“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”
–Anna Quindlen, Living Out Loud
Today, NPR published an article titled “The Writing Assignment That Changes Lives”. Basically, it’s a writing program or curriculum that is designed to help students identify for their future goals, but also their current strengths and weaknesses. It’s already well known that writing can stimulate mental health and combat mental illness. In a world where there is so much pressure on students to decide what they want to do with their lives and succeed without ever failing, perhaps writing is an excellent tool for students to make those decisions: decide what they want out of life and how they’re going to achieve it.
I’m certain I’ve done similar writing exercises, but I think the problem with them is that we never update them. Things rarely ever go as planned and it might make us depressed to look back at our plan and discover how little we accomplished. Or it can be a great opportunity to evaluate why things didn’t go as planned and how we can adapt to get back on track. Such a writing exercise is called “Future Authoring”. There is also “Past Authoring”, a close example of which is contained in my post “Secrets of the Heart”, where you discuss a past experience that still evokes negative emotion in an attempt to draw information from it.
The idea behind “Future Authoring” is that you are the author of your own adventure. In any good story, our protagonist is dynamic. They are always working towards the resolution of the story regardless of setbacks and obstacles. You want to be the protagonist who takes matters into their own hand, not one who waits for deus ex machina to save them or allows themselves to be swept wherever the current takes them. But a protagonist can only move forward if they’re aware of where they are going. A “Future Authoring” exercise helps us obtain that information.
If you asked me in my sophomore year of high school where I would be at my current age (26), I would probably say I’d have my PhD in organic chemistry (ah, so young, so naïve). In junior year, I’d be acting as a history teacher and writer. Senior year, I was going to be a chemistry teacher. My freshmen year of college, I was going to have my PhD in chemistry… again. Sophomore year I was swept into the currents of uncertainty and bashed into the rocks a few times. To be honest, I put little thought into where I was going and was just trying to survive and it showed. It stayed that way until my junior year when I got into research and, once again, resolved to get my PhD in chemistry. But then in my senior year, I fell in love with medical biology. It felt so wrong, but oh, so right. So, if you asked me then, I was working towards my MD/PhD (dream big, kid, dream big). That was until self-doubt took its toll as I continued to finish my degree in my fifth year (long story for another day) and I lost my resolve for a bit.
It wasn’t until my year after graduation, when I finally, FINALLY, was able to find a job that I found my passion again. The transition from all these goals was so difficult for me because I was just floating from one thing to the next without ever evaluating what I truly wanted and what would make me happy. Writing it out wouldn’t get me there alone, but I’m sure it would have helped.
At the end of this summer I’ll finally be transitioning into that PhD program I always dreamed of, but it’s in Cell and Molecular Biology instead of Chemistry. It will be a difficult road no matter what and so I think before I head into the program, I might try this exercise to evaluate my goals further and to know what I’m working towards.
About two years ago now, a friend of mine who was in medical school came to visit me while I was working a late night in the lab. I proudly showed him everything and explained all the projects I was working on and everything I hoped I could accomplish. His response? “Is this really what you want to do for the rest of your life?” I was a bit surprised by the brazen and not-at-all subtle insinuation that my chosen career was lowly. Knowing him well, it wasn’t all that surprising, but I didn’t expect him to think so little of a career in research. I pretty much just said “Yes” knowing that it wasn’t worth the argument. He replied “Well, I thought about doing research for some time, but I decided I actually wanted to do something with my life.”
I was too stunned to respond, but as I said, it really wasn’t worth the argument. He was never going to see my side of the story. No, I will never directly interact with patients. I will never directly guide them towards a better lifestyle. I will never cavalierly pull a life back from the brink of death in an emergency situation. I could never be good at such things. First of all, I’m not much of a people person (of course, clearly, neither is my friend) and I just don’t have the patience to constantly deal with patients. I barely survived waitressing. Second, I’m pretty squeamish. I just got over a longstanding fear of blood and I still struggle with needles. I almost pass out when someone talks about eye injuries and I can’t stand to watch someone get injured during an athletic event. Could I get over those things someday? Yea, sure. Do I want to be a doctor badly enough to put the time and effort into doing it. Nope, not even a little bit.
It’s not to say I don’t think being a doctor isn’t a noble career. I absolutely believe most doctors do good things and save lives. But the career doesn’t sing to me the way research does. The idea of being a doctor doesn’t get me out of bed in the morning. Tomorrow I’ll get out of my bed for my students, because even though I’m not saving the lives of patients, I am training students in the area of problem solving and they may be students who go on to save the lives of patients. In addition, I’m working towards solving problems that could save the lives of patients. I’m not naïve enough (at least not anymore) to believe I’ll cure cancer or any other disease that effects the lives of people every year, but I will contribute to the body of literature on those diseases. I could bring these fields one step closer to saving millions of lives, even if I never directly save one myself.
That’s enough for me. It’s more than enough. The idea of filling in the puzzle with pieces I have to create myself and jury-rig pieces from the information I ascertain for others really sings to me. It fills me with energy, it keeps me up at night, it gets me up in the morning. I love working with students: watching them grow from not holding a pipet properly to troubleshooting experiments they designed themselves. I love guiding them on their career path, helping them find resources, recommending them to others, reading drafts of their personal statements, even though it means they’re moving on from my lab. It means they’re moving on to something better. They’re taking whatever skills they learned and making the world a better place. That sings to me too and no one can take that away from me.
I can’t say I’ve never had doubts, but I always end up quashing them. More than anything, I can’t see myself doing anything else with my life. I believe I was destined for this job and I believe I will succeed at it.
I may not have taken a linear path. I will be what they call “a non-traditional student” simply because I “chose” (let’s be real, I wouldn’t have gotten in; not being humble, I really wouldn’t have) to wait a few additional years before applying to graduate school. Some of my friends from my class are already close to graduating from their programs. This was the path I needed to take to succeed. I needed to fail in college. I needed to learn it was okay to fail. I needed to re-evaluate what I wanted from myself and learn that it wasn’t realistic or necessary to be perfect. I may not have done things the way I envisioned, I may not have always handled obstacles in an efficient way, but here I stand, ready to finally tackle the goal I’ve been aiming at for almost a decade. I may have arrived late to the battle, but at least I’m not running from it.
But the goal, isn’t just to be a PhD student. I can’t make it through a graduate program, an extension of my education towards a career, without knowing what my career will be. Looking back at my previous goals, I was never far off the mark. I’m going to be a professor. I’ve always wanted to teach, I was just wrong about the age group (oh so very wrong). I can teach, run my lab, train students. It’s my dream job and it’s everything I want out of life.
The outlook for graduate students going into tenure track positions is dismal. I’m writing here and now that I do not care. It will not sway me. If I have to spend extra years as a post-doc, so be it. If I have to take another job, while I try to become a professor, I will. But the endgame is professorship. Professorship or bust.
Most definitely, I am a better person today than I was yesterday.
The Other Side of the Window 