What Is This Substack For?
The Substack of A. P. D. G. Everett is my way of trying to keep my friends, family, as well as other interested parties, updated as to why someone in the front half of the 35-50 age block, who spent the better part of the last score of years acquiring the mix of hard and soft skills, as well as the CV, to do science and technology policy work in DC, is making a hard pivot away from that (assuming the Lord and medical school admissions committees are willing) into a physician and clinical researcher.
Given my pathway towards a career in health care and the life sciences, I most certainly will discuss the issues I encounter along this pathway I am now on, current events related to that, my motivations and background will most certainly be discussed as part of all of this (and my apologies in advance for those who already know me when I am discussing something you already know about me).
For those of you who don’t know me
Given that I have worked for two consulting firms (Booz Allen Hamilton & Deloitte) doing federal sector tech consulting, several government agencies (including the US military & NOAA), several academic institutions, was active in student government when a student at the University of Washington (where I did the bulk of my undergrad, including a BA in mathematics concentrating in applied mathematics and a BSc in economics with international studies)1, the University of Virginia (where I did my MSc in systems engineering), and Cornell University (where I custom-built a MEng in computer & information sciences)2, was active in the Philomathean Society when I was an engineering PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania (which I took a leave of absence from, took my first DC job whilst awaiting my year clock to finish - a transportation policy internship at the Reason Foundation - and then quit my doctoral work in engineering), am now a Biomedical Engineering graduate student working on the remainder of his pre-med courses at the University of Vermont, etc., I will most certainly also discuss other things I am interested in, and considering that I have worked in four different universities engineering labs (UW, UVA, UPenn, and UVM) in four different engineering disciplines, in environmental science oriented work (for NOAA primarily, but also to a lesser degree in other places), was a one-time political hack, is still a news junkie who has tried to keep a balance between sanity and a need to be informed, etc., I will most certainly be discussing as wide of a range of stuff as all of that I think is implied.
For those of you who already know me
So, not just will you get to hear about my newest journey into medicine, you’ll get to hear about all of the same stuff you’ve seen on my Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, etc., ideally all in one place!
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At the time I was at UW, there was no applied mathematics bachelors, just an undergraduate minor and graduate degree options as well as the joint ACMS programme (which I didn’t want to do for several reasons). Given I, as a standard BA maths student at UW could get the maths department to count three of the four classes needed for the applied maths minor towards my maths BA, that’s what I did. My minor in international studies is grouped with my BSc in economics on my UW transcript (and my coursework in undergrad included international macroeconomics (an econ course), international political economy (an international studies course), and undergraduate seminar in political economy (a jointly listed course between econ and poli sci)) which is why I refer to my econ degree in this way.
I officially enrolled into Cornell’s Systems Engineering MEng, however constructed my degree to fulfil all of the requirements for the Cornell CS MEng, including doing my MEng degree project under the supervision of a Cornell CS faculty member. I did this because of the fact that I hadn’t acquired a CS major or minor at UW (the latter of which wasn’t even an option when I was at UW), I only had taken a couple of CS courses as a graduate student at UVA and one at Penn that would have counted as CS coursework - ergo I did it the way that I did. When I applied to work at NRL as a simulation software engineer and at Deloitte as a tech consultant for their risk advisory arm - they looked at my coursework & degree construction in my degree plan (which I developed when a student at Cornell) and accepted my Cornell MEng as a CS masters.
