Coming Full Circle
My final days at IRRI were extremely bittersweet. It felt like finally, after 8 long weeks, I was getting the hang of everything. Things started making sense, I knew where to go and when, I stopped missing the buses. The last week I was at IRRI was also the best, which made it the hardest to leave. It really is true that you don’t know what you have until you don’t have it anymore.
The last week for work I was to give a presentation to the platform about my work at the internship. In the process of preparing for the presentation I started realizing how important and how impactful the work I was doing. The first week of being at IRRI the work I was doing was kind of slow. I came into the Heirloom Rice Project right in the middle. So I was given a lot of different tasks that didn’t seem to make much sense together. I was doing a lot of reading that didn’t feel like it had an end. I was transcribing a lot of surveys and found that very very boring. Luckily I was not making any coffee runs. But looking back on the work I did at IRRI that last week, I realized that those slow parts are both guaranteed and necessary for any project. Despite how many people tell you that the work you are doing is going to change the world and it’s going to be very exciting, there will be times when the work feels boring. A very important thing that I’ve learned from working at IRRI is how you should dream about revolutionizing the world and doing impactful research, but at the same time being realistic about what the means. Because no one changes the world without doing work that they sometimes don’t want to do. You have to be patient with these long, high impact projects. If you’re doing surveys, they have to be transcribed. If you’re working in the lab, dishes have to be washed. Every profession has parts of the job that are menial, mundane, and tedious. But those parts do not disqualify the job as being profound, influential or right for you. Before I realized this, I was very unsure about my fate at IRRI. I predicted 8 weeks of the most boring desk job at the coolest place in the world. But with time, my job shaped up to be just as cool as where I was.
I also ended up making the most amount of friends in the last two weeks at IRRI. IRRI hosts social hours every month and I was traveling for work so I missed the first social hour. But I really wanted to meet as many people as I could so I decided that even though it was my last week to go to the social hour. It was very ironic because I introduced myself as a new member and then also was bid farewell. They served my favorite coconut pie at dinner and, of course, I got super excited. All my new friends must have noticed and over the course of that week I was given 4 (!) pies by different people. Someone even bought me vacuum packed pies that I could bring to America and eat/share with others. So if anyone is interested in trying this amazing coconut pie that I’ve been talking about, I would be more than happy to share some of the two whole pies that are sitting in my fridge. Although I will say the tastiness of the pies decreases dramatically once they go from hot oven to a 20 hour commute to the US. That last week I was invited to so many dinners that there was one night that I had to do one dinner at 5 and then go to another one at 8. Everyone was just so so nice to me. I remember being worried at the beginning that I wouldn’t make friends. Everyone was just so much older than me, I thought it would be hard to connect with anyone. My roommate to IRRI came about halfway through my stay so I took her out to dinner at my favorite place to welcome her. We were talking and I hadn’t revealed my age yet. She mentioned how it’s hard for her to connect with her brother because he’s 3 years younger than her. And then she told me that I was much easier to talk to. I was very flattered and decided not to ruin the moment by teller her that I was more than 10 years younger than her. But the last week I got so many kind goodbyes and gifts that I realized I made so many more friends than I realized. I always considered myself friends with them but never thought that the feeling was reciprocated. So many people I would occasionally see in the kitchen or in the gym and I realized that small moments like about asking how to turn on the stove was the start of a friendship.
In one of my first blog posts I wrote about celebrating the small things. That was really hard in the beginning because all I had were the small things. But 8 weeks later those small things turned into a killer work presentation, life long friends and an amazing experience.
