I joined the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s Science Education Partners/Virtual Scientist in a Classroom (book me to speak with your classroom, if you want!) this winter, which means I’m spending three hours every Friday for a month learning how to communicate about science to 6th through 9th graders and therefore to everyone—in part because I want to feel like a Harvard student and do more things at Harvard before I graduate and in part because I want to improve my out-loud science communication and I miss teaching.
One of the exercises we did on the first day was to list out activities from our childhood that qualified as “a memorable learning experience that took place in an informal environment (meaning outside of school).” Here are mine:
Coding (in HTML) fan sites for my favorite band at the time, t.A.T.u. These were very embarrassing and you will never ever see them, and maybe you don’t consider HTML to be coding, but these fan sites were my first ever exposure to any sort of code. This was at El Valor in Chicago.
Coding my theme for MySpace, which would have been a few years later. I think this was a first coding experience for a lot of people in my generation. It must have been HTML with a little bit of JavaScript and some CSS. This is where I learned how to google anything and everything I wanted to learn to code—probably the most important skill.
Setting up a shop and pricing products in NeoPets—my first exposure to economics of any sort. (I’m not particularly good at economics.) Apparently there was also a stock market (a few of my friends learned about the stock market through NeoPets) but I missed that; I was more interested in the very small moneys of buying up snowballs at one neopoint and reselling them for three neopoints.
Reading fiction, which is both escapism and (I think) the best way to learn how to write. I’m bilingual so I learned to read a little late but I read a lot as a kid, a novel a day for a long while.
Reading popular science magazines, which for me was first Popular Science and then MIT Technology Review (it is not lost on me that it is absolutely nuts that I now occasionally write for TR; younger me would be beyond the moon). Since both of my parents are biologists my first exposures to science were of course through them; after that it was Popular Science, and Popular Science was also an introduction to science more broadly.
DeviantArt. I was obsessed with photography, especially macro photography, and I learned a lot about what makes a photo meaningful to me by looking at other people’s photos. Some people also posted about their process. And of course I learned a lot from posting my own art and getting feedback.
These experiences were meaningful to me because while they were fun they were also some of the times I learned the most. I was learning because I wanted to do something with the information, which is when I learn best.
It surprised me, listing these out, that all of them were in some way social. Fan sites for bands, MySpace, DeviantArt, and NeoPets are all directly social. Reading fiction and popular science magazines is also social, in a different way—absorbing other people’s voices and ideas and thinking about what I would say if I were part of the conversation. I like group work now—specifically I like groupwork at work, which is most of my job—but in school I most enjoyed work where I holed up on my own and did practice problems or wrote essays. I did not like lecture and I really did not like groupwork, especially in-class groupwork. So it’s surprising to me that my best and most memorable learning all involved other people, even if at a distance.
Next we talked with an actual 8th-grade science class. We went around the room introducing ourselves and our work and then we answered questions from the class. I was appallingly terrible at this part. I said I study how vaccines affect infection by and transmission of COVID-19, which is true but resulted in a lot of questions about vaccines—how they work, how they’re designed—which is interesting but not what I study. What I should have said was that and something about the process: that most of what I do is code at my computer and talk with other people about my ideas and their ideas, that we use the mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 genome to trace transmission events, and that we work with the Department of Public Health to connect what we learn from the genomes to real-world data about the actual people infected and learn more than we could from either data source alone.
I want to mention that I was very impressed by the 8th graders. They asked excellent questions and already spoke enough of the language of biology to have a conversation in it. In retrospect I think I was there too by 8th grade; it shouldn’t have surprised me.
After meeting with the 8th graders we talked about the differences between how we communicate about science with the public vs. with other scientists. The most important difference is not the language, which is what I had been focusing on, but that the order of things is inverted: in science we communicate
the necessary background,
then supporting details,
then our results and conclusions;
when we communicate with the public we should be presenting
the bottom line,
then the so-what/why it matters,
and only then the supporting details.
I think we’re pretty good at the supporting details, maybe even the bottom line; the so-what is more difficult. We listed out answers to the question, “Why is my work important?” Here’s what I came up with (I have very high opinions of the importance of my work):
It can show how a disease is transmitted (airborne, blood, food, sex, etc.).
It can show who is most vulnerable to a disease.
It can guide people’s decision-making on how to protect themselves and their loved ones.
It can guide public health recommendations.
It can guide how we allocate our resources.
We then thought about the follow-up question: “Why is that important?” Here’s what I wrote (again, I have a very high opinion of my work (which is why I do it, in addition to it being interesting)):
It can save lives (if done quickly).
It can give people agency (if communicated well and if the government helps).
Then we asked ourselves the next follow-up question, which you can probably guess: “Why is that important?”
To which I answered: because life and health and agency are important.
So when I talk about my work, that last one should go first (or maybe in this case be skipped), then the second one, and only then the third—and only then the information I am used to presenting first, the specifics of what we do and how it works.
Speaking of meaning—
The first Friday of Science Education Partners was on (Friday) the 13th, on Old New Year’s Eve on the Julian calendar. That night the tradition is to get together with friends and toast to the old year and then the new year, same as on New Year’s but less of a big affair/more cozy; I was back in Cambridge/Salem at that point and we went to a cocktail bar for karaoke in a small group. Then the next day was Old New Year, the last of my five holidays of the winter and the definitive end to 2022.
This winter we spent a month in Key Largo in a house along a channel, with kayaks and the ocean. The owners had a few plants outside that looked dead; over the month my grandmother and I watered them and nursed them back to health. By the end of the month they looked happy. Here they are:
This blog post is not about Stranger Things. These are a list of songs that would save me from Vecna, the robotics company in Waltham that has repeatedly appeared to me ever since I started college, as if an apparition, coincidentally at the time and place of career fairs.
Bourrée in E minor by Johann Sebastian Bach
This is a song that my mom plays on acoustic guitar, and has played on acoustic guitar since I was small. I associate it with memories of her playing it, at each stage of my life and in each apartment or house we’ve lived in. And sometimes she plays it when we go somewhere local to be outside for a few days as a family, so it reminds me of the forest and the cold summer air in Pennsylvania. It is very precious and special to me.
Help! by the Beatles
When I was young music was on tapes, and then CDs. (I missed the tape era but tapes were still around, lots of them, and all the sound playing equipment played tapes.) When we first moved to the United States my parents had Help! on CD and we listened to the CD all the way through, so I remember the whole album by heart. This is the song I know best and the one I like the most.
My grandfather learned English in part by listening to the Beatles. So I also associate this song and this album and the Beatles in general with him. I miss him, and when I hear this song I think of him happy and dancing and laughing and joking and young.
Песня полярных летчиков by Александр Городницкий
Перекаты by Александр Городницкий
Two more songs from an album that we had on tape or CD, and which I associate with the forest and with camping. Александр Городницкий was an extremely talented Russian songwriter and bard. My mom grew up with his music and I grew up with his music. When we first moved to the United States we lived in Chicago and we had a very tightknit group of friends who had also recently emigrated from the former Soviet Union, who were all around the same age and whose children if they had children were around my age. We would go camping together and we would all sit around the campfire and someone had a guitar and would play the music and everyone would sing these songs. My mom sings them beautifully and it is especially beautiful to hear everyone singing together. The smell of burning wood always brings me back to these memories, and camping, and the sounds of crickets and frogs and cold nights and trees overhead.
These are my two favorite songs by Александр Городницкий. They are both about facing challenges.
The first song (translated lyrics here) describes pilots stranded during a blizzard waiting for the opportunity to fly again. My favorite lyric is “Снова ночь нелётная даже для луны” (“Again the night is flightless, even for the moon”).
The second song (translated lyrics here) is called rapids, and it is about rapids, real and metaphorical. In the Soviet Union accurate maps were illegal, so people who went hiking/backpacking/canoeing drew unofficial maps—outlines/sketches. The song is about not knowing what is coming next, making your way as best as you can by outline/sketch rather than a real map, and reminiscing about cozier times (and, I feel, feeling comforted that those cozy times will continue to exist, somewhere, after you are gone), and it is about the end of the summer, and it may or may not be about death though death is of course discordant with the tone of the song.
This song is a bit of an enigma. I’ve heard various stories about what inspired it and they are all tragic and probably all wrong. There are very serious rivers (everywhere, including in the United States—not just in the former Soviet Union) that have specific ways you must move through them—you must turn right here or pass this rock on the left—, and if you miss any one of these turns, you will die. One version of the song’s backstory is that it was inspired by the author’s friend(s), who, missing one of the crucial turns, were carried through the rapids in their boat to their certain death with the whole rest of the party watching as they drifted away, helpless to save them. Another version of the song’s backstory is that a group of friends in Siberia are on a canoe or kayak trip and they know they will not make it to safety before the winter.
I listen to this song sometimes when I feel stuck. I love this song.
Slice Me Nice by Fancy
This is a very silly song and it is complete nonsense. My dad used to listen to it when he worked out and my first memories of it are hearing it playing from the basement sometime this past decade. It’s one of hundreds and hundreds of songs from my dad’s childhood and it is one of my favorites. My dad did not understand English when he originally heard and liked this song, so it was perfectly fine, maybe even better, that the lyrics are nonsense. I like to play it while I’m slicing things when we are making dinner. (I don’t usually cook, but I can slice.)
The next round of songs are from my parents’ adolescence, which means they are from my childhood.
In the Soviet Union when my parents were growing up tapes were smuggled in and sold illicitly (selling western tapes might land you in jail—not because western music was illegal, but because selling it was illegal entrepreneurship). You could buy a real tape like the ones sold in Europe, but it cost about a week’s salary, or for a day’s salary you could get a lower quality tape from a recording studio. The way you usually got tapes was by copying them from copied tapes that your friends had, but the copies got worse the farther along they were in the copy-chain, like a game of telephone. It was generally understood that if you had a tape, you would of course share it with all of your friends so that everyone could have a copy. (Before tapes people copied vinyl records onto old x-rays, jazz records especially.)
You could also listen to (and record) western music from AM radio, though that would be even worse quality, especially when you factored in the sounds the government would play on the same frequency to try to block it out. A lot of people got their music by listening to Seva Novgorodsev on the BBC Russian Service. (Seva was knighted in the United Kingdom for portraying the UK positively in the Soviet Union.)
These are the songs that are most burrowed into my brain from their respective CDs and tapes, which were among many, many CDs and tapes we had in Chicago. A lot of my memories of our first apartment (or maybe the apartment after that in the same building) when we moved from Moscow to Chicago have those CDs and tapes playing in the background.
Most of these songs are from 1970s Germany. Keep in mind that almost no one listening to this music in the Soviet Union understood any of the words.
In For A Penny, In For A Pound by Arabesque
Moscow by Dschinghis Khan
What in the heck was going on in Germany in the 70s.
Rasputin by Boney M
Media was tightly controlled by the government and Moscow by Dschinghis Khan and Rasputin by Boney M were not allowed to be played officially on the radio or TV, though you could listen to them at your own house. My dad says that when there was a Boney M concert in Moscow they started the concert with the intro music to Rasputin but did not play the actual song.
Daddy Cool by Boney M
My dad says he was so sick of Daddy Cool by the mid-80s that he couldn’t listen to anything on that record and still can’t listen to it. It was way too popular (in private, not on radio) and worse my dad had a copy.
Killer Queen by Queen
When I was 12 I started my new school for that year which was Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago, and I was in the Academic Center program that more or less tumbled 7th and 8th graders into high school classes, though we had our own separate classroom for core subjects. I met some of my best childhood friends that year; we had a very tightknit nerdy friend group and some of us still keep in touch. School let out early, 1:something instead of the 3: something I’d gotten used to, so when I got home I’d spent an hour or so eating and decompressing before thinking about homework. We had this Queen album on tape, which meant if I wanted to listen to a song on repeat I had to rewind it to just the right spot each time, and I played the album on our grey boombox in the kitchen and this was my favorite song to dance to.
Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd
The next year we moved to Central Pennsylvania, I started 8th grade, then I was in 9th grade and in Pennsylvania I became a different person, or more accurately I tried on two or three successive outer layers but was very much still myself underneath and with my family and closest friends.
Those first few summers in particular were very memorable to me, the kinds of months when years happen, probably because there was so much change happening in my life. We spent a lot of time wandering around outside. Wish You Were Here is a song from those summers to me; I most viscerally remember it playing in a cute hippie-vibe store called the Apple Tree downtown (not much of a downtown for me with childhood so far being in Chicago), which has since closed. This song, to me, is my childhood in the past and what Central Pennsylvania felt like in the summer and biking at 9pm with the sun still up and the whole idea of everything being transient and simultaneously happy and sad.
Where Is My Mind? by the Pixies
This song, too, is from around that same time for me. A boy I saw for about a year, who was/is an artist and who was very sweet to me, made me mixtape CDs sometimes and this was on one of them. I think making someone a mixtape is a very personal and underrated gesture. Back then we listened to music on CDs or on the radio so that was how we shared music with each other. Burning a CD is a lot of work compared to how we share music now and then after you made your CD you could decorate it or write things on it. Very special.
Dancing in the Moonlight by King Harvest
I have no idea where or when I first heard this song—probably around those same years. I really love this song.
In high school, our method of sharing music got more sophisticated. We, specifically the tiny subset of us in our school who had immigrated with our parents from the former Soviet Union, especially me and a boy I was rather desperately obsessed with who had a much better understanding of whatever we dreamed up former Soviet Union culture was and a cool older brother who presumably had enhanced cool older brother cultural knowledge, brought in USB sticks to transfer music between each other’s laptops, especially from his laptop to mine because he was older and more recently arrived and the one with more of the better music. These are my two favorite songs that I absorbed during that time, I think from those data transfers, both by Земфира. You can find roughly translated lyrics here and here.
Прогулка by Земфира
Итоги by Земфира
Сказочная тайга by Агата Кристи
This song is associated with a very particular memory. My family in my dad’s black Suburban, my dad driving, this song playing, us on our way to some lovely outdoorsy adventure. This song is kind of nonsense but I love the ping!-ping!-ping! sounds that sound kind of how stars look. It makes me think of my family and it makes me think of stars between tree branches directly overhead in a cloudless sky.
Like a lot of these the song itself is not particularly special except that it stuck with me. A friend from Chicago let us burn a copy of a disk with this song and that disk lived in the car, which is why we played it in the car. Tragically the writer of the song has gone completely nuts in a political way.
New Romantics by Taylor Swift
I started listening to Taylor Swift when I was in high school and she was about the same age and I was growing up in Pennsylvania not too far from where she had been growing up not that long before. Taylor Swift is special to me; my moods and life path have followed the moods and paths of her albums quite faithfully, from our shared origin in Pennsylvania to college and all the human complexities of college to the vicissitudes of grad school.
Initially, I had painted my dorm room green. My desk was against the wall next to my door, so when I sat at my desk I could see the whole long hallway and anyone walking through I could see and say hi to. The hallway was well-populated because it was one of the crossover sites between the two buildings at their shared wall, and my room was also by the back stairwell.
Random Hall has a smell. I don’t mean that in a bad way, just that the building itself and its walls and its carpet have a very particular smell that has a very particular feeling in the nose and the mouth and the airways that I remember vividly, and I remember that smell most vividly of course lugging bags or boxes from whenever I came back after a time away. (It’s probably because the building is very old.)
1989 was the end of college as it is usually defined and the start of this bizarre endless grad student state I didn’t realize I’d be in for quite so long when I started it. 2014 was initially supposed to be my graduation year but I stuck around for my MEng (my master’s) and I was very excited to have gotten into the program and to be making excellent progress toward my dreams, which at that point were to someday get into a PhD program, preferably at Harvard in part because my ex had dropped out of a PhD program at Harvard but especially because I wanted to stay in Cambridge. I’d gotten an extra year extension to stay in my dorm and even in my exact dorm room, so I got to extend my existing life by a year before needing to move on in any way at all. When 1989 came out, in October, I was focusing on teaching—I was TAing 6.005, Elements of Software Construction, which took up most of my time, and most of my time when I wasn’t working on my own classwork was grading or code review or answering student questions. I would have been sat at the same desk in the same room, a few years older and having painted my room a new color (brown, for some unfathomable reason—well, the reason was that I wanted to live in an apartment and brown felt like a grown-up color). I think my main personal struggle was getting through my workload and getting the confidence to look for a lab to do my thesis work in. This was a few months before I started in the lab I’m in now and I think it is about when time melted into itself and dissolved. (I still don’t know why it did that, and I haven’t been able to get it to come back together since.)
New Romantics is my favorite song on 1989. It was my phone alarm for a long time, which meant it was the first thing I heard when I woke up every day.
Moving To New York by the Wombats
Moving To New York is originally, for me, from a burned copy of the Wombats’ first album from one of my closest friends in 8th grade through high school—who, ironically, ended up in Chicago, where I started. He even included a CD cover and a replica of the album cover printed on a color printer (color printers being especially rare for me to encounter in high school). That album and this song as my favorite from that album are prominent in my memories of and have followed me consistently through high school and college and then my master’s and the year between my master’s and my PhD and now my PhD. And all the music the Wombats (and Love Fame Tragedy) have made since then (and there are other favorite Wombats songs—especially Pink Lemonade and 21st Century Blues and Flip Me Upside Down).
Finally, three songs that I just really like. I don’t remember when I first heard them. They are special to me for no reason at all.
Just What I Needed by the Cars
The Lovecats by the Cure
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me by Billy Joel
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me, recently, is rollerblading round and round a tiny outdoor basketball court with my mom and riding in my car, my mom’s old car, with my partner, on the way to the post office, with the windows down, feeling, like that song always makes me feel, a bit like we’re in a fancy convertible.
There it is again, Vecna, followed us on a tote bag, probably from one of those same career fairs.
This being my first ever blog post (not really) since forever (kind of), and therefore necessitating some form of introduction, I share with you my entry in our high school class’s ten-year reunion yearbook, created in lieu of a major superspreading event.
What is your name?
Lydia Andreyevna Krasilnikova.
Where do you live now?
Cambridge, MA, USA.
What is your occupation or field that you work in?
I am a computational biologist. I study infectious disease and disease outbreaks. I also draw space cows at @nightlyfieldlog and occasionally write articles about scientist culture.
What are some life events that have occurred? (marriage, children, education, achievements, etc.)
I got my SB and MEng and am currently working on my PhD. My partner Cory and I have been together for almost nine years now. We met in college (lived in the same dorm). He’s a mechanical engineer. No kids (yet).
What is one unusual experience you have had since graduating from State High?
Teaching was weird. One of my first times reserving a room for office hours I waited way too late and the room I got was a special room above the Museum. I got a message saying I would need to pick up a key. When I came by to pick up the key the person in charge was flustered and very confused, told me I wasn’t supposed to have been able to reserve that room at all, and finally said I could have the room just for this week but that I and my students were not to eat anything while in the room and that we were absolutely not allowed to touch anything. Anyway, it turned out to be the human specimens room. It was full of skeletons, human skeletons and skeletons of human-like primates, and skulls on shelves behind glass, and stacked little cardboard boxes that I can only assume contained more bones. (In addition, the lights were automatic and apparently I don’t move that much because they kept turning off.) No students showed up to office hours that week.
High school was a magical time. I was obsessed with the radio, and I carried around a little wind-up Grundig. I knew all the stations in our town, and in the neighboring towns, and I vividly remember the staticky morning talk show wake-ups and the smell of the wet morning air in the early autumn and the hope I had for every single day. I knew all the genres of stations, and I thought I knew all the genres of people. I dressed in mostly all black, with one non-black color at a time, ostensibly to show everyone I was hardcore but secretly because I had no idea how to match colors. I ruined all my textbooks by pressing leaves between the pages. I was always late, especially to first period, and I got a decent chunk of my best studying done in detention and Saturday school with my favorite math teacher. I learned that authority figures can let you down, and that other people, including some trustworthy adults, can open doors for you and make your dreams possible. I wasn’t yet grateful for nor understood the preciousness of their consistently showing up for me (even as I did not not consistently show up to, well, anything). I unquestioningly thought I could do anything I wanted to do—which to me meant, ultimately, getting into MIT, leading to some unknown secure future, the vision or meaning of which I hadn’t thought through at all (other than, of course, an MIT boyfriend). I hadn’t yet experienced or learned about sexism—or xenophobia, or racism, or imposter syndrome, or the sadder sides of immigration, or most bad things (and I don’t think I would have gotten as far as I have if I had). As far as I knew, I was smart and hardworking and if I decided to do something it got done.
Things that would surprise then me about current me:
that radio plays much less of a part in my life
and kayaking, and camping and hiking
that, ten years out of high school, and having graduated from MIT, I live with roommates in a not-fancy apartment
that I still don’t usually feel that I belong, and that the weird awkwardness I felt in classrooms of older or cooler students never fully went away (and maybe was never about age)
that I actually did pull it off, all of it
If twelve-year-old me, lying on the carpet of her second-story bedroom at 11pm switching between homework and calling friends on the light tan corded phone (yes, actually) and obsessively refreshing the MIT Admissions blogs, could see me, I think, she would be beyond thrilled, floored, some kind of astonished. I achieved most of her dreams. I got into MIT. I blogged for MIT Admissions, which was my browser homepage and obsession (obsession) from ages 12 through 18. I don’t think I can overstate what a big deal that would have been to her. (People even read my writing! Sometimes a lot of people, and sometimes a lot.) I finished a double major that sounds like a triple major. I got an MEng. I got my MIT boyfriend.
Writing it out, it sounds ridiculous. I even got into Harvard for grad school after MIT, which I hadn’t even bothered to imagine. I even wrote for Technology Review, not once but multiple times, in print (my own name, in a byline, in print)—the same magazine a younger me was utterly entranced by at an alum family friend’s parents’ house, the very origin of the foundation for the future self that I spent the next half-decade carefully planning and imagining and singularly working toward. I was even on TV. I was even on the cover of a newspaper. It all happened.
I am not the person I think I thought I would be, nor am I anymore the person who imagined her. I’m steadier, I hope, and my risks are more measured, which may or may not be a good thing. I have thinner skin and a softer shell. I care deeply, far too deeply, about what people think of me—not just the clothes and the music, but my academic accomplishments and my mind and my career. I’m far less confident, even as I’ve progressed academically, even as I’ve gotten far more comfortable around people and inside my own body. I’ve disappointed a lot of people whose opinions I care about, including myself—something that just wasn’t possible back then. I’m more concerned about other people in general, and not just in a bad way. I’m kinder to my body. I’m more concerned about balance.
Sometimes I wonder what that younger me, the designer, the true me, as she seems to be in my head, would do with the opportunities and challenges I have. I wish I could transplant her into my mind for a week, either to take the lead on my work or to sit back and critique. What would she think of my PhD so far? She’d probably work far harder, or at least with more focus, with absolutely no self-doubt. She probably wouldn’t hesitate or wait for permission or approval. Would she be a better self-advocate? Would she be unshakable in pursuing her goals? Would she speak up more aggressively for her ideas, and do a better job of asking for resources to carry them out?
Clearly the thing I miss, really really miss, about the person I used to be is her assured, steady confidence, or at least what I remember as assured, steady confidence. Where did it come from? Supportive parents? A stable, comfortable home and academic life? Mostly supportive teachers, at least in the subjects that mattered? Easier, less open-ended day-to-day tasks with tangible goals and endpoints? Did it come from not having yet experienced a pileup of history of failure? a lack of exposure to criticism? not yet having experienced or named sexism and the various usual injustices? Was it just a quality of being a teenager, some level of blindness to failure or criticism—social skills sufficiently underdeveloped to not notice or care about anyone’s opinion of me or have my own real opinion or awareness of myself? Did I simply not have an awareness of the distance between myself and the person I wanted to be? Or was the person I wanted to be sufficiently vague or shrouded in distant adulthood to be beyond comparison? Did being a child make my shortcomings easier for me to accept? Or was it perhaps something more positive: a healthier attitude about failure, or something that gave me the perspective to not be wobbled by it? Was it the constant, hovering presence of a professional goal that reached beyond any one person or subgoal, large enough and far enough away that it could be reached by wiggling around any steps I missed? Was it my many, many hobbies, giving me something other than my career to invest my heart into? Was it the presence and support of family and friends who I felt truly knew me?—in which case, was it the ability to talk through setbacks or negative experiences or my perception of another person’s judgement, again and again and again, to several separate people? or was it the knowledge that here, in this place where I am safe, are people who love me, even knowing me? Perhaps knowing that there are people who consistently see me and consistently love me cause feeling otherwise unloved or unseen to become bearable, any other person’s opinion or moods not quite as important. Or is the problem with self-worth during a PhD the concentration of responsibility for evaluation into a far smaller number of people, sometimes just one, often for an entire six years? In that case, it should be important to de-densify that authority—introduce more mentors, more authority figures, preferably some of them supportive to balance out any overweighed trauma from the others.
One idea that has been causing me particular dissonance is that high school me seemed to have time for everything. She filled up the school day with nonstop classes, cramming more classes where there were supposed to be study halls or lunch periods, missing a few days a week of easier classes to cram even more classes in where they already literally couldn’t fit. But I don’t remember homework or classes being my whole life, or even most of it. My memories are mostly in between classes (gossiping, so much gossiping, holding hands, making out in the hallway—horrifyingly embarrassing to think of now) or, especially, before and after school. A lot of my social life was in Science Olympiad—more gossiping, learning to use power tools (and hot glue and gorilla glue and gorilla tape), building tiny cars and water clocks and wooden airplanes I was so proud of—, starting in eighth grade and ending in eleventh, when I left high school. I was obsessed (obsessed) with getting the team to Nationals (I didn’t—we didn’t, and I cried on the last bus ride home from States). I kayaked multiple days a week and most of the weekend many weekends, especially in the not-freezing seasons. On top of that my family went on near constant adventures, skiing and biking and hiking and weekend camping trips around Pennsylvania. I also remember long nights coding personal projects, working on my first attempt(s) at a blog, trying to learn to sew clothes, baking experiments like that handful of times I made phyllo dough from scratch. And then my obsession with photography, going on what I called photography expeditions, then spending hours and hours editing photos of butterflies or trees or sunsets or the moon and adding a color-coordinated border and uploading to deviantART and talking with strangers online about my photographs and their photographs and about photography in general. And, of course, constantly AIM-ing with my friends, dissecting and analyzing crushes and homework and teachers and goals—this not including the hour a day dedicated to phone calls with boyfriends or prospective boyfriends or the time spent vaguely hanging out/loitering on school property or playing hide-and-seek tag after dark on Fridays in the park on the way home from school (that and another form of tag on the actual playground equipment right when it got just dark enough for someone to get injured on playground equipment but yet not dark enough to make hide-and-seek extra spooky).
There definitely wasn’t actually enough time: I cut class or slept through class or got sick and missed class constantly, at least once a week, which must have been an awful rollercoaster for my parents and a ridiculous mess for my teachers to watch and try to grapple with year after year after year. I would pull all-nighter to get work done, only to fall asleep and miss class and not turn in the work I did anyway. Then turn work in late; then probably fall behind, though I don’t actually remember ever being behind. Then do it again. (The trick was to get into just enough trouble to get Saturday school, rather than several far less productive detentions, but not enough trouble to warrant an even less productive in-school suspension.)
And yet I remember this time, and my time at MIT right after it, as remarkably productive, even though I definitely spent far more time on things that are not my job than I do now. Which is too bad—it seems I am working harder, but far less effectively, perhaps because I am working harder.
So here are some action items, borrowed from a happy childhood, to cultivate well-earned self-confidence for a better, less traumatizing, perhaps even empowering PhD/current career stage experience—maybe even a better, less traumatizing career overall.
Choose your mentors carefully. Have several, meet with them regularly, and solicit feedback. If your current career stage is structured such that you get feedback from only one person, or only one person’s feedback matters to your career, acquire additional mentors and do your best to dilute that one person’s power over you (even if they are supportive and that power feels like a good thing).
Develop a larger goal that reaches far beyond your current career stage—far enough away that a failure now or loss of support from any one person could be wiggled around to still reach the larger goal through another path.
Have family and/or friends who you feel truly and consistently see you, and truly and consistently love you for exactly who you are. Talk with those people often, and do the same for them.
Have hobbies that are important to you and give you fulfillment that is completely separate from your primary career.
Make (substantial) time for your hobbies and family and friends. Don’t cut them out because you think you will get more work done. You won’t, apparently. Work less.
Make good friends at work/in your lab to make the whole thing more bearable and hopefully even fun, at least sometimes. Spend more time talking with people, and listening to people, and being friendly.
Remember your younger self, who would be so proud of who you are and how far you have come.
Update: my favorite math teacher, who presided over Saturday school, has informed me that apparently while I did have Saturday school sometimes, I mostly showed up voluntarily, just for fun, to sit and work and be focused. (What a nerd.)
L. A. K. 