On Grad School Loneliness: A Mini-Rant
Ph.D. is far more than just an academic challenge
Slowly inching towards my 4th year of graduate school, I’ve been thinking about grad school lately, and how 2020 and to an extent this year brought about doubts and challenges I had never in a million years thought I’d encountered. A lot of thoughts are flowing, but there has been no output because life has been taking over. So I forced myself to stop, think and learn.
It’s a weird belief, really, that getting a Ph.D. is not only an academic challenge, but also a socially draining crusade to the frontier of knowledge. We are expected to conduct independent research, learn to think critically — the list goes on. What comes with this massive feat, though, is that even if we are a part of a bigger cohort of students, throughout these 3 years I’ve been in grad school, it eventually came down to me as a lone snail chipping away at this big leaf that is my degree, the dissertation. It came down to us, to me , to show up every day, power through when it seems impossible, make decisions, and deal with the consequences that come with them. We carry the weight, the anxiety, the success, the immeasurable imposter syndrome, every single day until we cross the finish line, or at least we hope so. More likely than not, the feeling of not being enough but not having anyone to truly commiserate will carry on for longer than just our Ph.D. tenure.
There is an analogy that I remembered reading online.
In a strange way, life in research-intensive academia is like a career in pro-sports. There is intense work and competition involved in getting drafted and working your way through your rookie contract. Then you land a lifetime contract. After that, how hard you work at your craft is up to you and your goals.
Most people like what they’re doing, want to stand out and work hard. Some people coast, some people do nothing but have luck on their sides time and time again. You’re not part of a team with collaborative efforts towards a big, shared goal. You’re an island trying day and night to drift towards the continent of finally feeling worth it.
Bleak, you may say.
And bleak, it is. I was drawn to academia and the prospect of doing a Ph.D. for idealistic reasons. When I first got into biomedical sciences, my goal in life was to become a physician-scientist and patent lawyer. Weird, I know, but I believe that cost-prohibitive drugs represent a clear and present danger to our existence. My ambitions were to create quality, but affordable medicine that can better the health of patients around the world regardless of age, gender, race, or religion at cheaper prices than is presently offered. I also want to use skills as a patent lawyer to make sure that greedy corporations cannot hijack and gain control of my cheaper medicine and once again make it too expensive for people to afford. Circumstances have changed my plans dramatically, but I am fortunate enough to still be on the path of becoming a scientist, creating the next generations of pancreatic cancer therapies, and acquiring knowledge in the law world that helps me understand the legal, regulatory, and business implications of my science. I wished for expertise in drug development and scientific thinking. What I wished for, I got, but I was also preyed on for my idealism. The long-established world of academia had an order, and I came in and was fully imprinted to believe that I was there at the expense of my work-life balance, family, hobbies to uphold the golden rule of ‘publish or perish.’ Science becomes a chore, a utilitarian regime with benefits to humanity as a side product.
Many parts of a Ph.D. are intrinsically isolating. It’s somewhat inevitable that we work alone a lot of the time, and that our non-PhD family and friends hardly understand what we go through because this career, compared to the plethora of careers out there, can be too peculiar to grasp. As we progress, as we become experts of our own subfield of subfield, we will also inevitably be more and more isolated from our colleagues and even our mentors. It’s a struggle for me to not let the impending occurrence of this isolation take over my life, but I am lost as in where to draw the line of how much is too much devoted to my lab work, and amongst the struggles to get that balance right, the world events of the past year piled on some more. Sometimes, it feels like PhDs are the loneliest places in the world. A seed waiting to sprout but enduring the most unbearable darkness before that first moment under the sun.
If there’s only one thing I hope my future self or anyone watching can take away from this, it’s that the first step of reaching out from an island that we felt like we were on can be as simple as asking for a free cup of water at Starbucks or sharing my frustration with someone I see every day how lonely I find my progress. Instead of trying to project an image of perfection and having our shit together, try accepting that the authentic versions of ourselves will probably never be perfect. We are always going to have that carefully curated image to present, and we’re constantly under the impression that we need to fake it till we make it, but what matters, at least to me, is the act of trying. Start small, be vulnerable, be kind to me, and never be afraid as long as we are moving.
Even 0.00001cm is a distance forward.
Again, I adapted this short essay into a video essay. Hope you enjoy it! And if you are feeling lonely and overwhelmed on your graduate school journey — please know that you are not alone!
