We were lucky to catch up with Kamal Abuarquob recently and have shared our conversation below.
Kamal, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
I think I can summarize what I’ve been doing in life as follows: I am a Scientist by training, a Writer by hobby, and a Business Development Manager by career. As for the scientist part, the journey started from childhood. As far as I remember, I have always wanted to be a Geneticist or a Cell and Molecular Biologist. The challenge was that where I was born and raised, Palestine, we didn’t have an education system to support that dream of mine at the time. Moreover, my family had limited resources to afford such education internationally. Luckily, my high school grades were fairly high and my mostly self-taught English was well above the average for my peers. Both of these advantages helped me in 2004 to secure a visa to the US, where I spent the next few years learning how and training to become a scientist.
When it comes to writing, I didn’t go to school for it. While there might be a bit of a writer in each one of us, writing, especially fiction, could be a taxing mission. In a way, one could have the greatest stories and ideas to tell, but if they didn’t have the time to write and the patience to structure their plots, likely they would not be able to produce meaningful works that other people might find helpful. Luckily, I enjoyed writing as a hobby, something that significantly helped persist until I finished writing my novel.
As for my current career in business development, similar to writing, I didn’t go to school for it either. Shortly I will tell you what I specifically do part of this job, but for the purpose of answering this question, I basically market for and sell services to customers. While there might be a built-in salesman in some people but not in others, sales and marketing still need certain skills that could be gained only by proper training. In a way, if I were to be fresh out of college (as a scientist), I bet I wouldn’t have been able to perform well with such a job. Instead, to help myself prepare for the role that is the Business Development Manager, I have connected the dots around a series of life experiences that I have gone through. Specifically, by the time I took on the business development job nearly 5 years ago, I had worked as a scientist for 10 years, had written a novel, and had gained a decent level of communication/social skills to help me best sell and promote ideas. All together, these life experiences have significantly given me the heads-up to pursue such drastic career-path switch.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
It is time to tell you specifically what I currently do, and then I will walk you through how I got where I’m now. I work for a San Diego-based Contract Research Organization (CRO) that provides services in support of clinical trials. My role is in business development, specifically, I work with pharmaceutical/biotech companies that are in need of particular research and testing services. I work closely with lead customers to help them understand the offered services and how these services could be utilized to support their drug/therapeutic development. Then upon alignment with these customers, contracts are signed to pave the way for the execution of the desired work.
The above said, how did I get to where I’m now? As soon as I moved to the US in Jauary-2004, I started my education at the Michigan-based Henry Ford Community College. There, I quickly rose to the top of my classes and started receiving scholarships. In 2006, I graduated with an Associate Degree in Biology and received a major scholarship (Jack Kent Cooke Foundation) to attend the University of Michigan -Ann Arbor, where I majored in Cell and Molecular Biology. After graduating in 2008, I worked for the University of Michigan as a researcher, simultaneously, I started pursuing my master’s degree at Eastern Michigan University, also in Cell and Molecular Biology. By the age of 30, I had earned my master’s degree and accumulated 5 years of experience as a scientist.
In pursuit of adventure and a new life, not too long after completing my master’s program, I packed everything I owned in my car and drove one-way to San Diego. For the first 6 months in San Diego, I took a break from working as a scientist, and instead I spent most of the time writing my fiction novel. Sometime in 2015, I finished writing the bulk of this novel, and as I was thinking what to do with it from there, I needed to find a job.
In 2015, I found my first scientist job in the industry settings, versus my previous scientist jobs in academic research. I joined a team that was working on gout drug development, for almost a year. Excited to embark on the next adventure, in late 2016, I was hired for a new scientist job, at the same company where I now work as a Business Development Manager. I have always wanted to work in the settings of supporting cancer clinical trials and research, and so for the next five years, I found true fulfillment working there as a scientist. Then by the year 2021, curiosity pushed me to pursue a new career path, namely switching from being a scientist in the lab to utilizing my scientific background in the business world. Following a thorough process of interviewing and evaluation, I was hired by the same company as a Business Development Manager. Since then, I have found the utmost fulfillment through this job, as I get the chance to employ my scientific knowledge and communication skills to support cutting-edge clinical trials, and along the way, help many patients who are in a desperate need for medications and treatments.
In the meantime, over the past 10 years, in addition to having a busy career life, I have made sure to enjoy every bit of time I have spent in my now home San Diego. Most significantly, there are three things I have been doing: for my novel, I ended up self-publishing it in 2018. It is called Rhythms: A Thriller of Love & Freedom, and it can be purchased from Amazon.com as a hard/paperback copy or a Kiddle version. This novel was never intended to be a commercial success, but rather a fulfillment of a promise I made to myself to have it out there for people to read. Another thing that I’ve been doing over the past 10 years while living in San Diego is taking nearly 15 10-day road trips, mainly exploring nature hubs. I’ve been to more US national/state parks than I could remember –located in Hawaii, Alaska, the Midwest, the West Coast, etc. I also had the chance to travel to Turkey and Jordan. Finally, I have met an amazing girl; a gorgeous, intelligent philosopher and professor (PhD in Western Philosophy). We were married legally in 2023, and had the ceremony in 2024. Sorry I can’t introduce her to you for this interview, but maybe one day. She is still living in Jordan, as we continue to wait for her paperwork so that she could finally join me here in San Diego.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
I can think of two main driving engines for what I have been doing. The first is my fascination with knowledge, you might say I’m a knowledge junkie. In a way, rarely do I settle for only what I know, and instead view anything I encounter as an opportunity to learn something new. I read ancient books and new, I travel to isolated places, and I listen to other people’s life stories. Along the way, I come up with ideas and eye the next adventures.
The other driving engine is curiosity. Coming to the US, becoming a scientist, moving to California, writing a novel, switching careers; each one of these life-changing moves was triggered by curiosity. Most recently, as another example of my appreciation for curiosity, there has been an ongoing initiative of mine to explore “what would be the ideal human diet, if there were to be one.” I started on this initiative in late 2020, then the first 2 years, namely 2021 and 2022, were extremely difficult for me health-wise, as I was self-experimenting with radical changes to lifetime dietary norms. In early 2023, I came up with a new experimental diet, which I have called since then The Euphoric Diet (TED), and ever since I have written a new hypothesis on vitamin c. I’m actively working on ways to further test this hypothesis and continue exploring my anecdotal observations about what I think might be the ideal human diet.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
The truth is, there hadn’t been a specific lesson I ever wanted to unlearn, and rarely any that I did manage to unlearn. Instead, I would rather say that there have been many lessons that I had to re-learn from a new angle. One example could be how for so long I thought some jobs had been inherently more important than others. Then the more life situations I have encountered, the more I was realizing that the importance line could be blurred between different kinds of jobs. There are a few reasons for this change of heart. The first reason is obvious; we can’t all do one thing for a living, for no one would be left to do anything else. As for the second reason, different people can do great at certain jobs but are doomed to perform poorly at other jobs. In a way, while a surgeon could carry out the perfect operation in a hospital, it is unlikely that many would trust that surgeon to do their landscaping. As for the last reason, people sometimes find themselves forced to do certain jobs by circumstances. For example, a few of my brothers overseas had to quit high school and start building houses to keep up with life expenses. Some of them would tell you they enjoy what they do, while others I think would do best at comedy. At the end of the day, thanks to all of what they have done throughout their lives, as their effort has put many of our sisters and brothers through college. For all of the above reasons, I have learned to avoid underestimating what any one of us does, I guess as long as they are in line with decent ways of earning a living.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.amazon.com/Rhythms-Thriller-Freedom-Kamal-Abuarquob/dp/1983428124
- Instagram: @GeneticLove
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamalabuarquob
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@geneticlove
Image Credits
All pictures are my own.