critical ingredient of the future of human space exploration, greenhouses in extraplanetary habitation! It was here where I felt like a lot my metal was tested and where I was able to refine who I was as a person. Lastly, it was here when I didn’t know where I wanted to attend graduate school, my mentor at DLR mentioned, “Have you thought about University of Colorado Boulder? That’s where I went and focused in Bioastronautics.”

 That talk ultimately led me to go to grad school in Boulder, pursue a passion for knowledge and human spaceflight I hadn’t seen before, and in the process, intern at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston working on spaceflight medical hardware. Similar to my experience in Germany, I expanded my professional network at Johnson and instead of figuring out where to go for further education, I was presented with a potential job opportunity. That potential job opportunity turned into a real one where today I’m working as a flight controller for the International Space Station in life support technologies. I am focused in a discipline where I’m excited to go into work every day, I am excited to learn about how I can help in this next age of human spaceflight, and lastly excited that I get to apply the things I learned in Germany and from Boulder. I feel more confident in my ability to succeed because all these things came together from the opportunity to take on a co-op in Germany.

Only twelve humans walked on the Moon by 1972. The population of the Earth around 72 was 3.84 billion according to the Worldbank. Meaning for a person to have walked on the Moon by that date, they would have 0.00000003125 of a chance.

 According to the Huffington Post, you have a 1/175 million chance of winning the lottery, or 0.000000057 of a chance.

 How about a more modern example? Assume that the first person to walk on Mars has already been born as of 2018. According to Worldometers, the current population is 7,632,819,325, meaning to be the first person on Mars, you have a 0.0000000013 of a chance.

 What’s my point with all this? Not everyone gets the prize. In this case the prize is you. Not everyone in their lives will get the chance to interact with you, build a friendship with you, a professional relationship with you, and only that special person with a 0.00000000013 chance is going to win your heart.

Challenges are there for you to take them on. Things are always daunting but it’s up to you how you decide to approach them. You can be headstrong and be willing to face them or you can shrink back and let the anxiety of them hurt you.

When was the last time, you as a team member, genuinely showed interest in your groupmates’ lives?

 Do you know what they care about, what they’re passionate about, important things in their life, do you show support for their goals outside of what you work on together?

 It probably took you a minute or two, but you had to think about whether you’ve done it or not.

A good leader always remembers one key thing: it’s not about them.

 One day you’ll be a place of power, congratulations. But your job isn’t about the power, it’s about using it to help the people around you. That’s why it exists.

 It’s not easy, you’re going to have put your ego aside, and think about what does your team need to succeed, what are you doing to help them succeed, and are you keeping your thoughts and actions in check to make sure you’re doing the job right?

 Those are tough thoughts to live by, but if you’re willing, they can make the difference between your team succeeding or your team failing. But you have to be willing to take on the challenges, to put in the extra man work, to have faith when it seems like it’s the hardest thing to do.

15 January 2018

 I’m going to be starting something new this semester, and I’m hoping it will help me as much as you may enjoy reading it. It’s about leadership.

 More than that, an imagining of what one my favorite leaders would say and think about to anyone who would seek out that advice. I’m going to put myself in the soul that accompanies Steve Rogers, or you better know him as Captain America.

 You’re probably wondering, why? Well honestly because I need it. This semester I’m doing something that involves more leadership and I’ve had my experiences with leadership in the past, but I’ve made a lot of mistakes and hopefully learned from them too. I’ve been too soft at times and not firm on people. Other times I’ve let my anger get the best of me and forgotten to think about the other perspective. I have been weak in judgement, lacking the confidence I needed to carry myself as a leader. And the biggest fault of all is that I’ve let my own brain get in the way of thinking I wasn’t doing a good job.

 I’m hoping that if I think like Steve Rogers, get those good and focused thoughts down, it can help keep me grounded. I know he has his faults (i.e. see Civil War), but there’s a lot from his character that I can take away: putting ego aside, focusing on the team, and having faith in myself to do the right thing.

It’s been a long time since I last wrote, both on here and with my own stories, sometimes I wonder what it is that holds me back, I mean I have a perfectly good book setting on a drive waiting to be published and it’s been over 4 years at this point.

  But that’s not what is on my mind as of late. If you know me well, then you know I love the CBS show Elementary, starring Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as Dr. Joan Watson. What I love about this adaption is the richness these two actors bring to their roles, especially Miller as a former heroin addict. The show strongly ties with the struggles of addiction and overcoming it and what the world of addicts looks like.

  Just as well, I love how much contemplative thought Holmes shows in his meetings for drug use. Many queries he ponders that have no real answer but just deep reflective thought. About who he is, how he views the world, and how he views the relationships in his life.

  In that sense, I love connecting to Holmes because it’s something I always have on my mind, just thinking about these ideas. As of late, I think about who I was when I started college, 5 years ago, and who I am today and the differences in my character from then on. Am I wiser, smarter, kinder, more of the person that a 7-year-old version of me would come to respect? Am I a better son, brother, and friend now than when I was younger and considerably more naïve?

  Some notions of things feel like they haven’t changed, as in how I view emotion, well a certain emotion. There’s an overwhelming sense of overanalyzing, concern, hope, and an ever-changing spectrum of flow that haunts and enlightens me.

  People tend to say you learn from your mistakes, I tend to say when it comes to this emotion in particular, you don’t. At least in my case, you don’t. I still find myself catching into the same routine traps that come along and it just hurts. It hardens me yet breaks me every time, and I hate myself so for it. Because I’m not intentionally going out of my way to seek this, but my mind pushes and sways me in a way where I can’t help but to think of feelings in such a fashion.

  I’m glad there are some ways where I’m able to restrain my mind, one of which is asking the deep questions. Is this about me, or I am trying to go out of my way to think of something greater? Am I imaging realistic scenarios or false realities? Am I remembering the mistakes of the past to learn for the future? Am I keeping focus on my goals as opposed to true or false distractions? Am I overthinking things or am I believing real insights?

  In this sense, I wish I was like Sherlock Holmes, because while he has a hard time coming around to his emotions, he eventually is able to deduce true from false, and more than often, it makes him a better man. For me more or less, it feels like a war being fought in the heavens, angels fighting against demons, and I’m never really sure who is right, and at the end of the day, I just rather leave the battlefield and not let things consume me.

  One thing I’ve learned as I’ve grown older is that stereotyping phases, certain trends, can be more fake than true. Just because it worked for A to become B it does not certainly mean B becomes A or necessarily A will become B through the same pattern. I think in our engineering psychology book it was discussed that humans love to view things linearly but in reality, much of life is nonlinear, as sometimes for A to become B, there may be a myriad of variables that could lead to that path.

Sol Zweihundert- Acht und Zwanzig—Das…ist Uns.

 228 Days. I was technically abroad from December 28, 2015 to August 12, 2016 for 228 days. Enough for a one-way trip to Mars and part of the way back I think I ended up learning more and experiencing much more than what I thought would fit the cookie cutter mold.

 To describe it like Sherlock Holmes, I began to look at things in a different way. Perhaps not like his typical look close for the details but not too deep to miss the big picture, but in appreciating, examining, understanding, and seeing the essence of food and how it is ever-evolving just like a human mind. I began to examine things in a wider context, a character trait, I hope to carry on henceforth.

 With the research I was doing on the history of food, I began to understand how so many different recipes came to fruition out of necessity: busy people, type of ingredients available, etc. I began to respect how the real world applications of engineering could apply to farming, and specifically understand how certain crops with my job, could be used in other, extraterrestrial applications. I earned a chance to interact with new people and see their customs and ideas about food and reasons for what shaped them. It could have been at work, with new friends I made during my travels, or even with my German family. I think for me, this experience is two-fold because it ties me to so many people I met during my time in Europe and I don’t think it so easy to forget them. Food brought us together for so many occasions, holidays and other celebrations, family events, and even random moments.

 As for the future, I think I’ll enjoy to randomly wonder about the history of certain foods, look it up, understand them, and see why it’s important. I guess the same technique applies to an engineering mind as well. I think that’s one of the other important things that this experience taught me, it’s the curiosity and desire to learn. I’ll also try to bring up discussions of food and smile quietly to myself as it quickly brings a conversation together.

 But the biggest thing I gained out of this experience that I didn’t see so easily coming? It was respect. Respect for the food I have in life, and the relationships and experiences that come with it. Respect for how certain foods have shaped my cultural identity as an American, Indian, in some aspects African as from my dad’s side, and now? As a European.

 I proudly say to anyone thinking of starting a project like this one to do it. You’ll be exposed to a world you may never thought of before and you’ll gain not only some incredible knowledge out it, but you’ll shape stronger relationships, appreciate the bonds that come from it, and begin to think in a unique but fruitful way.

 Food is one of those things that can be so hard to describe, it brings vehement emotions that can shake you like the sea or be calming as the waves of the ocean. It can inspire memories, experiences that wouldn’t be the same without food. It’s an essential cornerstone of work, social, and family cultures that become so colorful just because of it. A boy telling his German dad about his home garden on the other side of the world, a student sharing a family recipe for a work dinner, a bodybuilder aspiring new recipes to become healthier on the microscopic scale, or a chocolate truffle melting cold hearts standing on top of Jungfraujoch. These all were me and so much more. These were the experiences and essentials that defined the times I spent in Europe, and I can only imagine how they shape the lives of 7.4 billion people on the 3rd terrestrial orb from the Sun.