Love and Abuse in Graduate School
The foreword to my PhD thesis.
The technical content of this thesis cannot possibly convey the emotion, wonder, and humanity that are invisibly laced throughout the graphs and text of the forthcoming chapters. The soft green glow of the microscope’s fluorescent screen, the landing pad of an electron’s unknowable summersaults. The infinite shimmering web of the ronchigram that hypnotizes me as I stare into its icy depths, or maybe its gentle flame. But sometimes the microscope becomes just a microscope, and the images are just patterns of light and dark. When that happens, I say out loud to myself — I am looking at atoms. These experiences are too fantastical to ever become ordinary.
But those are the good days. On the bad days, self-doubt, directionlessness, and impostor syndrome weave themselves into my experiments and my outlook. In my second year of grad school, I wrote a piece that was anonymously published on the now-discontinued website Letters from Grad School. I would like to share this piece here. It represents a moment in my scientific career and captures my range of experiences in grad school: the good and bad, the magical and analytical, the scientific and human. I called it “Love and Abuse in Grad School.”
Inside the electron microscope, my nanostructures are being bombarded by an electron beam that will induce electronic oscillations at their surface. Electronic oscillations that did not exist until I fabricated structures smaller than a thousandth of the diameter of a human hair, on a membrane tens of atoms thick. These oscillations result in emission of light from the nanostructures at wavelengths controlled by the nanostructure size and shape. Thinking about it makes it seem less real than it is. Light spreads out in all directions around us, from the sun, from lightbulbs, from our phone screens. To be able to create, control, and confine light is commonplace in research, but to really do it, to fabricate nanostructures myself and watch as they emit photons — I don’t know what could possibly be better than this.
The electron beam scans across the array of tiny triangles in nanometer-sized steps, building up a pixel-by-pixel image based on the light emitted at each position of the beam. I watch with anticipation as the patterns appear on the screen- light is concentrated at the tips of the triangles, and when two tips are close to each other, interacting modes create swirled patterns in the space between the tips. Sitting here in the dark after spending 10 hours aligning the instrument and taking data with the same song on repeat (“Break Free” by Ariana Grande), I have no doubt that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. Nothing makes me happier than thinking about the fact that I could really do this, do research, forever.
And when the experiment is over I stumble out of the lab, the now-unfamiliar light from the incandescent bulbs of the hallway burning my eyes. My hands were steady when I removed my millimeter-sized sample from the instrument, but now I’m shaking so badly I can’t open my water bottle. I feel like I have a stomach virus but I’m probably just hungry- it must have been ten hours since I last ate. I reach down to find a granola bar in my bag and feel shooting pains in my back. I sink to the ground, shaking, cold, and tired. I love what I do so much, but it so quickly slips into abuse.
During one of these nights in undergrad, I distinctly remember thinking to myself: I hope I never reach a point of physical limitation where I have to put myself before my research.
Now, as I’m finishing my second year in grad school, I can safely say that I’ve reached that point. My undergraduate self would be horrified. I can hear her now- “But I prepared you for this! I spent all night in the lab! Remember that time I got two hours of sleep for two nights in a row without drinking coffee? You’re going to throw all of that away for…your health??”
Yeah, yeah, take a seat. Let me tell you how it happened.
In my early days of research, I learned to become part of a culture where dark bags under your eyes and a wrist brace from carpel tunnel syndrome meant you were giving your all. Colleagues impressed each other with stories about long nights in the lab. It was understood that the worse you looked, the harder you were working, and the better you were doing in grad school. If you were taking care of yourself, you’d better have all of your experiments working and a paper just accepted to Nature, or else what were you doing? I saw my mentors cultivating these notions, so I followed them. If grad school was about working myself as hard as possible, I could do that. I looked forward to it.
Then I became a graduate student and realized I had to change the way I framed my story.
I majored in chemistry as an undergrad, and my graduate program is in materials science and engineering. I could draw the structure for any compound on the back of a bottle and tell you how to synthesize it, but I’d never seen a phase diagram before and didn’t know how to read a stress-strain curve. So when I got my first thermo exam back and had one of the worst scores in the class, I regretted my undergraduate major, my decision to pursue engineering, my decision to come to MIT. I was not cut out for graduate school, and the admissions committee made a huge mistake in accepting me. Essentially, I had impostor syndrome.
As many, many graduate students know, impostor syndrome goes beyond feeling like you’re not good enough. It’s knowing for a fact that you do not deserve to be where you are because you fundamentally do not have the capability to succeed, but you have fooled everyone around you into thinking that you are worthy and intelligent. And your brain will do anything to convince you that this is the case.
So, in one of the best engineering programs in the world, how do we convince ourselves that this is true? I reasoned that my 4.0 GPA in undergrad resulted from working hard, not from being smart. Getting straight A’s really did not take any skill or innate abilities. All I had to do was read the chapters, do the homework, go to office hours, write the lab reports, and I would learn enough to do well on exams. I was never the kind of person to read something once and understand it, to ace exams without studying. Anyone could have done what I did, I just had the patience and motivation do to it, which is how I fooled everyone into believing that I was intelligent.
I was even warned about this. During graduate student orientation, there was a presentation about “impostor syndrome” and how being surrounded by so many amazing people might lead us to believe that we have tricked the rest of them into thinking we belong here. But the thing is, if you really believe you’re an impostor, being warned about it isn’t going to help. You’re just going to think to yourself, sure, everyone else might have impostor syndrome, but I’m truly not good enough. I am the real impostor. And every single person who tells you, “I’m sure it will be fine,” “You’ll do great,” “I believe in you,” that makes it worse because you know you’re tricking them too, and you will eventually let them down.
So impostor syndrome further fueled my desire to physically drain myself until I was convinced that anyone who saw me had to believe I was working hard, since I didn’t have the grades to show it. Somehow I was here, and if I was going to keep up the act, I’d better be convincing.
Now I’m a Ph.D. candidate, and changing my mentality was what allowed me to pass both my qualifying exams.
A few months before my written quals, I got to the point where I felt like I couldn’t hide anymore. I wanted to tell everyone that I didn’t belong here and wasn’t good enough and would never make it. I couldn’t keep tricking them anymore. So I emailed one of my mentors from an undergrad internship who was here at MIT, asking if he could meet up with me. I told him everything and asked him if I should seriously consider leaving MIT before it was too late.
And he told me he felt the exact same way his first year. For every single thing I said, he had his own version of that story, of what he told himself to convince himself that he wasn’t going to make it. He said that the only way to get through it was to force yourself to get rid of those notions, no matter how much you believe them to be true. Somehow, hearing from someone else who went through the exact same thing finally made me start to believe that what I was telling myself might not be true.
When you’re faced with a month of studying for a six-hour exam, there’s no way you can get through that if you don’t believe you can succeed. On the one hand, relentlessly telling yourself that you won’t make it isn’t exactly conducive to success. But it can go beyond that, because when you hate yourself so much for not being good enough, you push yourself further and further beyond your physical limits because you lose sight of your self-worth. I cared so much about the outcome of my work that it made me fear I wasn’t good enough, which led me to overcompensate by abusing myself. I think this is part of how we create a culture where care for oneself competes with passion for one’s work.
When a material is stretched and it snaps back to its original shape, we call that elastic deformation. But if the material gets stretched so much it doesn’t go back to the way it was, that’s called plastic deformation. Sometimes I think I am plastically deformed.
If we believe in ourselves and take care of ourselves, maybe we can tell a new story to the students we mentor. Can we tell a story about trial and error, mistakes we’ve made, experiences we’ve learned from? We can show them our scars; research is brutal, and they will inevitably experience despair at some point in their careers. But can we also teach them that their love for research doesn’t have to be siphoned out of a finite pool of respect they’re allowed to show towards themselves? Can we demonstrate to them that taking care of yourself doesn’t mean you care less about your work?
If I become a professor, I want to hang Justus Gustav van Bentum’s painting “The Explosion in the Alchemist’s Laboratory” in my office. I saw this painting for the first time in the Chemical Heritage Foundation museum in Philadelphia, and I instantly identified with its subject. An alchemist watches in horror as his experiment explodes on the kitchen table, while his family shields themselves from the flames. On a basic level, every researcher can relate to the wreckage left behind by a failed experiment. But on another level, I think this painting is representative of what can happen when we don’t realize the toll that our work is taking on our lives, until it’s too late. Can we change the culture of grad school before it explodes in front of us?
