It has been a year since I officially received my PhD degree and with it the hard earned right to call myself Dr. Namrata Iyer. Despite all the effort that went into earning that prefix, it is one I am still acutely uncomfortable using. It is as if using it gives an impression of being something I am not. Doctor, in my books, has always been someone who is working to save lives, an expert in his field, an authority. And expertise is something I felt I sorely lacked at the end of my pursuit of this degree.
I used to always find it weird that this degree was called Doctor of Philosophy. It has been the subject of many a joke in my graduate life, with students mourning about the “sage/hermit”-like life they were forced to lead on graduate salaries and having to forsake most materialistic desires! But having come out alive and whole from this process, I am beginning to realize how apt that title is.
PhD essentially is a process of examining the world around you, whether at a micro or macro scale. Looking at one tiny drop in this vast ocean of unexplained phenomena and asking a question of it; a question whose answer might provide some clue as to its true nature. Most of the time these questions do nothing more than satisfy our curiosity. But the beauty is that in the process of asking this question, you end up learning things about yourself you would never have discovered otherwise.
No two graduate experiences are alike and some are decidedly harder than the others. I for one had it easy by most standards. Not too much pressure, freedom to plan my work, timely completion of the thesis and a decent recommendation to go where I wish. Despite that, my PhD posed one challenge that till date I struggle with….and that is dealing with failure. Coming into graduate school, most of us have an excellent academic record, top of our class, good research experience and all that jazz. In short, we’re used to being successful at what we do. But then, suddenly we find ourselves not only in the company of equally brilliant peers but also staring down a question/project that comes with no guaranteed solutions.
Apart from the rigors of dealing with our mentors, colleagues and their expectations, the project we choose is in essence a black box without any instruction manual. Especially in fields like biology, the things you deal with literally have a mind of their own. Sometimes things come together like a neatly assembled IKEA piece and sometimes you realize you don’t even have all the pieces to begin with. In a field where each bacterium, each mouse you pick up is unique, you are struggling to discern a hint of pattern or a trend amidst a sea of noise. For many, this struggle ends in triumph while some face down defeat, sometimes at the fag end of their graduate tenure.
Having found myself in the latter category, I was faced with a sort of existential crisis. 5 years of my life invested and nothing concrete to show for it. It made me wonder if I’d made the wrong choice doing my PhD and whether I’m really meant to be a researcher. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes to make it in this field. It’s a long and hard fall to take for someone who, while showing outward humility, never really expected to fail at anything. But being in that position forced me to take a long and hard look at what I really want in my life. It made me step out of the preconceived notion of what life after PhD should be like and make peace with the uncertainty of the future. Not everyone is destined to be a PI (Principal Investigator) and that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for you in the system. Being a part of a good research team with a good leader can be just as satisfying as leading one, as long as you are doing work that you find engaging. When faced with the question of whether or not I want to a postdoc, I realized taking that on doesn’t mean I am sentencing myself to an academic rat race. And it turned out to be a wonderful decision in the end. I was lucky to find a group and an environment that allows me to grow academically and also personally. I’ve explored both teaching and science writing in the few months that I’ve been here and look forward to building a path that allows me integrate things I am passionate about.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not touting myself as a success story….far from it. All I know is that PhD needn’t be the be all and end all of your life. It is just one chapter, one experience and your success and failure in that isn’t necessarily an indicator of how the rest of your life will shape up. Whether or not it leads you to academic success, it definitely does leave you stronger and better equipped to ask questions of life and deal with the answers you get. It is a degree that each one of us would be fortunate to have. So even though I persist in my discomfort with the prefix doctor, I am proud of being Namrata Iyer, PhD.
About the author: Namrata Iyer has completed her PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and is currently working as a Postdoctoral research associate at Brown University, Rhode Island. Her current research focuses on the interactions between the gut microbiome and the host immune system. Her interests include teaching and writing. This blog has been posted simultaneously in her personal blog today (http://namrataiyer.blogspot.com/2016/01/to-each-his-own.html)
https://in.linkedin.com/in/
This work by ClubSciWri is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
