Be Receptive
I came to graduate school with a vague idea of what I wanted to study, and some general idea of who my advisor was as a person and scientist. However, it quickly became apparent that he would not be the best support for the kind of work I originally had in mind. While he’d be supportive, I wouldn’t be working with him as collaboratively as I had hoped, and would end up being more of an independent scientist peripherally associated with his work. That didn’t sound ideal and lead to quite a bit of stress!
Towards the end of my first year I was speaking with him about a conference he had just come back from. Some of the topics were quite exciting to me, and clearly exciting for him. I mentioned this, and (long story short) ended up leading a project that proved very successful combining our mutual interests in this topic.
I have not returned to my original interests during my PhD in any serious way, and, in some ways, this has been a loss. However, dwelling on a PhD I could have had is self-defeating. My PhD has been a joy overall, and the work I ended up doing was immensely rewarding, if unexpected. I believe working on a project that had buy-in from my advisor and my colleagues proved more valuable professionally, intellectually, and socially, than sticking with my initial interests, which, after all, were formed by the most random of events anyway!
The takeaway for me - it’s hard to predict anything about life, and that is doubly true in a PhD. You join your advisor’s lab with limited information about who they are, who you are, and what science is. The decisions we make for ourselves in that informationally impoverished environment are likely to be non-ideal in many ways. Be adaptable! Be receptive to new opportunities!
Sixth Year Tears
One day in my sixth year of graduate school, I walked into lab and I immediately started crying. I was incapable of doing my work that day. I didn’t know what to do.
The week before, the flu kept me at home binging Netflix. After I recovered from the flu, I was broken in a way I had never experienced before. Every morning, I woke up in a panic and with a pain in my chest. I had no appetite. I had loose stool (due to increased acidity in my digestive tract?). The thought of doing lab work made me cry.
Up until that point, I was happy with my graduate career. I had done well in classes, and I believed I was well-respected by colleagues. I had funding, and my advisor let me pursue a project I was passionate about. I was confident that I could surmount the challenges of my project. Now, I felt completely incapable, and I feared doom for my future. I thought I wouldn’t be able to get a job. My confidence was gone. When I tried to do labwork, my thoughts consumed my attention.
Sometimes, having a good conversation with a labmate magically returned me to a functional state. Other times, sitting at lunch with labmates would exacerbate my anxiety and I would need to leave the room. I started comparing my life to the lives of everyone around me and I would only see my deficiencies. I felt so small. I thought about dropping out.
I started therapy at my school’s mental health office. I talked to my advisor, who was extremely understanding and told me I could take time to get better. I found an off-campus therapist. I opened up to labmates and leaned on them. A few months later, I started taking antidepressants (a serotonin selective reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI, called Zoloft or Sertraline).
I am fortunate that I do not have chronic depression or anxiety. I am fortunate my advisor was supportive and gave me space. I am fortunate that I was able to rely on old friends.
I think the root cause of my depression and anxiety was social isolation. I was accustomed to saying no to social opportunities. I’m learning to be more open-minded and I’m doing much better. I regained my confidence. For me, community has been essential.
Life can get better. There is support out there, but I had to seek it. In general, the help didn’t just find me. People wanted to help me, but I had to start the process.
Growth as a Person
Even though my research may have not turned out the way I expected, I am still glad I went to grad school and had the chance to explore and grow as a person.
The Invited Speaker
My advisor invited a speaker to campus whose work is very relevant to mine and forgot to tell me…
Advisors
There are two kinds of graduate school programs, at least the ones I’ve been exposed to. The first is akin to an arranged marriage. For the Psychology department, you find your advisor based on a common area of research, and start the dance to join the lab well before you’ve matriculated as a student. For other programs, you show up without a niche interest, and then have some time to explore.
My graduate program was the latter. We had rotations in different labs, and had a chance to explore our interests. On paper, it seemed like a great idea. In reality, when you have the expectation of conducting research along with taking some of the hardest courses you’ve ever graced, it’s a lonely and stressful experience. You can’t really dive into the research as you’d like, or even spend time to evaluate how you like a lab, because you are sleep deprived and overworked.
At this point, it’s on the shoulders of your program to give you the support and guidance that you would need to endure both the stress of being a student, and the need to find path. However, ironically, because the program expects you to find community within your lab, that extra support isn’t there.
This is what happened to me. I rotated through several labs, and was barely keeping my head above the water. My qualifying exam, which is based on course work, was the most important thing to focus on, because if I didn’t pass, my entire graduate school career would end. For this reason, I pushed off thinking about joining a lab. I focused all of my energy on studying algorithms. I, like many people, allocated the decision off to some time in the future. I made incorrect assumptions that the future me would be better capable of making these decisions.
Fast forward to after the qualifying exam, and I had survived. I needed to join a lab. What did I do? I joined the one that seemed most rational, because I had started writing a paper there. I didn’t realize that the lab itself provided almost no source of community, and it felt more like a research factory than anything else. This was my first advisor. He was supportive and provided structure, but I felt alone. I didn’t know who the others in the lab were. The desk I was given as a first year was taken away for new first years, and I felt alone.
It was sometime in my third year when a new faculty came to our program. He was flashy, cunning, and focusing his research on something I found interesting. I dove into the opportunity to work with him, and went through the hard process of changing advisors. It felt like the right decision at the time, because I wanted that sense of community. And I did wind up finding it working with two others in the lab. For just about under a year, I was really happy. I didn’t even realize that I was spending more time being “the programmer person” for the lab, and writing a lot of the scripts to run analyses. I didn’t think of my own growth because it didn’t seem to matter as long as I had my team.
At some point I realized that I wasn’t learning or growing, and perhaps it was my fault. My advisor never seemed to be in the office, and he could barely make time to meet with me. I started to realize that the scattered and infrequent meetings we had were devoid of substance. I would go in and draw on the whiteboard for 40 minutes, and talk about what I was doing, he would nod, and tell me how fascinating the work was. At some point I realized he wasn’t giving me feedback. I asked for it. It didn’t change. I realized that his entire show of showing prowess in machine learning was fake, because he didn’t actually know anything about the methods. Ironically through all this it was me that felt like a bad person. I wanted to support him, and produce good work for his lab. So I decided to be proactive and learn on my own.
Fast forward a few months, and I had actually come up with a complete analysis with a result. But something felt wrong. The work was assembled together haphazardly, with more emphasis on the story than on the soundness of the methods. Story is important to science, but only for the communication of sound ideas. These were at best, creative. I didn’t know what to do, or who to talk to. I started going to extra seminars, and reaching out to experts around campus. I would get the feedback that I needed, and it felt great. My advisor also became more distant. He was starting a company, or maybe just didn’t have time to advise me.
Then there was that terrible day before Christmas. I had an advisor meeting, and my plan was to share the wonderful news that I found a way to get feedback on my research without stressing his time. I shared this plan with him, that he could be my advisor, and I would reach out to others when I needed help. He was furious. I found myself in an office with a forty something year old man yelling at me. He told me that I was terrible for the lab, a terrible influence, and how dare I suggest such a thing. I tried to maintain calm, stayed fairly quiet, and walked out after the episode was over. I went upstairs to my old department and immediately started sobbing. I knew it was my word against his.
He wound up denying me a grade for the year of work that I helped his lab. Ironically, this work resulted in multiple papers for him, none of which I was mentioned for. The problem with this timing is that it was the quarter right before I was supposed to get a special status as a graduate student to start just doing research. The University noticed. I was in trouble with my program, because this was my second advisor, and the executive committee had to make a decision about my staying in the program. He claimed that I was a negative influence on his lab, and wasted a year of his time. I could easily counter that with enormous amounts of work. But as the little fish, I had to please him. He insisted that I submit a paper to a large student competition, and it was the paper that I didn’t think was sound. I wound up needing to meet with an unbiased third party to sign a contract that he would be satisfied with - an agreement for him to give me the grade that I already deserved. I reached out to my old advisor for help, but he refused. I met with a University ombudsperson who sat us down in a room, helped to write a contract, one which my advisor begrudgingly signed. It required me to travel to the conference, present the work that I didn’t think was sound, and “try my best to win the paper award.” Only then would he be so kind to give me a grade.
I was severely depressed that winter break. If my Mom hadn’t come down to see me, I can’t say with certainty I would have made it through. It was during a long bike ride to campus when I realized that I needed to be strong. The greatest revenge would not be to fall apart, but to succeed, regardless of this individual trying to destroy my graduate career. I was going to find a way to not be kicked out of my program, and not give in to his childish ways.
I wound up joining one of the labs of a PI that I had sought out for support. I had to go through much more fighting and paperwork with my graduate program because it was unheard of to switch more than once. It was questioned if I should go into a different graduate program. I stood up for myself and fought because I knew I could do it. I had to prove that it wasn’t me, it was him.
And I did. In under a year I wrote and published several papers, developed software, and found community in my lab. I completely forgot about the hardship that I had gone through. Graduate school became fun, and I imagined wanting to stay there forever.
Now that I’m older, I can look back and ask what happened. Where did things go wrong, and what could be done differently? My answer is that the early stress and expectations are too much. If the student is expected to join a lab, then the coursework needs to decrease so that more time can be spent applying it to research problems. I would have had to choose to spend less time on studying and homework and more on research. It could also be that there isn’t enough support structure around students rotating, or that graduate students shouldn’t need to prove themselves (again) with grades. Would it really hurt to, after being accepted to a prestegious program, be allowed to take courses pass / fail?
Still, even with these ideas, I still feel like it’s somehow my fault. The darkest days of my graduate career happened because I was stressed, overworked, and lonely, and I didn’t know who to ask or how to ask for support. If you are reading this, and you feel the same, just know that you are not alone. Reach out to someone, anyone, and go for a walk. They will listen. You will speak. Everything will be okay.
The Windy Hill
Sometimes I really wanted to escape from the stress of courses and research, and even trying to learn about myself. I decided that at the end of every quarter, I would go to the Windy Hill. Somehow standing at the top with my hair flying around like a raggamuffin, I felt like the wind would blow away all the crap. Whenever I was struggling in the middle of the quarter, I’d always think forward to that future moment, and know that soon enough I’d be there.
What matters
Work and stress can be overwhelming. They distract us from what really matters – health and happiness.