Interview tips and techniques are very subjective. During my time at Cornell I’ve been told what to do and what not to do by many who have been through interviews. One thing I learnt was that was people had very different opinions on what you should do at an interview. With this is mind I decided to attend the Rose Seminar on interview tips and techniques to see what different or new tips and techniques I could learn.

GRF Sara who conducted the seminar gave us an interesting example of a fictional character George Costanza from Seinfeld, and his interview with the New York Yankees. The idea behind this example was “opposite behavior”. George does not behave in the manner someone being interviewed usually does. Instead of only answering as many questions as the interviewer throws at him, George is very relaxed and calm and keeps questioning the interviewer as much as the interviewer questions George. Secondly, he even goes as far as to criticize the policies implemented by management, which instantly gets him the job because he was honest and didn’t say what the interviewer wanted to hear instead he was honest and provided constructive criticism.

I found this example to be very helpful. More often than not most people are preoccupied with trying to impress the interviewer they forget that it’s a two-way relationship rather than a one-way relationship. While the interviewer tries to gauge if you are a good fit to the company and job position you too should question the interviewer and try to find out if the company is the right for you. Since, finding the right job is like dating. Only if both parties are compatible will it work out.

In conclusion, it’s important for you to be yourself and be honest because if the interviewer doesn’t like you, this means that chances are you might not be a good fit to the company culture. Further, it’s important to ask questions from the interviewer since in some ways you are also interviewing them to see if they will be a good fit to you. The idea of opposite behavior is a very valuable takeaway for a successful interview in my opinion.

On Monday night I went to the Germs, SuperBugs, & Antibiotic Resistance Table Talk with GRF Shiv and House Fellow Cynthia Hill.

Cynthia and Shiv started off by asking us a question: do you use antibacterial soap and do you think it is better than normal ones. Coming from an economics background, I honestly never paid attention to the kind of foam soap provided uniformly around campus, but I have heard the saying that artificially eliminating the bacteria on your skin may cause you physical system to be weaker to bacteria. I always find the question of whether we should use antibiotics very hard to answer. On the one side, my dad use to need to take a lot more medicine than normal people, since he took a lot of antibiotics as a child, as doctor and parents at the time weren’t aware of this strong side-effect of this medicine. So I generally avoiding taking any antibiotics during cold and fever, and instead take herbs and carry through. What Shiv and Cynthia talked about was alarming, there are about 25,000 people in America who die of taking antibiotics every year, and the death rate of children due to antibiotics shoot up in the past decade.

So what happened here? I would have imagined that as the medical technology grows and people are more aware that antibiotics is a double-blade sword, they would more cautious of taking it and doctor would be less likely to prescribe it unless the situations is really urgent. But this led me to think about the change of world through years and maybe people are weaker to certain disease as year goes. So Cynthia asked here: is it necessarily a bad thing that some people die of antibiotics? I thought that the underline alternative thinking is similar to Davinism. Maybe we can take antibiotics as a form of natural selection and people who survive the side-effect might possess more potent gene? I am not very sure, but personally I would rather to think about building solution to antibiotics harm.

Apart from that, one of the major things we discussed during the dinner was the SuperBug. Honestly I really thought Super Bug would be a physically ultra-large bug. Turned out I was totally wrong. Super bug is a kind of micro conceptual “bug” that is built us when someone take a overly large amount of antibiotics, and this wall of super bugs would make any medicine useless to your body. So in another way you can not get cured by medication anymore and have to survive yourself! (if i get the concept correctly) This is such a horrible concept that I feel this “super bug” is much more intimidating that any of the spiders I have seen in my dorm. From Shiv and Cynthia’s talking there seems not to be a solution to the super bug problem so far, and there are many cases of people who suffer from it.

Although the topic is very serious and heavy, I felt very happy that I chose to go to this event and get educated on antibiotics and the current trend on it. What I take away from this dinner is to be cautious of things you take into your body and always find some time to learn stuff outside of my subject area. Great experience!

The topic of this week’s Table Talk was superbugs and antibacterial resistance, and how they are very closely tied with our own actions. From the overuse of antibacterial soap to doctors unnecessarily prescribing antibiotics, we are feeding a dangerous process of natural selection that may come back to kill us all – literally.

One major but perhaps not obvious way that humans use antibiotics is in agriculture and herding. This article speaks to usage of the antibiotic drug colistin that has led to the rise of an antibiotic resistant bacteria that has already resulted in human infections. Just this Monday, the World Health Organisation issued a warning  about the imminent threat posed by these ‘superbugs’ while we are running out of treatment options. This threat to human health is as much a national security threat as is terrorism, according to one chief medical officer. We are at a critical point where we must invest in antibiotic research or risk losing the effectiveness of our drugs which may ultimately lead to an apocalyptic and world-wide pandemic. We must also consider the policies regulating the use of antibiotics in our farms or else face the consequences.

One very cool concept that adds a note of optimism is in the alternatives to antibiotic products and drugs. Right now, there are no other drugs that work as effectively as antibiotics, but an emerging area of science is synthetic biology: the use of artificial viruses for treating bacterial infections. The development of this discipline and its eventual practice in medicine are essential if we humans want to continue to be one step ahead of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Yesterday I participated in Table Talk: Germs, Superbugs, and Antibiotic Resistance. I had previously known about the debate surrounding antibiotic overprescription and the discovery of superbugs, and I was excited to learn more about the current state of debate. An interesting question Cynthia posed was how prevalent are deaths from superbugs, really? I rarely hear of superbug deaths in the news, so I estimated that it is not very common, and that would be correct. But given that it is not very prevalent, why are we worrying about it now and pressuring doctors to prescribe less antibiotics?

I was not aware before that the prevalence of superbugs has been growing at a high pace in recent years. In fact, just this week, the WHO issued a list of the top 12 most dangerous bacterial threats to humans, resistant to antibiotics. Although superbugs have not posed a huge threat in the past, if we continue with daily life hand sanitizer/antibiotic use without thought, we will be creating the potential for stronger and stronger superbugs. But we should be able to design new antibiotics to treat these superbugs right? Another interesting point is that the development of new antibiotics has slowed, partly because developing antibiotics is not as profitable for drug companies as committing to a potential blockbuster drug used in chronic diseases. There is simply not enough profit potential of an antibiotic intended for a few weeks use to justify the enormous R&D costs. Given this precarious situation, as a society, it is important to stay vigilant and take action now to combat the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. We can take steps in the present to eliminate potential future catastrophe.