Oh boy, describing what I do for a living is one of my favorite parts of an introductory conversation. And pretty much every day I have to tell someone else what I do for work now that my husband and I have moved to Dallas, TX (I could count the number of people I knew in Dallas prior to moving on one hand). This whole exchange use to cause me a little bit of anxiety. Especially if my husband were around. A conversation would go:
Me: I'm a bioinformatics scientist and I process and analyze biological data using computers.
Newbie: What?
Husband (butting in): She makes woolly mammoths and turns chickens into dinosaurs. No, I am serious! There are these crazy scientists who want to make a real Jurassic Park.
*It is really hard to backtrack at this point to not make yourself look like a mad scientist. So you have two options: 1) change the subject or 2) just go with it and proceed to tell the Newbie how you are also working on making elephants miniature so that you sell them as pets.
So I don't actually like going around and making up (but sort of true) stories about my job. It makes for some great bar conversations, but at some point people want to know what you actually do with your life (my grandparents in particular). I am going to share what my go-to response is for someone like my 86 year old grandpappy (keep in mind that my pappy quit school at 9th grade - he went on to start his own successful business and continues to work to this day *my hero*):
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I am a bioinformatics scientist and I process and analyze biological data using computers. Whenever you go to build something, you usually follow some sort of a blueprint or design. DNA is the blueprint or design for all living things. If you are building a house, the blueprint directs where the building materials, such as wood and cement, are suppose to go and how they are suppose to be arranged. Amino acids/proteins are the building materials for living things. If you are building a person, the DNA for that person would direct where the amino acids/proteins need to go and in what order so that a person is the end product. There are different blueprints for different houses in your neighborhood. Every person has slightly different DNA similar to all of the blueprints in your neighborhood. A blueprint for a bridge is very different from a blueprint for a house. Same thing applies for DNA for a plant and DNA for a person. Everything is still written on blue and white paper, but the directions are different.
Small changes in the blueprint can sometimes result in barely noticeable changes in the look of the house such as moving a window over by an inch. But sometimes small changes result in big changes such as moving a grade beam a few inches so it no longer supports a wall in your house. Changes like this could make the wall immediately fall down or could gradually deteriorate the structure of your house with time. This is similar to how some diseases occur, small changes to the DNA can have very little impact on a person or could cause disease. So how do you know if a small change will have a little or big impact? If we were still talking about a house, your builder would look over the blueprint with some prior knowledge of how houses should be built and find the error. DNA blueprints are much, much bigger. Imagine trying to find a change like this in all of the blueprints of houses in Dallas. There are over 450,000 houses in Dallas. This would take the builder a REALLY LONG TIME. And it is possible the builder may even get exhausted looking at all of those blueprints that they may miss a small change of a single grade beam that is off by a few inches. We humans are not very good at repetitive analyses like that, but computers are GREAT for things like this.
So I use my computer savvy to repeatedly look at all of the blueprints for houses in Dallas to find a small change. Or rather to look at a person's blueprint to find small changes in their DNA. I can of course do this for many, many people and find patterns that are similar to certain groups of people such as those afflicted with a certain disease.
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This usually satisfies people who are really interested in what I do for a living. You should of course continuously engage with the person to quickly wrap up the conversation the moment they glaze over if you determine a recovery cannot be attained. Also, be prepared to remind the person that you are not a medical doctor and please refer them to their primary care physician the moment they start to describe their ailments. I study disease, but I do not diagnosis diseases.
It is both cliche and appropriate that my first post would be this post.
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