Trenton Bricken

In undergrad, Duke had this thing where you could just make your own major.

And it was like, I don't like this prerequisite or this prerequisite.

And I want to take all four or five of these subjects at the same time.

So I'm just going to make my own major.

Or like in the first year of grad school, I like canceled rotation so I could work on this thing that became the paper we were talking about earlier.

And like didn't have an advisor, like got admitted to do machine learning for protein design and was just like off in computational neuroscience land with no business there at all, but worked out.

I didn't mean to cut you off, but I think it's strong ideas loosely held and being able to just pinball in different directions.

And the headstrongness I think relates a little bit to the fast feedback loops or agency in so much as I just don't get blocked very often.

Like if I'm trying to write some code and like something isn't working, even if it's like in another part of the code base, I'll often just go in and fix that thing or at least hack it together to be able to get results.

And I've seen other people where they're just like,

Help.

I can't.

And it's like, no, that's not a good enough excuse.

Like, go all the way down.

If you do everything you want.

If you do everything you want.

Exactly.

But yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think Sholto's story is more exciting.

Mine was just very serendipitous in that I got into computational and neuroscience, didn't have much business being there.