Hola Amigos

Hola, indeed, after a long time! I intended to write about my experience in Cancun, Mexico—hoping to paint a picture for curious minds and to amplify my internal gratitude. But before the beaches and crazy bus drivers, let’s reflect on my first semester teaching at VCU.

I should probably admit that I had a lot of head scratching the first two weeks. The type of scratching that peels off the crust of a pimple that just healed. My anxiety and scratching gradually settled down to a manageable routine. Without the gracious and deep support from my fellow bioinformatics professors in SLSS, I would not have figured out a way to float this soon.

Teaching bioinformatics is inherently different from the “same old” molecular and cellular biology lectures that I was used to giving. Being a visual learner myself, just looking at text and talking over text for long was different. I could not resist adding pictures to my Jupyter notebooks.

Next challenge was: how can I still sing and make games about blocks of code? Well, we managed! As we kicked off the semester, I sang with the Take Down melody: “You are gonna be the master of Python coding… How can you sleep or live with yourself without knowing a line of Python coding?” Later, explaining how infinite loops work, we sang “I am unstoppable, I am Porsche with no breaks.” This gave me a chance to explain the break keyword in Python. Then, when we talked about try-except blocks, we sang “We can’t fix it if we never face it.” You could probably notice how I became a fan of Huntrix in the meantime.

Teaching Bioethics was a whole new thing. We discussed several bioethics concepts: truth-telling, autonomy, confidentiality, beneficence, who gets to make a decision, who is impacted, how many layers of complications exist here, and how we even tease them apart. Ethics of stem cells, embryos, and embryo manipulation with the advances in gene editing have been dense topics. To empathize with a couple going through similar debates, we had a role play describing the decision-making process for donating frozen embryos for research.

We were fortunate to have a field trip to University of Richmond. Dr. Jessica Flanigan was our kind host and gave us a speed lecture with active learning. The students had to move to the side of the room when they agreed or disagreed with an idea. Inside the classrooms, the group discussions and deep, thoughtful communications were the backbone of the course.

Now that the semester is almost over, I am excited to plan for 301 and 420 courses coming up next. But for now, back to Cancun.

We only stayed for 5 days at the Royal Cancun. What I liked most about Cancun was that it was very similar to Antalya, my hometown. The beach view is stunning, and there are so many opportunities to have fun on the sand, in a pool, on a canoe, or on a Captain Hook–styled party ship. The way you spend your time will depend on your intention. There are many luxury shopping malls and stores as well as a flea market where you would need to negotiate hard.

The all-inclusive nature of the hotel is very humbling. I almost always wanted to pay for the dinner, but they kept saying, “All included.” Mexicans are very much like Turkish people: forgiving, generous, hospitable, and in a rush in traffic. We took the city buses to see around, and I kept telling my kids, this is the same as riding a bus in Turkiye. The roads are narrower, the buses are faster, and they even drive with the door open while a lady who just got on tries to get coins out of her purse while holding onto nothing.

Mexicans are also very much into music and dances. The show at the Xcaret park rightfully demonstrated Mexican history and how they embraced Christianity while preserving the Mayan culture.

I guess I am trying to put together in my head two very different experiences. If you decide to go to Cancun for a vacation, or jump into the unknown waters of the coding world, you are not alone! Each new thing is scary at first, and all initiatives are unsettling. Be courageous to take the first step, soon you will notice that the second step is actually not as difficult as the first one.

Let’s wait and see what the next semester will bring.

Until then, adios amigos!