Speaker 1: Okay, so just to make sure for the interview, you work at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory as a physical scientist.

Speaker 2: Yes, my name is Veeshan Narinesingh, but you can call me V. And I’m a physicist. I work at NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in the Atmospheric Physics Division.

Speaker 1: Okay, great. So just for anyone who might be, you know, a bit new to your position as a physical scientist, can you just tell me what it is that you do, like in terms of roles or in terms of your role or responsibilities?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so actually I have a very, even though my role says physical scientist, it’s a very unique role within NOAA. It’s the first of its kind. I mean, the role of physical scientist is not, but my job description is the first. So first I’ll start by telling you 50% of my job.

So 50% of my job is working as a physicist, a researcher, a scientist for the federal government as we try to study climate change, whether get a better understanding of the physics of these two things and projections of how it might behave in the future. So some things I think a lot about are waves in the atmosphere. So there’s this phenomenon called Rosby waves. And these are waves that travel in the atmosphere or they can sit stationary and they really lead to all the different weather patterns that we get in the mid-latitudes and all over the globe. So for example, when you have the high pressure portion of these Rosby waves over a region and they get stuck, that can give you a heat wave.

And when you have the low pressure portion of these waves, that can also lead to extra tropical cyclones and things like that. So these waves are very important. How these waves travel, how often they occur, the directions that they travel in, these are all things that physicists are trying to understand or people are using physics to try to understand in our current climate. And then I guess the Holy Grail of all of this is trying to understand how these waves behave in the future climate is really important because we want to be prepared for the future. So in a nutshell, that’s the science of what I study, heat waves, Rosby waves, all these different kinds of things, the physics of them, how they change and evolve in climate. And what I use in order to study these phenomena, these weather and climate phenomena, is something called climate models. So basically, if you ever took physics class in physics class, they have Newton’s laws, they have conservation of energy, all these things to describe like blocks and like balls on springs and things like that. But you can take all these physics equations and you can write them for the atmosphere.

The atmosphere is the fluid at the end of the day, even though we can’t see it moving around the fluid actually. So you can take these physics equations, write them for the atmosphere, you put them on a rotating sphere because the earth is rotating, all this stuff, all this mathematics. And you get some crazy equations and crazy differential equations, which you can’t solve by hand. But luckily for us, we have computers that can solve them.

And it’s basically like a big video game. You can go into the computer to solve all these equations for you. And you can do all kinds of experiments with ready to climate and weather. So that’s how we predict the weather, for example, which is pretty remarkable.

And then we can take these models that solve all these equations and we can increase the carbon dioxide, for example, and run it 100 years in the future and see how the wave, the heat waves, storms, all that might change. Okay. And we can wind it after, so that was 50%. I’ll follow up there before I tell you the other 50%.

Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, I just had like, I was just wondering, so you talked about having these models. Would you say that, I mean, this is like a very important topic these days. Would you say that AI and machine learning are a big part of like helping with these models?

Speaker 2: Well, I’m definitely not an expert on the machine learning and AI stuff. I don’t, so I’m not very read up in all this stuff, but definitely AI and machine learning has become increasingly more important in climate science. In our lab, for example, at GFDL, they have the Allen Institute, they’re representatives from the Allen Institute working within the lab to help make our climate models better. So one of my friends, for example, Spencer Clark, he’s a really smart brilliant guy.

He’s working on taking course resolution models and using AI to make these models run as if they were at higher resolution without all the computing costs that would entail. So it is very frontier kind of thing, for sure.

Speaker 1: Wow, okay, so just like for other stuff, I see that it’s like taking like an increasingly large spot. Do you want to describe the other 50% of your job you were talking about? Okay, cool.

Speaker 2: So I’m very lucky to be tackling maybe the two worst problems in the history of mankind, climate change and systemic racism. So the other 50% of my job is dedicated to enhancing diversity and inclusion within, I guess our lab, our federal government and the people that work there.

And the climate science field in general. So for example, if you go look at the population of the United States, Hispanics, for example, take up about 20% of that total population. But then when you go and you look at the composition of the lab that I work in and similar kind of labs, you see that Hispanic people working there is only like three to five percent.

So there’s this big under representation when you go look at science fields and STEM fields. So a big part of my job is working on trying to improve that, working on trying to build better communities within scientific spaces where everybody can feel welcome and safe. And in the day, just make sure everybody’s in a good community, on a good vibe to thrive and everybody’s represented. So we can all do our work when you have diversity that makes, you have diverse minds, diverse perspectives that makes the work better. You have different people that can connect with different communities. So that’s a big part of my job.

It involves a lot of mentorship of students, a lot of outreach and meeting with students and giving talks, inspiring people, traveling to places, going to conferences, building community within the lab, organizing events and stuff for people to get together and become friendly with one another, have a nice vibe. So that’s the other 50%. I think it’s equally as important.

Speaker 1: Yeah, so there’s a lot of outreach in that other 50%. My community worked.

Speaker 2: Yup, hence how I met you. Great.

Speaker 1: So, I mean, you’re a researcher, so this question might be difficult to answer, but would you consider that your job involves an ample variety of problems to tackle? Maybe in the sense that you aren’t always focused on one particular subject, you mentioned that you were talking about waves, so maybe this is a bad question.

Speaker 2: Oh, no, this is a good question. Yeah, I’m definitely thinking about a million things that once, all the time, it’s like quantum mechanics. Yeah, so at this point in my career, like when you’re doing your PhD, for example, you’re kind of focused on like one or two projects, like your main dissertation, and then you might have a couple of side things that you’re doing, but as you progress further and further as a scientist, sometimes you go into these roles where you have several projects going on at the same time. So professors, for example, at universities, often have different students with different projects going on in their own projects and postdocs.

So at the lab that I work at, I’m in the type of role where I’m expected to produce science, to produce papers, and contribute to our understanding because it ultimately serves the American and the American people and people of the world, right? Understand climate change and weather. So for example, right now, I have a project going on about heat waves in Honduras. I have another one about heat waves in the Caribbean, another one about heat waves in Africa, and I have one that’s related to El Nino and the effect on weather in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

Then I got another one that’s about looking at the different type of temperature forcing that gives you extreme temperature events throughout the country. And then I have all the diversity and inclusion projects that I’m doing, all the student mentorship, planning a trip to Puerto Rico this fall to do some outreach. So yeah, definitely a lot of different kinds of problems to think about, both scientific and I guess climate justice related.

Speaker 1: Wow, okay, so you have things for both the scientific and outreach aspects, that must be a lot. So I mean, would you say that there’s a lot of communication within, I’m not sure if you have a team, but would you say there’s a lot of communication and teamwork as a part of your job?

Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. As a scientist, I mean, you don’t have to, but I think the scientists that thrive the most, they work within teams, they encourage the collaborate with all different kinds of people with different diverse perspectives, hence the diversity aspect of it is very important. So teamwork is very important. It’s very critical that you’re able to work in a team well to be responsible, to pull your own weight, to contribute, also manage your interactions with people so you can get the job done at a high level. So definitely if you’re considering being a scientist or something like that, you should try to work on your teamwork skills and get some experience in that.

Speaker 1: Okay, so would you consider that your job comes with flexibility in terms of maybe time, location, pace?

Speaker 2: Yeah, it does. And I think working with the government in this moment, it offers some flexibility and I’ve had other jobs where it offers flexibility as well, but in this kind of role, we got to go to work in the office three days a weekend. For now, we can telework, work remotely for it, two days, so that’s nice, that’s some flexibility. And then in terms of the topics that I get to work on, I mean, my interests are exactly aligned with what the agency wants to do, which is essentially serve the people. So serving the people as it relates to weather and climate is exactly what I’m interested scientifically. So my scientific interests have freedom to explore that up there as long as it aligns with what the goals of the lab and know what are.

Speaker 1: Okay, and so maybe like a last, like high, higher level question, how would you say that working for the government differs from other jobs that are not, obviously, for the government?

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a, I just going off my limited experience. So besides working for the government, I’ve only worked full-time at nonprofit organizations. So I guess when you’re working in certain sectors, like nonprofit or private industry tech, depending on the company that you’re working for, the organization that you’re working for, there’s varying levels of the flexibility.

So at my old job, when I was the deputy director of the Harlem Gallery of Science, that was a nonprofit role, building youth development programs in Harlem. So that allowed me a lot of flexibility. I kind of just had to go into the office when I needed to. And I was in a senior leadership position. But then there was also times where I had to run events and be there on the weekends.

So it was nice to have a lot of flexibility with that. And I was directly under the president of the organization. So I kind of only had to answer to him. So, and we had a really good relationship, a good understanding.

So that was nice for me. Another job that I had is a postdoc at Princeton University. That was another full-time role that I had.

That offered a lot of flexibility as well. I kind of just went to the lab whenever I needed to since we’re doing computational stuff. I just work remotely.

Even though I was in Princeton, I was living in New York. So I go down when I need to. That was really nice to have that flexibility. And then for a while, I was when I first started working as a federal employee, I had to start commuting from the Bronx all the way to Princeton, Princeton, Plainsboro, where the lab is located. And that was really tough making that big commute two, three times a week, because there’s a lot of traffic.

Sometimes it would take two to one and a half hours. So I would just say, yeah, I mean, obviously, working for the government is probably not gonna provide you as much flexibility as some of these private industry things or nonprofits, depending on what you do. But at the end of the day, I really like my job. And I also moved closer. So now it’s like a reasonable commute. And yeah, I look forward to working honestly. And I love the environment that I’m in.

It’s very intellectually stimulating. The people that I work with are really nice and cool. Make me feel comfortable. And they’ve kind of mentored me a lot to help me grow into this person that I am.

So I really appreciate that environment. The agency that I work for, like I said, really, I mean, you’re not gonna become rich doing this stuff. That’s for sure. Working in private industry, you’ll probably make more money. But the mission is, still at the end of the day, I make a decent living six-figure starting and all that. Good benefits, all that.

But the mission, serving the American people, serving the people of the world, helping us understand climate change, thinking about vulnerable communities and how we can empower those communities to be climate resilient and ready. I mean, that’s worth more than any money in the world to me.

Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. That’s very inspiring. So stepping down a bit more from the high level stuff, could you describe what a regular day looks like for you?

Speaker 2: What a regular day looks like. There’s no regular days for me. Which is awesome because that’s what I like. I don’t like doing the same thing every day. I’m not someone sitting in cubicles and you know, push paper all day.

Every day is different and it’s fun. And I like it that way because one day I might be coding, I might be sitting there coding in Python, analyzing some data or running some simulations. Sometimes I spend, when I generate my figures, looking over my figures, trying to understand the science of what’s going on and making PowerPoints. A large part of a scientist’s job is presenting your work. So, yeah, you’re walking through the full scientific process, so you run your model, you analyze the data, you synthesize it into like a presentation, and then you present it.

You present it in the form of a paper, a PowerPoint presentation poster, whatever, all these different things. So, a scientist aspect that’s kind of like mixed in throughout day in, day out, depending on what I need to get done in my deadlines. And then, you know, some of my job entails being in all different kinds of meetings. So, for example, I’m the chair of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Accessibility Committee in our lab. So, we’ll have some meetings to organize events or things that we have going on in the lab. I also mentor students. So, I have four students that I’m working with right now, so I meet with them and see how they’re doing, give them some tips, help them, teach them.

That’s really fun. Some days, I’m doing outreach. I try to do like an outreach thing every month. And then, also as scientists, we get invited a lot to speak at places. So, you know, I make several trips during the year to different universities across the country to give talks and things like that. Go to conferences sometimes. So, yeah, it is pretty different. It’s really fun, honestly.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So, there’s a lot of variety. I mean, I can definitely appreciate that myself. You do a lot of stuff? Yeah, yeah. I like it. I don’t like always doing the same things. I mean, so, I try to not, you know, work on the same thing two days in a row.

So, you know, one day I might be working on my summer home, working on another one on my college list. And then, I always try and, you know, go outside. Like, I like running. I like playing basketball. So, I definitely try and do like different things every day.

Speaker 2: Yeah, are you on the, do you do any extracurriculars in your school?

Speaker 1: So, I am part of the Peer Tudor club myself. So I tutor other people. But apart from that, you know, I won’t get too much into detail. But it’s kind of hard at my school because I would be mostly interested in, like, athletics. And our campus is not at our school. It’s all the way in Brooklyn. And I live in Harlem.

Speaker 2: Oh, you live in Harlem? Okay. Yeah. Where’s your school at?

Speaker 1: It’s all the way downtown by South Ferry. Oh, okay. All right.

Speaker 2: Well, that’s good. The tutoring club is good though. And it’s good to have sports with your friends and stuff. Some good, like, human interaction. Yeah, that’s for sure.

Speaker 1: Um, so, I mean, like, we’ve talked about the work, but would you say that your job offers a good, like, work-life balance? Because that’s important to a lot of people. Yeah, definitely. It does? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: I don’t know. I feel like some people in the lab maybe they don’t think that. But for me, I think that.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I’m sure I can vary from person to person because it also depends on how you handle your work and when you work. So. The internal pressure, all that stuff. Yeah. Um, so do you, I mean, I can, I can, like, you’ve talked about working with, with a lot of people across your company. And obviously, um, you have that other 50% of like outreach and diversity. But do you work with a lot of people who have different jobs within the company?

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. So in our lab, the, in the position that I’m in now, there’s all kinds of people that work there. There’s scientists, there’s people that are specialized in like computer infrastructure and like, um, code development. There’s people that do administrative work, like, um, you know, the budgets and getting stuff paid, um, getting people their paychecks. There’s HR people that, um, manage the hiring. There’s custodial staff, of course, there’s facility staff that, um, move things around, I guess, and other, other things.

There is people that work in policy and connecting back our science to like what they need in Congress and things like that. Um. Yeah, it’s probably a lot more than I’m remembering, but there’s a lot of different kinds of roles there, sure. Okay. Can contribute.

Speaker 1: So working with a lot of a variety of different people with a lot of roles.

Speaker 2: Um, so I was sorry to cut you off, but, um, I would say to like within the sciences, there’s many different kinds of scientists. So I must say this is what there’s also chemists in there, there’s biologists, a bunch of people.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I assume that you like need those people to like also work with you. You also like work with a lot of those people. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2: We’re all collaborating working together because the earth, all the systems of the earth are connected. So for example, there’s some people in the lab that focused on like plankton and how climate changes affect them and how do you model that with the computer to get a sense of how much plankton is going to be in the future. And then all that interacts with the atmosphere and it’s dependent on temperature and the ocean and things like that. So a lot of different levels of expertise required. That’s for sure. Okay.

Speaker 1: Um, so now just just help, you know, students get a better idea. Could you like try and describe for me, maybe like in a simplified way, of course, the path for a student, I guess, like me, who’s in high school. Um, for them to get to a position like the one you’re in today.

Speaker 2: Okay. The high school student. Hmm. All right. Uh, I’m going to tell you the idealized path. All right. But I first wanted to disclaimer this by saying that I did not take this path. I’m telling you a good path, but I did not take this path. My path was pretty bad on a sleep. So when I was in high school, I did not care about school or going to college or graduating.

I just want to have fun with my friends. I’ve dealt with a lot of like bad stuff in my life going on outside of it. A lot of like trauma and things like that.

And I think a lot of my trauma response was to just be really carefree and just care about having fun with my friends and doing things like that. So I did get in a lot of trouble when I was growing up and I was very unserious about school. Um, during my undergrad, I, uh, yeah, so I did not go to any like prestigious high school or any prestigious college or anything like that. I just kind of went to school because like that’s what society told me that I needed to do.

And my parents told me that I needed to do. So I just went to college. I went to Pace University at Perth downtown, which is really, really expensive private school. And I would not recommend a school like that if you are from like a lower middle class family like mine was.

Um, so, yeah. And then I transferred from Pace University. So, yeah, I had the realization that what I was studying down there was not interesting to me. I was doing like marketing and I was like, you know, I’m just going to do what I was always interested in, which was physics. But I switched to physics and then transferred to city college about like the second year of undergrad, I think, um, or third year. So I transferred to city college because they had a physics major and then city college was a state school.

So the tuition was much less. But then when I first got to city college, I guess I was like 20 or 21 years old around that time. And I was still kind of very unserious, just cared about like having fun, I guess. Also, yeah, just dealing with a lot personally with my family and all that. So that was difficult.

And then, yeah, after some certain events, I kind of came to a realization where, uh, yeah, I realized that I had a lot of experience in that, you know, my mom, my mom was in dirt, such hardships in her life. She grew up really poor in the Caribbean in Trinidad. And like she moved here to create a better life for us and have better opportunities for us to access education. Like she never got the chance to go to college.

She grew up with like a dirt floor kind of thing, like really poor, she has 14 siblings. So, you know, I thought to myself like, and just seeing the stuff that she endured while I was growing up, being abused, all these kinds of things. And if you talk to her, she’s just like the nicest person in the world. And you’d never know that she’s been through all these hardships. She’s so resilient and cool and nice.

And I’m just thinking of my head like, you know what, like this lady sacrificed so much and did so much that and I’m just wasting it. I’m going to school. I’m not even passing my classes.

I’m just wasting all of these opportunities that she fought so hard for. So I started becoming very serious in school after that. And I started so just to recap, I say all that because like, I feel like students sometimes drive themselves crazy to get into like a hardware to MIT. And that’s good if you want to do that, but you really don’t need to do that in order to be successful.

Like, maybe your life, have fun. I think most importantly, like just try to be very serious about your education. Your education can take you places that you wouldn’t even dream of.

You didn’t even know you dreamed of. So take your education. That’s for sure. So I went to a regular state school. And at first I did bad, but then I started doing good. I started doing good because I first of all studied more. I started reading the textbooks they gave us. I started meeting with some of my friends to study together. I went to the tutoring center. I went to office hours with a professor and I went from getting like C, C pluses in my in my classes and like my analytical dynamics and my electromagnetism courses and calculus courses. I went from getting those kinds of grades and F’s even to getting A’s in everything. I feel like my transcripts like C, C, C, C, C, B, D, F and then it’s like A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A the whole way up.

So bottom mechanics, all that stuff. So definitely like build your support system when you go to school have friends that you study with. Don’t go to study with like seven people that’s going to be distracting but that one or two or a group of friends that you sit there suffer, do some problems together. And then also just make sure you go enjoy yourself after you know, take a test, go out and have a dinner together or you know, things like that. So definitely you got to work hard, take your education very seriously, try to do as good as possible in your classes, but also make sure you take time and enjoy life and you know, have friends, have that social interaction, that kind of thing. So I started doing good in my classes.

That helped me out a lot. And then I also started working in a lab. So I emailed pretty much every single professor, physics professor at City College and maybe like two of them answered me and I got the opportunity to work in a laser optics lab during my undergrad. And I was doing that working and I was making solar cells and testing.

I was making quantum dot solar cells and looking for multiple exciton generation. So that was really cool and fun. And I was like in a lab like putting apparatus together and like shooting lasers and stuff like that, taking measurements, which was fun and cool but also realized that I don’t like doing that kind of stuff. So that’s good. I tried something different. So working in the lab also really helped. I was blessed enough to even get on a paper during my undergrad. Also other things that really helped too was while I was in college, I worked at a tutoring center. So in Harlem, so I worked at this place and there was a lot of like low income kids immigrants, kind of like from similar backgrounds that I came from. So that was really great getting that teaching experience because it made me fall in love with like education and helping young people become smarter.

That was really good. And then I also had other kinds of jobs that I feel like helped me a lot. I worked as a bartender at one time that really helped with my communication skills and like managing multiple things at once in a hectic environment. I also worked in retail at different kinds of clothing stores and so hope that Avenue and that helped with my communication and salesman skills for sure.

So yeah, I feel like I’m saying all this emphasize like different kinds of experiences are very important. And then after I was finishing my undergrad, I took a gap year to apply to graduate school. And then I got into a physics PhD program. I get at the same school that I was at. So I still didn’t transfer to no fancy expensive school, but I went to the same PhD program in the same school that I was at. And from there, I got connected with some fellowships.

And I guess the rest was history. That’s how I started working with Noah. So yeah, undergrad straight to PhD and then a postdoc. Well, I worked in nonprofit for six months and I did a postdoc at Princeton for a year and a half and then federal scientists. So keep it open mind and then also don’t drive yourself crazy trying to get into some crazy school.

Speaker 1: That’s that’s definitely very, very inspiring. So I mean, just, I mean, you covered already all of this, but as as like a final question, do you have any last, you know, a few words of advice for anybody, like, in general, and maybe trying to get a job like yours.

Speaker 2: Yeah. A lot of advice. I would say definitely at the end of the day, make sure you have fun and enjoy your life. That’s what I’ll say first. But you got to study and work hard that’s for sure. So if you’re in school, make sure you get your good grades, make the time to get your good grades and all that stuff. Because I didn’t do that at first and I kind of wasted some of my life, I guess, I guess, you know, everything is part of the journey though.

So I don’t regret nothing. But definitely try to make sure you get your good grades. Well grades aren’t everything to you got to get some other experience as well.

Try to get, you know, work a part time job every every kind of experience, even if you don’t think it’s directly related will add to your character and your story in some way. That’s a skill that they have in some way. So be open, try different things. And then remember what the goals are at the end of the day for me it was. I want to do stuff that helps people that makes the world a better place that helps people from impoverished communities and power themselves and and have a say and contribute to the science. So that was always my end goal.

So even in all the moments of suffering that I endured, I said, this is this is why I’m doing this for everybody else and my mom and to make my community proud and all that stuff. And then one thing I would also add is to when you’re you’re as young as possible getting into this, I would say to try to get into like investing and saving your money and stocks and stuff like that. Try to learn about stuff like that as soon as you can and start stacking your money and things like that investing in ETFs and stocks. So good book for that is quit like a millionaire. You ever heard of that. I wish like the stuff I knew now I wish I knew like, if I knew this stuff like when I was your age or like 20 years old at the ability to find out for sure. So I would say try to get into getting your money right as early as possible.

Speaker 1: Okay. Um, so, I mean, I feel like that’s that’s like a perfect note to end it off on. Thanks. Thanks so much for accepting to do this interview and for, you know, showing up today. I’m sure I’m sure this will have a lot of people. It definitely helped me.

Speaker 2: Man, yeah, go for it.