Thinking Like X ThinQ

In this episode, I (Madhav) interview Adam Disque, an environmental engineering Masters student at Texas Tech University who earlier served in the US Air Force as a Bio-environmental Engineer. I met Adam last summer when he was interning at Raytheon in Tucson, where I am doing my PhD. In fact, this episode was recorded then. While most of the people we have interviewed and plan to interview on this podcast are well established in their fields, Adam isn’t as yet–he is a student. However, he makes up for that with some very useful insight into how engineers think. Added to that, his experience in the US Air Force makes the discussion even more interesting.

In this episode, we are joined by Suvir Saran. Suvir is a Michelin starred chef for his restaurant Devi in New York. He has spent most of his career in the US before returning to India a few years ago.

Apart from being a chef, Suvir is a writer, a restauranteur, a farmer, on the advisory board of Brigham and Women's hospital at Harvard, amongst many other things. While this episode is focused on Thinking Like a Chef, many of Suvir's other avatars come up during the discussion. Parts of this episode, especially towards the end, are very personal and really give us a sense of who Suvir is. 

As you will see, there are many aspects of being a chef which generalize far outside that particular domain. Talking after the recording, Mohanan, Tara and I saw various connections between the discussion in this episode and the previous one - Thinking Like a Theoretical Linguist. If you have had the chance to listen to both of them, you might enjoy reflecting on the commonality between these apparently distinct domains.

We hope you enjoy this episode. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app for future episodes.

This first episode is titled ‘Thinking Like a Theoretical Linguist’. In this episode John Schettman Marko, who interned with ThinQ in summer 2019 and Madhav Kaushish, a ThinQ member, will be interviewing two other members of the ThinQ team, KP. Mohanan (who we refer to as Mo) and Tara Mohanan. They are both professional theoretical linguists and educators.

This is a trailer for a new podcast series from ThinQ (http://www.thinq.education). The series is titled Thinking Like X. In every episode, we will interview people who are in a particular field. We are interested in how they go about thinking about their work, and how that thinking influences the rest of their lives. The first episode will be titled 'Thinking like a Theoretical Linguist' and will be released shortly.