PhD lessons

I defended my PhD yesterday! Surreal that in a couple of hours, the phase of life you’ve known over the past 8 years could suddenly end.

I know people had warned me the end feels anti-climatic for all the moments during the PhD you spend envisioning this coming day – and I found myself reaching to make this moment feel significant.

Corralling my husband’s help to shape matcha shortbread into shapes that resembled my nanoparticles, basking in the glow of post-defense chatter and nanoparticle-cookie crunching, organizing a post-defense brunch at my house – and yet, I still feel the need to write some piece to commemorate this season ending.

It won’t be long, just a few thoughts on my biggest takeaways – ones I hope you will find helpful no matter what season you are in.

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Lesson #1: There is a lot I don’t know.

I started my PhD having fumbled my way through a couple nanoparticle high school science fair projects, but thinking I would definitely be an expert after having spent 8 years in a PhD making nanoparticles.

All I can say about that is I have a general idea of the multitude of ways things don’t work and a very narrow sliver of understanding on how the particular path of decisions I decided to take (amongst the infinitude of other decision tree branches I could have taken) led to success, whatever success means.

It has felt like walking a tunnel immersed in pitch-black darkness equipped only with a battery-powered flashlight illuminating the small patch of dirt around your two feet.

To my left and right are trailheads that if taken, could lead me down a completely different path.

The only trick is – there is no map, no trail marking and no warning signs telling me I’m headed towards a dead end.

And so I venture tentatively forward (because there is no option of staying put either), guided by the weak circle of light beam around my feet, and choosing not to think of all the other paths I could have taken once that intersection has passed me by.

All these paths un-illuminated by my flashlight will necessarily remain in darkness; as I said, there is a lot I don’t know.

I have learned a lot about living in the tension of not-knowing; it applies to not just science but belief in God and really anything else in life.

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Lesson #2: There is a lot I can’t control.

Last week, both Peter and I got the stomach bug, meaning we were practically immobilized for a day, our bodies languishing in weakness.

I wonder, though, if that feeling of utter helplessness and exquisite vulnerability, as Barbara Brown Taylor would call it, is more true to reality than the veneer of our “healthy days” when we are able to do whatever we want whenever we want.

Along with the constant sense of walking in darkness, the other most frustrating part of the PhD was the disconnect between what you put in and what you get out, i.e. the lack of control of bringing about the outcome you desire no matter how hard you try.

As someone who loves progress or at least the feeling of making progress, the stuckness or even backward progress probably bothered me more than anything else.

There was that day in the lab when I had done everything right: my weight measurements were accurate to the milligram, every ingredient had been added in the right order, I had even waited 10 whole seconds between drops as I meticulously added silica precursor to my solution obediently stirring in its glass round bottom flask.

This was a protocol that had been optimized by one of my previous undergraduate students and there were days I followed the protocol more closely than others (if I was on a tight time schedule, 10 whole seconds felt like an eternity).

But that day I had been patient. I liked to imagine I was even among the ranks of those detail-oriented PhD students who spent all day in lab and somehow always managed to follow their protocol to the T.

Then came the final part – wrapping my flask in aluminum foil to protect it from light.

It was a bit of a tricky maneuver that consisted of reaching my hands into the fume hood and around the metal clamps to access the flask that was submerged in an oil bath and also connected simultaneously to a reflux condenser.

As I gingerly wrapped the foil around the flask and withdrew my gloved hands, everything seemed stable for a moment (…success?).

But then in one moment, perhaps because the stirring had perturbed the system out of its equilibrium state or I had neglected to clamp the system correctly or some other reason unknown to man, the flask suddenly disconnected from the condenser, spilling its contents all at once into the hot, swirling oil bath (oh the horror…).

Many such experiences like this at lab has taught me that despite my best efforts, there is a lot I can’t control.

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Lesson #3: Relationships are what count in the end.

So what did end up bringing the breakthrough? What brought me through to my journey’s end?

I remember telling God as I slogged through what seemed like endless, non-conclusive, drug release tests that if anything worked (i.e. if I saw any drug being released at all), it would be a miracle.

On my own, I knew I had no answers. I needed outside intervention.

Well, God’s grace did appear  – and for me, it largely came in the form of people.

In the depths of one of my sustained seasons of failure, I went to an electron microscopy training session and happened to sit next to a guy called Pierre from Strasbourg.

In the dead time waiting for the technician to arrive, he told me he had developed UV-breakable mesoporous silica which was the perfect complement to the upconversion nanoparticles I had been working on.

The happenstance meeting led to me spending 4 months in Strasbourg, France, where I felt the most supported in my research I had ever felt (read about it here and here!), and my very first 1st-author paper.

There were people God sent to direct me to the right equipment. When I couldn’t see through the noise of the UV-Vis spectroscopy machine at McGill (I felt I was spending more time troubleshooting the machine than actually using it), I started collaborating with a lab at the Universite de Montreal (Udem) where they had a 96 well quartz plate and a Tecan UV-Vis that worked infinitely better than the one at McGill.

I don’t know where I would be now if not for that valuable piece of equipment.

There were people I needed to help me think a certain way. Sam, my organic chemist friend from Udem, helped me think through conjugation reactions, saving me a lot of time trying to gain expertise on NMR and MS techniques myself.

There were people, specifically undergraduate summer students, who doubled or tripled my manpower to run optimization experiments or to be in multiple locations at once (shout out to Tobi, Rus, Adi and VL!)

And then there were friends who tirelessly listened to me struggle through the more existential pieces of the PhD, who cheered me on and reminded me that what I was doing was good work.

I started the PhD out alone in a big city, but am ending it ever grateful for the community of people I have met on this journey.

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Lesson #4: It comes down to the story you are writing.

The last big lesson I will share is this: we are all writing stories – in a micro-sense, me with my PhD, but in a more macro-sense, also with my life.

In my PhD, I believed in my mind that if the story didn’t end up the way it was “supposed to end up”, I wasn’t going to graduate.

So I had to force the narrative until it worked. I had to run experiments until I got the outcome I had deemed as success.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that no one knew what the story was supposed to be (not even my supervisor!).

And that if forcing the ending wasn’t working, the other alternative was to change the story.

The question of when one keeps going with a certain narrative in science and when one pivots to pursue a different narrative is an interesting one in science.

How much “contra-narrative” data do you need to switch narratives?

And when do you simply persevere and fit the extraneous data points into curve of best fit?

If I could study another topic of interest (but please no more PhDs!), it would probably be how people weave narratives of their life to create meaning – how they choose what narrative to tell, when they switch narratives and the intersection of narrative-weaving with other determinants of good mental health like resilience.

Are people more resilient when they are able to tell a meaningful story from their suffering?

But how soon is too soon to create a narrative? When do we need to simply sit with the uncertainty vs. jump to the conclusion that “everything will be okay” or “everything happens for a reason”?

What causes someone to switch the narrative (e.g. in conversion stories) they are telling themselves? And how do they reconcile the new narrative with their old life?

These are questions I ponder sometimes, not that they will be answered any time soon, but will probably be ones I continue to explore in this space.

But, I digress.

For now, all I need to know is that the story I told at my defense satisfied my committee – and for all its shortcomings and misfitting data and outstanding questions, it is one I will put aside for now.

For now, these are the lessons I will take with me as I learn to navigate this non-student, non-lab life (what a thought!)

Farewell, PhD, it’s been a wild ride.