Death by Insecurity

It was a little over a year back that I started my PhD journey at TIFR, Mumbai, starry eyed with a hundred different ideas of what I would pursue in PhD and what my life in TIFR would be like. I would be dishonest if I were to say that things have been exactly like I dreamt they would be. Having left engineering with an interest in developmental biology, I even surprised myself when I chose a lab working on Cellular Neurobiology over two other developmental biology labs I rotated in. But that’s the smallest of the surprises I’ve had. 

Very recently, I had to give a comprehensive exam presentation, what’s called Project 1 seminar at TIFR, on the field that my project is to be based on. This was unlike any presentation I had given in history because I was expected to have read research articles in the range of a few hundreds and know things in the field from the most basic level to the most advanced level, put them in context and understand what it means for my project. 

Not surprisingly, I struggled with this process, at the first stage even - reading at this scale. As a child, I was an avid fiction reader, but non-fiction I struggled with. This was most certainly not fiction, being scientific articles with background, methodology, results and interpretations. It was a nightmare in the beginning honestly, how am I ever gonna understand any of this? 

The year made progress but not my reading, and the presentation date approached steadily. To improve upon my progress, I stopped all experiments, focussing on reading day in and day out, slowly but surely losing my mind. After each discussion with my PI, I just felt more and more dumber, when I failed to answer the most basic questions. This now turned into days where I routinely cried, over feelings of my own stupidity and ignorance and my inability to think things through as I am reading. Nonetheless, I made progress and I reached my presentation day, worn out, but definitely alive.

However, it was the 3 hours of my presentation that surprised me the most since I joined TIFR. As I stood there, answering questions and trying to defend my ideas in front of the department and some of the smartest people I know and admire (the exact thing I thought I was stressing myself about), I wasn’t stressed. I wasn’t anxious. I had the best time standing there, just discussing science even as I repeatedly said I didn’t know the answers to several of the questions and that I had to go back and read. It reminded me exactly why I loved doing this for a career - to be able to think, learn and discuss. 

However, post my presentation, I couldn’t help but think about why the weeks that led to my presentation were more traumatic than my presentation by itself - about why I had pushed myself down to the extent that not a day had passed when I didn’t cry. It took me time to understand the answer. Being fairly good in academics in schools and university, I was in a stage where I had to push myself to go the extra mile, and where even that extra mile may not suffice. How in the world can I accomplish reading all the articles that are out there on mitochondria? I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that I do not know things. But a worse aspect of this was, I had made it a reflection of my own capability - that if I don’t know things, it must be because I’m incapable, and maybe I’m just not cut out for the academic life. 

My reading journey by itself was tough, but I had made it worse with my insecurity. And I am only learning that with this attitude, life as a PhD student may only get more and more difficult. So, while I started writing this article with a totally different introduction, trying to make it an end of year reflection for 2022, I ended up learning something about myself in the process. And this is the thing I want to put out there, to remind both myself and others in academia that there’s always going to be things that you won’t know, things that you should have known. But that’s the first step, after which comes the process of learning. And there are a lot of things that can stress one during PhD, starting with failing experiments to rejected papers. Let not your insecurity be one of them. 

I was never one to make New Year resolutions, but this year I just might! Happy 2023! :)