400 Days

I think my first year here was preparation for this year. A deep and heavy waiting, lots of things I didn't know how to do, feeling like I was swimming in water way over my head and getting nowhere.
This year feels like a waterfall. Experiments are leading to conclusions, I am pushed almost weekly to understand some new concept or explain something I took for granted, even my underlying leadership abilities have placed me as the person asked to coordinate, remind, and rally the others in the group. I remember what this feels like; this push-pull and really high expectation means that I get no breaks so that I leave here better and more prepared than when I came. Fortunately and unfortunately, I am not seen as someone "sensitive" to criticism given, therefore, correction comes hard and fast, and this time, I say "I don't know" outright and sometimes laugh at the bluntness of the correction. Surprisingly, this makes for a better mentor/mentee relationship. Unsurprisingly it still makes for a really rough day when the ladder has been knocked out from under me and all my weaknesses are exposed.


Either way, I am surprisingly forthright and able to hold my own but paradoxically, at the same time, willing to admit and learn what I don't know. This was most clear when I went head to head with a Visiting Professor about Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (technique for identifying organic molecules) and stood my ground well enough for her to almost seem apologetic when she realized I was an organic chemist and not a physical chemist. I came out of that meeting exhausted, but realized that I was able to defend my results with tact and reasonable explanations - a skill I hadn't exercised since my thesis defense.


Furthermore, I have had space and time to think about what it is that I am good at and what I want to do. The concept of getting to finally choose and carve out how I am going to use all of this work, education, and experience, for the benefit of others and in doing work that I can believe in is equal parts exciting and terrifying. Things are becoming more clear than I ever thought they would, and of course, trade-offs will be made, but I am more awake, and more aware of what I can ask for and negotiate and I think that makes any decision better.

Finally, lest we think I've returned to my graduate school days of slavish labor with no fun - that could be farther from the truth. And really, if I were somehow able to be the person that I am now, in graduate school, I'm sure my life would have taken a different course, but I needed to get here to figure so many things out and how I can fit what looked like a "set" career path to me, instead of how I could fit to it. With 100% certainty, I now know that fitting it for me, will make a gigantic difference for my future.

"We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time."
T. S. Eliot

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