I find myself at an inflection point, after spending some time in the trenches of pondering the next step in my career. My path until now was fairly standard, uncontroversial, following a well-trodden pattern. After school, I was fortunate to attend university, where I studied something that I loved and excelled in. Thereafter, I had the chance to pursue a master’s degree overseas—both a life-changing experience and an obvious opportunity to seize. My first post-postgraduate job then, too, unfolded quite naturally, and it was one which I thoroughly enjoyed. Getting to know wonderful colleagues, earning proper money, working on real-world problems. I feel immensely lucky to have had these opportunities and to have grown a community of incredible peers and mentors. From Cape Town to Edinburgh to Cape Town to London, these past years have been fantastic.
However, bigger questions now loom. Whereas my previous vocational choices were relatively linear, taken as a natural flow from one to the next, I find increasingly that the “next step” question feels overwhelming—not due to a lack of options, but an abundance thereof! Of course, I am privileged in this conundrum (perhaps that is privilege: choice itself?) Alas, the world being an oyster—my oyster, I am told—is terrifying at times. And I know I’m not alone in this feeling. Those I talk to are asking the same question: in a world where you can do anything, what should you do? Many, it seems, are craving a pivot towards meaning, but unsure how to get there. Most, it seems, are simply exhausted and struggling to find the capacity to think carefully about it. What cemented such vocational angst for me, personally, was some sage advice heard last year: “to truly make an impact in a given domain, you need to dedicate a solid 5-10 years to it, so choose wisely. See, with a handful of such periods gifted in our short lives, you only have that handful of big bets to make.”
Ahhh!
The problem is, as much as it scares me, I agree with the sentiment wholeheartedly. When you peer even briefly into the history of innovation and impact, you constantly find anecdata of people with unified attention and unrelenting tenacity—committing to a plan and sticking to it, long-term. The iceberg of success indeed hides the endless hours of focus that always precede victory. So, yes, I take it to be true, and I feel drawn to it. In fact, a word has been bouncing around my head in this season: decadal. What does a decade mean? Rather, what could it mean? I love the aphorism that people overestimate what can be done in a day (guilty), but underestimate what can be done in a year (guilty, again). So what about ten? What does it mean to hone energy towards solving a problem over that timespan? While reflecting upon this almost-decade of my own adulthood gone by, I find myself dreaming bigger about the one to come.
But finding that point of focus is hard too—hence the overwhelm! I want to do something important and I acknowledge that doing so will require a concerted effort. But how do we find a subject that is worth our daily discipline? How do we pivot towards meaning? I suspect that we cannot know a priori, and we must simply try things. It feels akin to the iterative process of “design thinking,” where you wildly expand out ideas at first—you increase entropy, noise, exploration—and only thereafter whittle down, refine, make choices. We try, and when we do, we pay attention, and when we do, we follow those paths which most resonate. Friedrich Nietzsche, for all his oddities, has a quote that forever remains stuck in my brain—something to which I regularly return. He says,
Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself.
To find the intersection of what we love and where we thrive—to find that which has elevated the soul, that which has mastered and delighted it—that’s the secret sauce. And that’s why I feel grateful for the experiences that have brought me here, for they have been my stepladder. I have learnt about the many things I would rather not do, and yes, the even-more-many things I am frankly not good at doing. I know them well. But, gloriously, I have also stolen glimpses of those things which elevate me—little peeks of what I have truly loved, that fundamental law of my true self.
Ergo, in response to my decadal pondering, I have followed Mr Nietzsche’s advice. After a period of trying on different hats, I have placed these “venerated objects” (the hats?) before me, and enumerated a guideline of where I want to be and what I want to do. It’s a work-in-progress, certainly, but here are five ideas I believe about my career:
- It is good to help others. Sure, the specifics of doing so are often ambiguous, but we can still try. Sure, sometimes our actions are minuscule and the world’s problems are massive, but try we still should. And sure, one may even question the true intentions of helping others—is it just so that we can feel good about ourselves? Maybe, quite possibly. But I think it is good to try anyway. We are our brothers and sisters’ keepers.
- In the aim of helping others, I want to work on hard scientific problems. There are many ways to help those around you, of course, and not all of them are scientific. All are important, especially those which are unglamorous, underpaid, underappreciated. But I have been given a wonderful chance to learn, to study, to grow, and now, to apply my skills towards big questions. This opportunity is not one to be taken lightly.
- In solving hard scientific problems, I want to work alongside passionate people. This is not an ego game, and I am nothing without the community that raised me and now sustains me. Humans have succeeded as a collective; the lone wolf is lying. Thus, I long for the whiteboard—I love jamming, I love riffing, I love brainstorming. I especially love multidisciplinarity. Diversity is not just a slogan. We are decidedly more than the sum of our parts. Moreover, passion counts. I have worked with some people who don’t care for much, and with others who visibly, vigorously do, and I adamantly prefer the latter. I have felt the temptations of indifference, but it is worth actively fighting against.
- In working alongside passionate people, I want to be focused towards an ambitious goal. Note that an ambitious goal doesn’t mean an all-encompassing panacea that solves all turmoil instantly. In fact, many tech people get this wrong: they want to design the thing, the app, presumably so they can be the saviour. Nonsense. An ambitious goal might even be laughably niche, but it should be hard and worth solving. Also, the tools and solutions we use to tackle the ambitious goal will change over time—we should not define our nail by the shiny hammer we have already designed. We are solving problems, not selling pre-made solutions. And we should not create contrived benchmarks simply so we can beat them. The question should always be, “does this advancement actually help solve something in the real-world?”
- Finally, life is bizarre, the world is weird, and I want to embrace ambition with a pinch of salt. Take everyone seriously, except yourself. We are not gods among men.
Despite these maxims being noted, the looming world-is-my-oyster question remains. These points above, thematically, are the filter for what I want to do… But where to do it? And how? With whom? My vague plan has been to try many things, meet many people, think deeply about the problems in front of me. But then there’s the final, crucial piece: serendipity. It is hard to explain, and harder to systematise. One can only lean into it.
And in my case, serendipity was the LinkedIn algorithm. I was looking around for my next chapter, something which would combine my interests and my abilities, and I was often left wanting, unsure, uninspired. I feel excited about the possibilities of modern machine learning and computational science, but disappointed (and concerned) by many applications I encounter. Then, at the beginning of this year, I discovered a funded doctoral opportunity at Imperial College London that mentioned ultrasound—which frankly piqued my interest solely due to a fun project from my 3rd year in undergrad. As I looked deeper into the topic—why and how the science is being applied—I realised it was exactly what I was seeking. The lab, led by Dr James Choi, is using focused ultrasound across the skull to target deep brain regions and thereby deliver drugs across the blood-brain barrier using microbubbles. If successful, the way we deal with neurological disorders could fundamentally change. There’s a lot to unpack around the research, and it deserves a future post of its own. But ultimately, it ticks the boxes of helping others by solving hard problems, alongside passionate colleagues, with an ambitious goal that I feel is worth working on. (And most importantly? We jammed at the whiteboard during my interview, which sealed the deal.)
Nothing about my maxims above necessitated doctoral studies, and there are a multitude of options for impact. But a PhD is truly a unique opportunity for focus. To have the time, space, and support for deep focus towards a lofty and uncertain goal is a pretty special opportunity. Comically, I have spent the past years asking weathered PhD students to tell me why a PhD sucks, and I have certainly heard the horror stories. Academia is not some pure intellectual pursuit, absent of politics and administrative nonsense—there’s a lot of that. Nonetheless, I believe that stepping away from the cadence of quarterly performance in favour of a longer-term vision is deeply valuable. Truly, I see this chapter as a launchpad for my decadal project.
And so, here I am: a fresh PhD student in London, still bright-eyed and bushy tailed, not yet weathered. My topic itself is super exciting, though I’m still figuring out much of it. My domain will be computational, but the problem spans physics, neurochemistry, pharmacology, electrical engineering, and more—and I love that. The work we are doing is funded by the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), which also deserves a whole post on its own. There is a growing community across both the public and private spheres in the country, all committed to solving ambitious scientific challenges, and I am stoked to be caught up in the energy of it all. I am also very grateful to the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, back in South Africa, for their financial support towards my degree. My ultimate aim is to take this technology home, to build and scale it in the majority world.
The heart of this post—writing down my motivation and journey getting here, starting a PhD—lies in two important aims. Firstly, I’m likely wrong about some points, and I’m fine with that! But I won’t know if I don’t create an error signal. I need something to be wrong about, to learn how to be less wrong about things. So here’s an offering to the world, Callum’s State of Mind™ in September 2025, Day 34 of my PhD. Tell me why I’m being silly! Or, just wait for future-me to figure it out and he will scold current-me anyway. Secondly, I want to encourage others to consider their own “venerated objects” in front of themselves. We are constantly bombarded with either the anxiety of not doing enough for the world, or simply spoon-fed the safe yet hopeless response of apathy. But we should neither neglect the seriousness of our responsibility as those with privilege, nor allow ourselves to be paralysed by our own ambition. I don’t believe that the response to our privilege—to the fantastic opportunities and choices in front of us—is simply to abandon it, nor to indulge in it. Martyrdom means no one wins; indulgence means only an elite few do. Instead, privilege does beckon us to take bigger risks, and that’s what I’m trying to do. Time alone will tell whether this was the “right” risk, but I’ll gladly give it a shot. Either way, the decade awaits.