We are family, I got all my sisters with me...
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We are four sisters (yes, 4!). I am the eldest sister who gets to do everything first, but has to guide herself and the whole family with every new step and phase in life. I think the famous book "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott describes us in a way. I come from a house of computers with two parents who work in the Hi-Tech industry and academic research, so I knew what I was getting myself into when I signed up for a CS undergrad.
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It's a little bit funny this feeling inside...
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I met Adi, later to be my husband, when I was 21, just before I finished my military service. After four years together, in which we overlapped a little in our B.Sc. studies in Technion, Adi pulled the best show possible and surprised me at a conference I attended in Zurich, Switzerland (dressed as a bunny!) and proposed, surrounded by conference participants and curious pedestrians :) We got married in Israel and went for a whole month honeymoon in Fiji Islands! Shortly after our wedding, we applied together to US Ph.D. programs and triumphed over the two-body problem by getting accepted together and individually to Ph.D. programs at Princeton University. We then moved to Princeton, NJ, to start two new adventures of parenthood and ivy-league grad school. Adi is my biggest supporter through all the great obstacles of the family-career interplay. Together we managed moving homes (five times), moving a country (twice!), raising twins, raising a third child, and completing multiple academic degrees (seven between the two of us).
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Is the city I live in, the city of angels...
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I lived in Haifa most of my life, the third-largest city in Israel, which resides by the Mediterranean Sea. Haifa will always be "home" for me; I love the combination of green forests on high mountains and sunny beaches down below. Not born but absolutely raised here from before kindergarten, went to school, and after my military service (in which I moved to Tel-Aviv for a short while), I came back to Haifa to study at Technion. My first "home away from home" with my husband was also in Haifa, where we lived for four years before moving to NJ.
While in grad school, we first lived in Princeton, in university housing (Lawrence Apartments), and quickly discovered the needs of a family are a bit different than those of two roommates. We later found the perfect place for our kids' childhood years in West Windsor, a small town next to Princeton. We recently moved back to Israel, visiting Haifa only occasionally, while our new home with our kids is in Herzliya. We now live in Tel Aviv's outskirts, enjoying the relative closeness to the center of Israel while living in a peaceful neighborhood where almost everything is walkable, and the coffee is better than in NJ :) |
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Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams... With you and me...
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The year 2014 was the year I became a mother. From a couple to a family of 4, what a tremendous change in life. Not too long after moving to the States (a mere two months after moving to be exact), Noga and Ella, our twin daughters, were born. In the next few years, both my husband and I juggled Ph.D. in Princeton and raising a (functional?) family.
After a few years, it seems we have forgotten what it's like waking up in the middle of the night to a newborn, and in the summer of 2020, our third daughter Gaia was born. A singleton after twins is indeed a piece of cake (there! I said it!), but having a baby during a global pandemic had some unique challenges. Now that we all moved back to Israel, our American kids had to learn how to become Israeli kids :) I think we will always be a little bit of both. |
Two more years and you'll be done with school, and I'll be makin' history...
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I spent many years in the academic realm, following my passion for science and research. I enjoyed my Computer Science studies in Technion. Yes, it was tough, yes, I debugged code late into the night, and yes, I sometimes submitted assignments on moodle close to the deadline, but I felt really empowered at this time of my life. I was fortunate enough to crack the "how to succeed in Technion exams" system, and wrote dozens of course notes and summaries that helped me succeed. I'm sharing them publicly here on my website for many years, which surprisingly got me "famous" as "Anat Etzion from the Technion summaries". I even once found my Organic Chemistry summary attached as formal course material in one of Israel's colleges :)
I was sort of a researcher during my military service (which I loved!) and decided to pursue a science Ph.D. in the US to combine my love for research with my interest in science and my desire to live abroad for a while. Generally, I think the decision to pursue a Ph.D. should come when you believe you'll enjoy the actual process of research and exploration, and not just for what you'll do with the title afterwards. My time in Princeton was invaluable. This transformative journey shaped my research capabilities, expanded my academic interests, and contributed immensely to my personal growth. During my Ph.D., I entered the machine learning domain, fascinated by its great potential when combined with biological data, and I think we will hear a lot more coming from this area in the next couple of years. |
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