Last week I met three science graduates.
One person was talking about the issue where even the science
graduates do not have proper jobs. Second person told me that now she regret
for selecting science as her field. She said, “If I manage to do a MSc, maybe I
will get a university lecturer job. Third person was talking about a different
issue on our mothers and sisters moving to Middle East and the social issues that
come with that.
While I
sat back and thought of what they discussed, I met this awesome
lady, another scientist, Ms Praveena Joseph-de Saram.
Praveena is a Sri Lankan Physicist/Biologist/Neuroscientist who invented one amazing product and
then turned it in to a business as well.
Having
graduated from the
University of Oxford with
an MPhys degree in Physics, she joined the PhD programme in Molecular Biology and
Neuroscience at Princeton University planning to have a career as
an academic. Instead, following a stint as a
Management Consultant with AT Kearney, she is now the CEO of the company she found “Poopooh LLC”.
Then I also found that Praveena, who will
soon hold the patent for her product, has handed over the production process to
rural women in Sri Lanka even though that is not the cheapest way to
manufacture it. She believes, that way they can provide for their families
without actually leaving the family for a longer time.
Then I remembered the
first three people I met in the week and the issues we discussed. I was
thinking how one person could address and show so many examples to the
society. Without any further
thought I decided
that I must write about
her. This is her story.
Q – So Praveena, to
start with what is your product? Why is it so special? Which part of it did you applied the patent for?
I have two dogs, a golden retriever named Romeo and an English
Springer Spaniel named Rosie. As you know, people walk their dogs in public
places over in USA and Europe and many parts of the world. They are also
generally responsible about keeping their cities clean. So most people
pick up after their animals quite diligently.
While walking my two babies one
day, I noticed that the garbage bins were full and people had left the little
plastic bags of dog poop pilled up near them. There was a whole lot of them and
I got to thinking about how many plastic bags are used just for this purpose.
Just for my two, I would be using nearly 2000 each year! So I felt there must
be a more environmentally friendly way to do this.
That’s where the poopooh bag
comes in – it is made out of paper and cardboard and natural latex glue. All
these things are biodegradable. The bags also have a unique design with two
scoops for picking up the stuff so one doesn’t have to do the whole “hand
through the bag and pick up a warm squishy nugget” thing – which is really not
very pleasant. With the poopooh bag, there is no touch, no tying things up –
just pick up, flip the stuff inside and that’s it! Once you dispose of it, it
won’t stick around forever in a landfill and if you have the facilities to do
so, you can even compost the whole bag.
As for the
patent, I have applied for utility patents – that covers the way the item is
used and works and that is rather different to design patents. So the patent
doesn’t cover specific parts of the bag but protects the whole invention and
how it is used. It’s rather complicated – I guess that’s why patent lawyers
study so long and charge so much ;)
The poopooh bag is faster to use, there is no need to tie it
closed, and once the offending poop is inside, you might just as well be
carrying around a paper lunch bag for all anyone knows. So the start was about
creating a bag I would like to use myself. I just bought some paper and
cardboard and got to work designing something (as you might recall from our
school days, I was always good with arts and crafts – Niloo used to call me
“crafty” as a cheeky little joke;).
Once I made a
few, I shared them with friends who had dogs or people who would help me with
mine sometimes. They all liked it so it felt like a good product to actually
put out into the world!
The obvious
next choice for me is Sri Lanka since I have always wanted to do something
there and particularly, I have been interested in setting up a social
enterprise to help our people in some way. For one thing, I think we girls got
an excellent education for pretty much free in Sri Lanka (a particularly
special thing considering the way women and girls are often treated elsewhere
in the SAARC region) and I have always been grateful for that and have always
wanted to give back in some way.
In terms of
start up cost, the patents were the biggest item. There are pros and cons to pursuing
patents quite aggressively and in hind sight, I might have done things a little
differently. That’s probably content enough for another post of yours :)
However, overall, I spent much less than the price tag of that paper bag
machine in the whole start up process (for patents, inventory, design, website
creation etc). I’d be happy to talk about the details of all this at some point
but the start-up capital needed in each industry is so different I’m not sure
my particular experience will be very useful to other entrepreneurs.
A – I went into this a little in a
previous previous question. I’ve learnt a lot about production in Sri Lanka
over the past few years since this is not the first idea I had for making
things in SL.
Honestly, there are a lot of things I didn’t expect. One thing is
that NOTHING in terms of raw materials appears to be made in Sri Lanka anymore.
The paper is imported, the cardboard is imported, perhaps even the latex glue
is imported. So, as a small business with no dedicated supply chain just to
ensure I get the exact raw materials I need, it’s hard to maintain quality or
consistency in a design since one doesn’t always know what will be available
next month. It was hard to find the right weight of paper and cardboard – the
range of weights and colours available here is very limited so one needs to
make do.
But then one can run into patent infringement issues
when dealing with that part of the world. So I am happy getting the bags made through
trusted people here. I am also looking at getting the bags made through
rehabilitation centers for people with disabilities – that will give them a
source of income and more funds with which to run their programmes and also
provide work that involves working with their hands, which is important for
regaining dexterity in certain cases.
A – Hmm, Nish, I am actually not sure that I know
women to be discouraged from being scientists here. I know the usual “if you
are smart, you have to be either a doctor, lawyer or engineer” thing. It’s
probably hard for anyone doing a degree other than those three to find a
satisfying and well paid job here – so I think children, either male or female,
may be discouraged from pursuing non traditional fields to some extent.
For
sure, some of our teachers at VV did do a “you are studying WHAT?” double take
when I said I was going to read Physics. But I am pretty sure that was because it’s
unusual, rather than because I was a girl. All three of my parents (mother,
father, step-father) were/are very liberal minded and ahead of their time for
Sri Lanka and I never felt any career was closed to me because I was female. Even
at VV, I felt like the attitude was that we were good enough to aspire to whatever
we wanted.
But back to
my parents, there was really no pressure to study this or that. My sister
wanted to be an archeologist or an architect (as was our father), if I remember
right. The Kulasinghes are all scientifically minded – architects, engineers
etc. But for me growing up, the biggest influence was probably my step dad, who
was a musician. He generally didn’t care what I did, as long as I did it well.
So a lot of pressure to be very good at something but he never dictated what
that one thing was to be. He actually thought my calling was to be a Chef – so
compared to that, becoming a scientist was fairly inside the box :)
My mother,
who was Sri Lanka’s first and for a long time only Speech Therapist, worked in
many hospitals here and had to collaborate with a lot of doctors – the only
opinion she had was that medicine is a cut throat profession and that she
preferred I didn’t enter that field.
So physics
was entirely my choice. I actually hated the subject till London A/Ls. For
that, the syllabus was very interesting and I had a teacher, Mr. Lucien Herath,
who made it even more exciting by going off syllabus too often to talk about
all sorts of weird and wonderful things. His pet interest at the time was
astrophysics (my nephew, who was also taught by him, tells me it is now
artificial intelligence) – that’s how I got it into my head that I wanted to be
an astrophysicist/ cosmologist.
A – Hmm, I’m not sure what you mean by
different subjects. I studied Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Pure Maths for
A/Ls – so I’m guessing you are referring to the mixing of Biology and Maths? I
suppose that is unusual in Sri Lanka, perhaps, but I really see no reason why
that should be the case. Anyone who wants to study a scientific field nowadays should
be competent in Math (and also Computer Science). As far as regrets go, I
regret dropping CS, which was my 5th subject at A/Ls and I also
regret not paying more attention to developing programming skills while at
Oxford.
Switching
from Physics to Neuroscience, that is a very long story. And perhaps not the
best decision I made either. At the moment, I’m not sure it’s something I would
choose to do again with hindsight. It was, in all honesty, a bit of an emotional decision to leave
physics and study neuroscience and I don’t think such decisions turn out to be very
well thought out ones.
A month after I started studying at Oxford, my step
father was diagnosed with cancer and he passed away as I was entering my second
year. I spent that first summer holiday in Sri Lanka (at oxford, summer
holidays are 16 weeks long!) and my dad’s condition was really progressing fast
with metastases in the brain and all that. He was probably the sharpest person
I have met, even to date perhaps, and it was really painful to see that
beautiful mind fall apart from disease and also, in a way, strangely interesting
(an odd thought, I admit, so perhaps I always was meant to be a scientist).
I had also
spent many school vacations working with head injured people at the Military
Hospital in Colombo, ever since I was about 13 or so. So that’s a lot of years
watching people recover from brain injuries. I thought the brain is a
mysterious and intriguing organ with a marvelous ability to heal and adapt. So
Neuroscience is a great subject to have had the opportunity to study but it’s
also a rather young and still messy field so I guess I remain more truly in awe
of the elegance that is Physics. My undergrad math tutor used to use the phrase
“elegant solution” once in a while – I don’t think I fully understood what that
meant until faced with the absence of it :) Physics is a very old field and a
lot of the basics appear to be fairly well understood. Neuroscience is very
young and it sometimes feels like a lot of groping around in the dark. I
suppose that’s why one of the professors at Princeton used to say “Neuroscientists don’t design experiments,
they explore!”. Maybe I prefer designing based off a solid foundation more than
exploring.
A – At the risk of sounding like a
mouthpiece of the Obama Administration (and perhaps plenty of other
governments), I’m going to say good science requires solid core skills. My
advice to anyone wishing to study any type of science would be to get a solid
grounding in math and computer science (since that is important for modeling,
managing large data sets, analysis etc).
But overall, my
advice to anyone wanting to study anything at all, is to do it for the right
reasons. Study something because you love learning about it or because it gives
you useful skills for a job that interests you. Even four years is a long time
to spend learning something you care nothing about. I think too many people get
degrees for the sake of getting a degree. Education doesn’t come cheap and
there are opportunity costs. And not everyone is academically skilled or needs
to be – there are plenty of successful people who don’t have any of the “right”
qualifications. Qualifications and degrees help, but don’t chase after them
just for the sake of it. (Apparently, one now needs a higher degree to be
considered a good candidate for marriage in SL! That would be an example of a
poor reason;)
Q –I know for a fact
you did not only studied books but also did many other things in life. Today
you seem to be very happy and content in life. May be the most important questionJ. How do you live so happily?
But I realize
(and maybe you do too?), that I have the luxury of living this way because I
don’t live in Sri Lanka – where every aunty has an opinion about my life, my
family, my weight, whether or not I have children etc etc. If I lived there,
not only will I have to put up with these opinions, however well meaning they
might be, but my family would also have to listen to comments and make excuses
for whatever it is that I am appearing to do wrong. There is a lot of pressure
in Sri Lanka, particularly on girls, to do such and such and behave in such and
such a way, to get married by a certain time, to have children by a certain age
etc. And EVERYONE seems to have an opinion about that – regardless of how well
they know you or your particular circumstances. I really think no one has a
right to decide what you should do or when – except yourself. Or at least, the
only people whose opinion I allow myself to be truly swayed by now are the
people who have actually noticed and stood with me when the going got tough. That
probably means I listen to less than 3 people but I do like to seek out the
opinion of people I respect – especially older people. Older people have a way
of really knowing what is important in the end. Maybe that’s just hind sight
but it’s good to avail yourself of it when you can! Just be sure to ask the
advice of people who have already lived a life you admire and respect and not
people who will have no understanding of your experiences or problems.
Anyway, we
all have good times and bad times in life and life is hard even for those of us
who appear to have our acts together. Quite often, we don’t know the truth of
the lives and difficulties of even our closest friends. So I try not to judge
and I try not to take offense at small oversights and all that. Life is too
short to waste on negativity. I also don’t compare myself to other people or
judge myself harshly against other’s achievements and I try very hard not to
fall into a particularly Sri Lankan habit – that of diminishing everyone else’s
successes and trying to find reasons for why it was “so easy” for them to be
successful etc. I think it is important to try to be happy for the good luck
and hard earned successes of others. That gives one a lot of things to be happy
about, right? So maybe it’s good to be happy for others, even if it’s merely to
help oneself gain a happy outlook :) I have also noticed that, even if those
nearest and dearest to us are sources of negativity or disappointment, there is
genuine kindness to be found all around us, sometimes in the acts of total
strangers. Take time to notice and appreciate those acts! (that might require
looking up from the cellphone screens we are all so mesmerized by these days;)
2 comments:
Very inspiring article. Iam a student who wish to enter Oxford University. How did you go there? Do they accept local A/L results as well?
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