Wander
[This essay was originally intended to be published as an e-book so I have somewhat kept the ebook format.
Approximated reading time: 35 minutes.]
About Wander
Wander is a memoir written by Olatomiwa Bifarin about his Ph.D. experience in the United States. In this 5000-plus-word essay, he tells his story of completing a Ph.D. program in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Georgia.
His tales highlight the surprising benefit of wandering and the counterintuitive – and no less potent – benefit of how being less competitive can improve one’s odds of success.
These lessons apply not only to folks who want to get a Ph.D. but even more so to anyone who engages in any kind of knowledge work. As he has stated in the essay, his memoir will benefit equally “prospective graduate students, local novelists in your hometown, or even actors in Hollywood.”
Dedication
In loving memory of my grandmother, Mary Babatola Bifarin
Prologue
This short memoir started spontaneously. First, a background story is in order. I defended my Ph.D. thesis at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Georgia in July 2021. A few weeks after my defense, I found myself to be ‘homeless.’ My lease had ended in town, and I was yet to receive an employment authorization to proceed to my new job, which is in another city. Luckily for me, I had a close friend in Clemson, South Carolina. But unfortunately, I had no access to internet services at my host’s place. I would use Starbucks’ Wi-Fi services down the street while enjoying a cup of Star drink, but I still had to head home at some point, didn’t I?
Having read most of the books I packed along, I figured I could write about my Ph.D. experience. Hence, Wander was birthed. I thought about writing a more comprehensive memoir at first, but I immediately quelched the thought. ‘Satan is a Lie,’ I told myself – as I figured that that was a way of seducing myself into adding yet another item to my never-ending to-do list, an excuse not to write anything after all. So, I sat down on my butt as one should, and I wrote for a few days.
As the reader will see, this memoir is not intended to be a “how-to” guide to graduate school. If anything, some people might find my approach orthogonal to their ideal Ph.D. journey. However, I think a few lessons can be gleaned by prospective graduate students, actresses in Hollywood, or even the local novelists in your hometown. I intend to share my experiences in a way that is accessible to the general public, hence the use of the narrative format. In addition, I restricted the urge to use too much scientific jargon, and where they manage to slip through the cracks, or where I became too careless, I endeavored to expatiate. Learning a few scientific jargons isn’t a bad idea after all.
Happy reading.
I. The End
I woke up after a mildly interrupted sleep. I was anxious, but not as much as I thought I would be. I could still feel the pain around my calcaneus from a goal-saving tackle I made in pick-up soccer two days prior.
It was a rustic morning: a hot bath, a light meal, and a short prayer. Then I watched the EURO soccer replays from the previous day – anything that could divert my attention. I haven’t worn a tie in years, but I had one today – it was a slim green tie. Together with dark blue jeans, a light green shirt – light enough to be mistaken for a white shirt – and a pointed-toe black shoe my dad got for me at seventeen.
Everything moved slower than usual, but I ended up somehow in a room with two folks. Facing my computer with about seventy people – I was told – scattered in about four different time zones.
I moved from one slide deck to another, and I mustered as many words I could and as lucid as it could be done. Finally, the one-hour talk ended with another one-hour-plus, mostly friendly conversation about my work. At the tail end, I was excused for a quick deliberation.
I stood close to a magnet – the magnet that birthed most of the figures on the slide decks. The figures that I bet would have looked like hieroglyphics to the untrained eye.
I waited for a while, waited to be called in, but in the meantime, I had a banter with a scientist next door named John. He started with a compliment, “that was pretty well done.”
II. Home
I was born and bred in a small town in Southwestern Nigeria called Ilé-Ifẹ̀. Primary school, secondary school (high school), and college – everything in that town. I would say that I was born into a middle-class home – only to the extent that that is meaningful. I wasn’t shielded from the interrupted, epileptic power supply, for example. And the constant violent cheers we make – every time electricity is restored by the government-owned power company – remains a prominent childhood memory.
College was also tough enough to the point whereby, on many occasions, I read with candles at night. Rough enough that there wouldn’t be water to take your bath in the dorm. And on many occasions, I would sleep on long wooden chairs in the library, sometimes by choice, most times because the dorm is filled up to the brim with human bodies.
There are many stories to be told about childhood and college, but this isn’t the place for a full gist. Instead, my story will start from the summer of 2014.
III. Caldicellulosiruptor bescii
In the summer of that year, I worked as a science journalist for Advanced Biofuel USA. I had a keen interest in bioenergy while attending the Catholic University of America for a master’s program in biotechnology. So, I asked for an internship to learn more about the field.
During the internship, I frequented the United States Capitol to cover bioenergy events. While preparing for one of those events, I came across a paper published in PNAS titled ‘Direct conversion of plant biomass to ethanol by engineered Caldicellulosiruptor bescii.’ Even then, I found the microorganism’s name a little intimidating.
“Cal-di-cel-lu-lo-si-rup-tor,” I attempted pronouncing it after downloading the paper. The organism is a bacterium that grows in scorching hot environments – they grow in temperatures as high as 185 degrees Fahrenheit, and as such, it is rightly called a thermophile. This thermophilic feature, amongst others, makes the organism come in handy for bioenergy/biofuel research.
The whole point of the bioenergy ‘business’ is to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels – to make fuels using renewable organic matter, for example like using the grass in your backyard. And the technology is pretty straightforward. Microorganisms degrade the organic matter, and in the process, they produce fuels as by-products. At the time, the technology was getting some solid press attention, as biologists engineer microorganisms to accomplish the feat.
Anyways, that paper would have a sizeable impact on my trajectory over the next year.
That summer, I was planning to start a Ph.D. program the following year. I have shortlisted a few labs, so I also decided to email the paper’s senior author with a mouthful title heading, ‘Prospective Ph.D. student and Caldicellulosiruptor bescii,’ to ask about potentially joining her lab the following fall.
The professor replied that she wasn’t sure yet about accepting new graduate students, and she quickly added, “…there are lots of opportunities for students in our department, and I do hope you will apply.”
You don’t frequently get replies from professors from the outside, talk-less of such auspicious response.
And you bet – I applied.
IV. Worms in the Dish
My application to the Integrated Life Sciences Program (ILS) at the University of Georgia (UGA) can thus be primarily attributed to this one professor with the auspicious response, and in turn, the PNAS paper I read on that lonely hot afternoon summer in D.C.
The ILS program at UGA was such a rich program that allows you to select from a pool of research labs, which was over a hundred. I joined the ILS program in August 2015 because it was the only program that ‘promised’ a chance to do biofuel research. I proceeded with the obligatory lab rotations – where incoming graduate students pick three labs and work there for several weeks to get a feel of what the hell they think they are getting themselves into.
I rotated in two labs with biofuel research programs – after all, that was the whole point of coming to Georgia – and I enjoyed the lab rotations.
However, there was a problem. The professor who was to host me for my last rotation wrote on a warm afternoon in October.
“... Since I wrote to you, I was provided with additional information which makes it impossible for me to offer you a rotation in my lab for your third rotation. I apologize….”
That was pretty much a two-week ultimatum to get a third lab for the last rotation. I contacted a few other professors with similar biofuel research programs, but they either said “no funds” or “no space.” So, I ended up setting up a meeting with a tall, soft-spoken Caucasian professor who had just moved from the University of Florida at Gainesville. I was told he needs new graduate students. They call him Art – Art Edison.
“So, tell me about yourself,” he said. And I answered in many fine words.
He told me about his research program – metabolomics, which studies the identification and quantitation of metabolites in biological samples.
Metabolites are small molecules that are either made or used during metabolic processes. Thus, they are capable of telling us insightful stories about what is going on inside biological systems.
He also has interesting zoological research questions studying C. elegans. And I would come to what C. elegans is in a minute.
“Have you worked with C. elegans previously?” he asked. I said the closest I have gotten to C. elegans is the famous Craig Mello paper on RNAi.
He had seen my blog somewhere on my resume, and he gave a nice compliment about it.
Then, we proceeded to the lab, where he showed me a C. elegans with a black-handled 6.3 inches microscope.
V. The Nematode that Saved the World
When it was time to pick a lab, it was not particularly easy. I made a decision I hadn’t predicted the previous summer. On the one hand, I had this keen interest in bioenergy research, and I had reasonably good lab rotation experience. But, on the other hand, I had seen an advisor that I felt was dropped directly from heaven.
I do have several decision-making hacks in my coffers, and on the subject of work, it was this one: the person you are working with is more important than what you do. So, I went for Art, aka Dr. Edison. And a little bit more detail – I can never tell what the other journey could have been. All I can say is that my decision turned out to be beneficial.
In January 2016, as customary after a semester in the Integrated Life Sciences Program, I joined the doctorate program in biochemistry and molecular biology and Art Edison’s lab. And so, it began.
I am a morning person, and I have learned a great deal about when you have work to do, you ought to get to it. So, I arrive at the lab a few minutes past 7 am most mornings, spend anywhere between 7 to 11 hours in the lab depending on the task at hand, and I save the evening for some psychology, philosophy, or history books.
In the lab, my first project was to work with this C. elegans I had mentioned previously. The animal is so important that the full zoological name is worth spelling out: Caenorhabditis elegans. And there is no need to be intimidated. It is a microscopic nematode – a kind of worm. The zoological name is a string of three Greek words: Caeno (recent), rhabditis (rod-like), and elegans (elegant) – in English: an elegant, rod-like nematode that was ‘discovered’ recently. Take that as a description that would aid familiarity and recollection; otherwise, it’s more complicated than that. C. elegans is a model organism in biology. This means it has desirable characteristics that make it a model to study specific biological phenomena; for example, they have genetic similarities with humans.
My work then was to identify the role of a group of enzymes that potentially transfers glycosyl groups that form a component of chemical signals called ascarosides. You can think of these glycosyl chemicals as sugar-like moieties, while ascarosides are chemical compounds that these worms used to communicate. It is safe to think of these chemical compounds as a kind of language. So, a worm can tell its friend that a neighborhood is crowded, that food is available in an area, or that they are ready to mate.
That leaves us with the word enzyme. Enzymes are biological factors that catalyze biological processes. If you will, they are machines that make things happen in the cell.
I worked my butt off for about a couple of years hunting down the ‘sugar-transferring’ enzymes, but the experiments ultimately failed. It was like a slap in the face. When other folks in your cohort are already submitting and publishing first-author papers, it’s hard not to feel a little miserable.
Looking at the data with very little to salvage, my Ph.D. committee advised that the project be halted. I remembered the subject coming up shortly afterward in Dr. Edison’s office. I was trying hard to see if can try my luck one last time, tweak something and see if it bulges.
“I thought your committee said you should halt the project,” he said, while walking away from his standing desk, covered with an antiquated red cloth with spiral edges, on a bright afternoon.
As he takes his seat, I replied, “Yes.”
Then he made this cutthroat gesture straight from those mafia movies; he clinched his right fist, stretched out his thumb, and moved it neatly across his throat.
I thought that was the coolest thing I have seen in a long time! They saved me from the sunk cost fallacy.
End of year two, it was time to complete my Ph.D. candidacy examination, with a project already killed and buried. The Ph.D. candidacy examination is the bridge between being a Ph.D. student and a candidate, with the latter indicating that you are a favorable candidate for completing the program.
With the baggage of a failed project, I would be remiss not to say this was perhaps one of the most stressful periods during my program. And, at least, one lesson is in order.
When you spend most of your time on an activity – which is the nature of modern work, a failure in that endeavor might, for many, denote a failure of the self. In this context, we often mistake who we are for what we do. And it takes a special kind of character to dissociate them. Failure in grad school – like in life – is inevitable. The only question left to answer is how bad you have failed.
For my candidacy exams, I proposed a tangentially related problem to solve. Remember those glycosyl groups – sugar-like compounds – I mentioned previously. They also happen to be involved in the removal of toxins in C. elegans.
This ‘detoxification’ pathway turns out to be terribly important. For example, many parasitic nematodes that still kill thousands of people back in developing countries do so because they have fortified that detoxification pathway. When patients infected with these parasitic worms get treated with drugs, they could add those glycosyl groups to the active agents in the drug, which could make drugs inactive.
C. elegans being the bad-ass model organism that it is, makes for a great tool to study these sugar transferring enzymes in the detoxification pathway.
So, I set out on what I have labeled phase-II of my Ph.D. journey. I enjoyed working on the project; I was making good progress, but a few things happened – it’s life, after all.
VI. Enter Machine Learning
I have a fairly prodigious interest outside of biology, and expectedly, I spend a lot of time reading all kinds of books. I like to wander.
Ironically my first serious encounter about the prospect of machine learning – a technology out of the statistics and computer science departments – was from reading a historian named Yuval Harari. In his “21 lessons in the 21st century” book, he exposes how he thinks the technology will make a serious dent in the universe, especially in his chapters on Work and Liberty.
And I was sold.
I felt the technology would be the greatest thing since sliced bread, for better or for worse. And one of the hallmarks of impactful technologies in the 21st century are technologies that disappear – technologies that bury themselves in devices and apps. And I saw this happening – it’s used in Instagram, Facebook, MS Word, Google search, everywhere there is data, and importantly, they go almost always unnoticed to the uninitiated eye – it’s not the steam engine after all.
I have heard and read a bit about machine learning before this time, but not a text that shows how consequential it is, and could be. So, I began to read more books on the subject, and after each subsequent reading, I got increasingly sold on the idea. To the point whereby I figured I needed to dance myself – I needed to write my own codes. “I could use this to accelerate some discovery in biology,” I had thought.
Except that there was a little problem. I am no computer science or statistics major. I have taken mostly biology ( and a little chemistry) classes post-secondary (high) school. I haven’t taken a math class in 8 years, and I will be pushing it to say my programming skills were decent at the material time. I am in a Ph.D. program in Biochemistry for goodness’ sake!
I spoke to a few senior grad students around. Now in my third year preparing to go to my fourth, they just thought it bonkers. Art also did. He feared I would never graduate. We had many back-and-forths in those days. I had some self-doubt, but there are certain things you see that you can’t unsee – the usefulness of machine learning was it for me.
A senior graduate student in the genetics department at the time named Nick thought differently. Nick looked like those dudes that had picked up a heavy object and dropped it – only that he had done it a million times. His Passiflora tattoos stood out in his hairy arms as he faced me in the lobby that morning.
“Bif, you can make your Ph.D. whatever you want to make it,” he insisted. “You just have to make sure it aligns with the boss’s interest.” For some reason, that was enough to crack the nut. I just needed someone else who thinks I wasn’t crazy.
Selling the idea – working on an applied machine learning project – to my advisor was, of course, the toughest part. Especially considering that I have changed my dissertation project once.
Luckily for me, I would have a joker.
VII. The Joker
The joker was a side project in the lab that I haven’t introduced yet. It’s a project in collaboration with oncologists and other chemists in Georgia. The lead oncologist had approached my advisor a few years back – they needed a hand in discovering biomarkers for kidney cancer in urine.
Kidney cancers, like other cancers, are diagnosed using high-tech imaging methods like CT scans, in addition to biopsy. A biopsy is a medical procedure that involves removing tissues from an affected organ in the body to determine the presence and severity of a tumor.
Instead of expensive imaging or a painful, invasive biopsy, why not use small molecules like metabolites in urine to detect kidney cancer? This innovation will clearly come with great benefits given its non-invasive nature. In addition, up to fifty percent of kidney cancer patients tend to be diagnosed accidentally, owing to the asymptomatic progression of the disease. Think of the ease of detecting kidney cancer with urine. This diagnostic will be akin to using blood glucose levels to detect diabetes mellitus.
I had collected ‘chemical data’ on hundreds of urine samples for both healthy controls and kidney cancer patients at the time. All I needed to do was to finalize metabolites identification. It is at this point the chemist becomes a full-blown detective, hunting down small molecules in complex mixtures.
Importantly, this kidney cancer project provided an avenue for me to dance. Machine learning techniques are used for pattern recognition – the same way your senses and brain help you detect patterns to find your way around, say the difference between a 3-year-old kid and an 80-year-old man. We can train machine learning models to make certain decisions. For example, on Facebook, some algorithms will predict what news you will like and stick it right in your face. In my case, the goal will be to develop machine learning models that will use urinary metabolites to discriminate between healthy controls and kidney cancer patients.
But the problem remains. I needed to convince Art.
We are officially now in phase III of my Ph.D. journey, and this will be early on in my fourth year. While still marching on with my worm project, I started intense self-study sessions on math and machine learning. In addition, I started spending quality time in the statistics and computer science departments, attending journal clubs, and reading various head-spinning papers. The entire process was arduous. I was logging 14 hours, easily, every day. And between you and me, I hated it.
I believe it’s not a great idea to work too hard, you want to work in a manner that allows you to work tomorrow, and you want to get some quality time to do other things like read a book or play soccer. But I had to do what I needed to do for several months, and I slowed down the very minute I was able to.
I worked on the machine learning end of things for months without the knowledge of my advisor. Finally, when it was time to use my joker, I called a meeting in a small, cozy conference room – with two other graduate students present. I went from slide to slide, showing solid results, with neat visualizations, showing exactly what was done – and the many things that were still possible. I could tell Art was in awe. There was no more need for arguments. There was no further discussion on the subject.
He sent an email to our collaborators that same afternoon to tell them “about an interesting analysis Bif was doing.” Bif, being my sobriquet. Everyone seems to think it was great work. And yet again, I switched my dissertation project, only this time, thankfully, for the last time. I had the full license to dance!
I relearnt a lesson I have always tried to have at the back of my mind. When you want certain things really bad, the world has a way of rearranging itself to serve you – more often than not.
It’s not magic. It’s no woo-woo. It’s bloody true.
A while back, a friend of mine told me that the uber medieval philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas was once asked, “what does it take to be a Saint?”
His response was, “will it.”
VIII. Thesis
In July 2021, I defended my Ph.D. thesis titled “Metabolic Phenotyping Meets Machine Learning: Detecting Renal Cell Carcinoma in Urine.” I identified 7-metabolite markers for kidney cancer detection. I discriminated between early-stage and late-stage kidney cancer, and I used urinary metabolites to predict the size of tumors. I will be incredibly negligent if I do not state that this project results from intensive collaborative work involving a team of cancer surgeons, professors, and chemists.
In addition, for one other project that made the thesis, I employed a state-of-the-art explainable artificial intelligence tool to interpret metabolomics models. This does require a little bit of spelling out, so I will just get to it.
Let’s go back to the example of discriminating between a 3-year-old kid and an 80-year-old man. If I ask you to explain how to perform that task, my guess is, you will mention features such as ‘wrinkled faces,’ ‘grey hairs,’ ‘longer legs,’ ‘shorter arms,’ and the like. It turns out we can pose the same question to a machine – to explain its discriminative decisions.
For my explainable A.I. project, I developed machine learning models to discriminate between males and females using urinary metabolites; then, I asked the machine learning model to explain itself. The system turned out expected explanations like testosterone levels in the urine, where testosterone is the primary sex hormone in males.
IX. Wanderer
I came to graduate school because I wanted to engineer microorganisms for a living – to produce gas from grass, that kind of thing. Only to have wandered into investigating the role of sugar transferring enzymes in nematodes. As if that was not enough, I dabbled into fusing machine learning with metabolic phenotyping. I even tried my hands on some more complicated applied machine learning problems using chemical and image datasets (many failed, others waiting to be completed).
Thinking of myself as a wanderer, I took solace in the idea that Berkshire Hathway – the gigantic holding company – started life as a textile manufacturer. Coca-Cola, as a drug company. And one of my Physicians back in Athens, Georgia – an engineer.
It’s great to plan, but I will also be the first to say, “avoid statutory, rigid plans.” Wander – rationally, give room for serendipity, and try new things. This philosophy, when acted out, allows for the domestication of fortuna; it allows for the taming of luck. This is the basic idea that undergirds optionality. A concept very well developed by the philosopher Nassim Taleb. The upside of a rigid plan is capped; for a wanderer, who does it rationally, the opposite is the case. There is no telling what is to be seen – there is just no way to know.
In his book Antifragile, he uses the term flâneur and defines it as “someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained. In research and entrepreneurship, being a flâneur is called ‘looking for optionality.’ A non-narrative approach to life.”
As a side, and as weird as it sounds, in science, as in life, what you know can be a stumbling block. It’s hard, if not impossible, to shatter (wrong) dogmas when the scientist is absorbed in the very same dogma – it’s like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. And on this subject of ‘kicking ass,’ it should be no wonder that physicists had to come into biology to give us the structure of DNA.
I sat through journal club presentations in the statistics department. I took graduate classes that are way out of my comfort zone. I read books that made me looked strange in a biochemistry department, and I even poked my nose into a few graduate philosophy seminars on campus. I didn’t shatter any dogma, not even in my dreams, but I connected a few very close dots, and more importantly, I had some fun.
And I should say that I wouldn’t have been able to pull this off under any random advisor. Art gave me room to wander, to tinker.
X. Mimesis
There is yet another point that is worthy of note. In graduate school, again, as in life, mimesis and its profound consequences on culture leave their strong scent. Mimesis – imitation and its myriad consequences – has been unpacked as far back as, at least, 347BC by Plato. However, it did take some two thousand plus years to flesh out its profundity, as presented in the mimetic theory by Rene Girard.
At the risk of converting this short memoir into a philosophical, anthropological treatise, I will add the following: humans are unique in their appetite for imitation. We like to think of ourselves as the originator of our desires, except that there is nothing farther from the truth. We imitate the desires of others, the desire of a model, say a neighbor – leading to a triangular motif of subject-model-object. The result is a mimetic complex where two ‘friends’ move toward the same goal, invariably resulting in intense competition and sometimes violence. (Where there are limited objects for the taking.) And the reader must not get me wrong, you can’t escape mimesis – it is the basis of culture – nor is it desirable to always do so. However, you want to avoid it, where it leads to unnecessary, avoidable competition (I have written about this idea from a strictly sociological perspective here and here).
This idea maps to almost anything you can think of, anywhere there is a mimetic behavior, that is, anywhere there are humans. As such, in academia, with its various research programs, you see this intense competition (from mimesis) for grants, paper publishing, which also dovetails into job hunting, and sundries.
It was this understanding that partly led me to pick up machine learning in graduate school while in a traditional biochemistry program. I figured if I could speak the language of biology and just a little bit of machine learning, that will allow me to engage in less competition. And since it isn’t a bad idea to be a little self-critical, I will say that I didn’t strive enough to be less competitive in graduate school. Peter Thiel, the billionaire-intellectual, drives home this point I have been dancing around by suggesting that one should frequently ask oneself: “how do I become less competitive in order to become more successful.”
»»»»»
A Ph.D. thesis defense consists of two parts: a defense talk to the general public, followed by an oral examination by the Ph.D. committee members.
It was at the end of my oral examination that I chatted with John. After a few minutes of chatting, I continued my wait.
Then Mario came around. Mario is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab from Japan, a kind, genial fellow. I had shared a room with him once at a scientific conference we both attended in 2019. We had a long discussion about Japanese culture and literature, and he had suggested books like the Dancing girl of Izu by Yasunari Kawabata.
This time, expectedly, we chatted about my Ph.D. defense. “Are you done? Are the committee members done?” He asked.
“No,” I said. “I am waiting for them.”
“You did a fine job.”
“Thank you.”
“And how was the examination?”
“It was okay, we had a nice conversation.”
“Tough questions?”
“A few hard ones,” I said.
A few seconds after our conversation, Dr. Edison opened the heavy-looking brown door, took a few steps towards me, and extended his hands. As I shook it, he said, “Congratulations, Dr. Bifarin.” I smiled, and we entered the small, brightly lighted, cozy room for another quick chat.
Afterword
For folks who would like to read it, here are the research works from my Ph.D. thesis that has been published:
Detecting Kidney cancer using urine samples. Link
Estimating tumor size and staging kidney cancer using urine samples. Link
Interpretable machine learning with tree-based shapley additive explanations: application to metabolomics datasets for binary classification. Link
Philanthrophic Grant-making Project
If you enjoyed reading this, kindly consider donating to my microgrant philanthropic venture that supports young Nigerians here. If you are a young innovative Nigerian reading this, consider applying for a MBB grant.
Supplemental Photo Essay
Here are some pictures that didn’t make the main essay.
Acknowledgments
This essay was written and sent for comments on very short notice. So, I want to especially thank Laura Morris, Max Colonna, and Alayonimi Bifarin for reading the manuscript and for the much-needed feedback. Paul Omotoye for the prompt delivery of the cover design. All members of the Edison Lab group at the University of Georgia during my stay for being wonderful teammates. Finally, I thank all my collaborators that made my Ph.D. thesis possible.
Dreams really do come true ! And I agree, when we want something badly enough, the universe conspires to help us achieve it !