i survived my first year of grad school and all i got was this trauma and also lifelong friendship
image description: side profile of Carrie Bradshaw sitting and typing on her laptop, white text overlaid on image reads “I couldn’t help but wonder... is the real PhD the friends we make along the way?”
Hello world!
I deeply apologize for how long it's been since I last wrote a blog post, but I have been busy living my life!!! These past couple of months have been a whirlwind; I completed my rotations, passed my written qualifying exam, joined a lab, visited my family and friends in California, and even submitted my first manuscript for review! I look back at the posts I made a year ago and honestly, the amount of growth I have achieved both in the lab and outside is immeasurable. Not only do I now know how to do mouse brain surgery, but I also know what to do when my car's battery dies—two very important life skills!
However, as I become increasingly more entangled with the scientific community at large, the interpersonal stressors that I deal with have multiplied. Along with the routine transphobic microaggressions I experience that I won’t spend the energy enumerating here, I’ve had people outright question my abilities as a scientist and demean me, to the point where I left a conference in tears because I felt so unwelcome. I’ve had people point out that I have a “big fat money sign” on my face, implying that my success as a scientist is simply a result of my ethnicity. There are many times that I feel deeply uncomfortable in academia, and I know that this feeling will not go away anytime soon. I often feel myself being squished and squashed, contorted into unnatural directions. Surely, some of this discomfort can be attributed to growing pains that come along with maturation and natural development. But I think a lot of that pain I experience comes from the fact that I fundamentally don't fit the mold that academia is trying to force me into, and I never will. Before I started grad school, I was frequently warned that during a PhD, you are broken down and then a new version of you is gradually built back up. I never fully understood why we had to accept this premise of inherent violence. What if I have spent the last several years of my life learning how to love every part of myself as I am? What happens then? I have made peace with the fact that I don’t belong here a long time ago, as this institution was not built with people like me in mind (duh), but for some inexplicable reason, I’m still here, for better or for worse.
One of the greatest highlights of the past year for me was joining a thesis lab where everything feels right and I don’t have to be anything other than myself. When I was considering my options, I didn’t even bother making a pros and cons list because there were simply no cons to speak of (except maybe that I always smell faintly of rodent). I am in the most supportive training environment a baby grad student could ever ask for. Everytime I leave my advisor’s office, I leave smiling, laughing, and feeling reinvigorated about my science. I am so grateful to have found a nice little home for myself with a fabulous mentor to boot, and am so excited to see what directions I end up taking my research. Of course, my blissful little science life is periodically plagued by moments where I feel incompetent in regards to my technical skills and knowledge and I am sometimes struck by my debilitating fear of disappointing people. I have to constantly remind myself that I am actively training to be a scientist; I am not expected to know everything, nor is that even humanly possible. I simply have to pick myself up and keep trying my best and believe that what I am doing is enough.
Without a doubt, the thing that has kept me sane throughout my first year of grad school is the community I have found with my besties in my cohort. They are the people I want to celebrate even the smallest of victories with and the people I can stay out gossiping with until 3AM. My friendship with them means that my mundane grad school life is interspersed with drunk outings to science museums, trips to the beach, and spontaneous sleepovers and dance parties in the kitchen. I feel so lucky to have found such a stable and strong friendship that I can rely on and draw strength from. After so many months of living in bleak isolation, every second that I get to spend hanging out with my besties feels like the sweetest gift. They make Atlanta feel like home. I am glad that I have found my people, because I know that they are what will keep me going for the next 5 or so years while we work toward our silly little degrees. It's so incredibly fitting that my thesis research is focused on understanding the influence of social interactions because if there's anything that I've learned this past year, it's the ways in which my quality of life and mental health are drastically enhanced by social experiences and human connection.
Year two of grad school is already coming in hot. I feel like I'm juggling so many things and people keep throwing more things at me that they want me to juggle and I keep dropping everything but I can’t even complain about it because I am the one who keeps saying yes, give me more things to juggle. Put simply, I am a clown who doesn’t know how to say no. My goals for this upcoming semester are to set more boundaries so that I can more successfully balance my academics, professional development, and social life with my research. I am also learning to give myself grace and not beat myself up when I inevitably drop the ball on something because truth be told, I will likely keep dropping all the balls. Luckily, this time around, I have several support systems in place here in Atlanta, so I feel confident that I can handle anything that year two throws at me. As long as it's not another global pandemic, that is.
your friend,
yesenia <3