The end of academia

Once upon a time there was a student. I don’t know where I’m going with this, I just really wanted to start out with once upon a time, because that’s how all good fairy tales begin and when you get to the end, they all lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, this isn’t the end of the story, just the end of the chapter really. To celebrate the end, let’s go back to the beginning. Or rather I figure today would be a good time to do the victory lap and recap the journey. It wasn’t a linear progression, but adventures never really are.

One more time, for old time’s sake. For those of you who don’t know me, I was a PhD candidate in neuroengineering for four years. I’ve said roughly that, but these days I’m a newly minted PhD. Yep, Dr. Lunatic is at your service. I also happen to have my BS and MS in mechanical engineering, which, as I always try to point out, are two very different fields (it was a bloodbath starting out or really starting over, so just take my word for that). I’m a Marine combat veteran, and for the last four years to the day (okay, roughly to the day), I’ve been chronicling my journey from PhD student to PhDone. So with the introductions out of the way, let’s talk about the journey.

If you’re unaware or weren’t following from the beginning, the 365 Days of Academia project was a one-year goal to blog daily about the PhD journey. I liked it so much that I did it until the end of my degree, which, as noted, was just a few weeks ago! Thus, a five-year journey was carefully written down step by step, but there were only four years in the five-year story, which brings us to the beginning. The why, if you will. And like any good story, it starts with failure.

Hot off getting my Masters degree, I was super pumped to start my PhD, and I felt confident in my little mechanical engineering world. I made the mistake of thinking the fields were similar, so I try to remind everyone that they are certainly NOT similar at all. Okay, maybe a little, but only in passing. Anyway, nearly five years ago this October (ish), I had an idea, which I vaguely refer to in this blog as my “super secret technique,” or SST for short. Our first paper on SST will be coming shortly, so I’m excited to stop calling it SST, but that’s another story for another time. To show the feasibility of SST, I performed an n = 1 experiment for my qualifying exam, the thing you do to go from PhD student to PhD candidate, and it demonstrates your ability to do the work required for your PhD (that’s the theory anyway).

The short version of this story is that I failed. Okay, I didn’t technically fail, but I didn’t pass, and really, isn’t that the same thing as failing? Being used to failure, I dusted myself off and decided to go hard, which meant doing better in my second round but also writing stuff down. Partly a suggestion from my therapist (several years prior to this project) and partly because I wanted to have a detailed reference sheet (or blog, I guess…) that I could look back on, so that was the beginning (here). Wow, reading that post, four to nine years… eek. Time flies, and it also reminds me that any time I tried to teach myself or others something, I put a little disclaimer at the bottom saying it may not be correct, haha. 

Needless to say, the second qualifying exam attempt went much better than the first (here), which also includes the rare photo of me; eww, maybe I should edit that out. Anyway, enough self-deprecation! Despite getting horribly sick in the days leading up to the qualifying exam and the day itself feeling like a fever dream, I made it. A lot of the things I learned to do for the “redo” of the qualifying exam carried with me the entire journey. In fact, my PhD proposal and proposal defense both used the same figures from that presentation. One of my committee members at the time commented that a bad qualifying exam, “will follow you around.” Which was one of the reasons she voted for me to do it again. I’m thankful for that and the explanation she gave, even if it hurt at the time (it also kicked off this project, so I can’t be too upset).

From then on it was a whirlwind of events, there were highs, there were lows, but nothing, and I mean nothing, felt like it was progressing. In fact, I had one, two, three, four, papers just sitting there getting added on, and added on. I failed, a lot, like a lot, a lot, and the stress from it all nearly broke me. Nearly… I mean four papers, one of which was from my Masters program not getting published made me feel like I wasn’t cut out to be a researcher. Who would ever have that much trouble getting things published?

Then as I like to put it the dam broke and things started moving. A light trickle at first, one paper got published, then two, three, and all four. The journey shouldn’t be this painful, but it was. After those papers got published things changed rapidly, and the blog went from a chronic “I feel stuck” style post to something more like, “AHHHH THERE’S SO MUCH TO DO AND THINGS ARE GOING WAY TOO QUICKLY!!” Which was a feeling that followed me until the very end. But it may have been the path I selected more than the PhD journey for the last half of that.

This is because two years ago, or three years into my PhD, I took a job! A full-time job in the hospital I had my fellowship in, so Co-PI was thus renamed hospital-PI and PI became school-PI. Which in hindsight was a better naming convention for them anyway, but that’s how things go. With my newly secured job I suddenly had roughly the same amount of work to do! Ha… Only slightly joking, during the fellowship school-PI and hospital-PI both wanted me full-time in their respective labs, soooooo I did my best to do both. The only difference now was that I could slightly shift the balance to more work and some school. Now why would I go and do something like this? The answer is simple.

No, no, no, no postdoc. I didn’t want to do a postdoc after graduation, which funny enough makes hospital-PI uncomfortable to this day, but he’s more traditional, I think, or maybe more rigid. It’s hard to find the right word to describe his mindset sometimes, so often I simply say he’s Russian as a way to account for the differences in our thought process. So why no postdoc? Well, one, I’m already a non-traditional student, and two, the hospital-PI treats everyone as a postdoc, so technically, I already (as of this writing) have four years as a postdoc in his lab (two “part-time” years for my fellowship and two full-time years). And most importantly, the big reason is pay. Postdocs get paid like garbage; in fact, I was already making postdoc salary when I took my job (that’s not bragging, folks, that’s barely out of poverty level… I wish I were joking. The postdoc salary is set by the government, which is to say the salary for a postdoc hasn’t kept up with inflation).

Anyway this is a look back not a complaining session! So I took the job and wouldn’t you know it after a dozen or so grant applications one of them gets funded?! The award announcement came literally like two months after I took the job. That led the school to do a feature on me and my research (which due to my pseudo-anonymity I haven’t shared the link to directly, but maybe one day). And if that wasn’t enough, then suddenly a few short months later, I get the email I was never expecting. The one where DARPA was like, “heeyyyy girrrl lookin’ good.” I’m kidding (or am I?!) it was more professional than that, but anyway they took interest in my work.

Now DARPA and I have a history, like I started this journey thanks to a DARPA program manager (who I thanked, IN PERSON all these years later after the DARPA conference, but hey now, spoilers, so let’s go in order). Anyway they took interest and was nominated as a DARPA Riser, already that would’ve been enough, but then I was selected! Shortly after, I found out that the event I was scheduled to go to also included the very program manager who helped me get here! Fast forward a few months, because lets face it DARPA was the most interesting thing to happen to me, ever, and it’s November-ish of last year when the conference was coming around!

I wasn’t expecting much, but I had the chance to be selected as one of the five to present our work if my poster won out among the other 30-ish Risers. While success seemed like a dream that would never happen because, let’s be real, I don’t get selected for anything, like ever, so my luck ran out after being a Riser… or so I thought. Practice makes perfect; we wouldn’t know who got to give their talk until it was basically time to give the talks, so I practiced like I was going to win. And the poster session came and went, I was scored, and after a brief talk exchange with one of the Risers staff, who said, and I quote (roughly anyway, this was a year ago), “I’m looking for two people, and you’re not one of them,” I assumed that I had just found out in the most anticlimactic way that I was not selected for a podium talk.

But I was. I was selected and while they say explicitly the list was in no particular order I like to think it was since my name was square at the top. Oh somewhere after the grant and before DARPA I also defended my PhD proposal and we started the clock to graduation (here). But really, once DARPA happened, the PhD stuff felt like background noise (only semi-joking). Any who, after DARPA I had to push my timeline for graduation from spring to summer, which was a bummer, but things were already so hectic I barely had time to blog (here). Which means that sadly, the fourth and final year of the 365 days of academia project had the fewest number of posts by far, but for good reason (fun fact about the 365DoA project, I was averaging nearly 100% of my goal up until then).

Then if things couldn’t get any better, DARPA calls again and is like, “Hey girrrl how you doin’?” I should come up with better jokes. But seriously, since I finished in the top 5 (technically top 6 since there was a tie for 5th place, which is why I am like 94.22343% confident that despite what they said the order was in ranking, or at least that’s what I want to believe!) they asked me to present this fall at DARPA Demo Days at the PENTAGON, like the actual Pentagon, to which I said heck yes, and am sending off my poster for the event along with the stuff I need to get clearance to enter the PENTAGON!!!!!!! sometime later today.

Of course, I defended my PhD, I passed, and met all the requirements after the fact so I officially graduated!It’s funny looking back at all these posts. I’ve basically written enough for SEVERAL novels. I did the math awhile back since WordPress gives me those kinds of statistics, and it turns out if I turned the 365 Days of Academia project into a book (assuming I cut absolutely nothing from them, ha), I would end up with like 21 (ish?) books. Like average-length novels type of books. Which is to say a lot of writing and probably little improvement in my writing ability given the state of this post (haha).

Some of the themes for the project were more prevalent than others: feeling stuck, mental health issues (obviously), feeling rushed, and mostly just not feeling good enough for anything. I think if I had to sum up the project, that would do nicely. When I set out to do the 365 DoA project, I wasn’t sure what would come of it, and during my time there, I constantly thought, “Wow, what if I run out of things to write about?” Which, it turns out, wasn’t the case; it was hard to find a single topic to write about most days simply because I had so many to choose from! Of course, the biggest surprise of all was that anyone read it. I honestly wasn’t expecting people to care, so while it’s nice to have a little journal (dear diary…) of sorts, getting the chance to interact with so many wonderful people has been the best part of the entire experience for me.

Technically this isn’t the last post for the project, but it is the conclusion, if that makes sense. I still have a few things I want to add that would fit nicely into this category before I retire the 365 Days of Academia – Year four category to the loony bin for good. I can think of two posts off the top of my head, but as creator of this project I reserve the right to tack on a couple extra if I can think of anything else to include.

As always, thank you all for following along on the journey, it’s been an honor to have you follow along as I worked toward my PhD. As I said, it’s not the end of the story, just the end of the chapter. And with how crazy this one got, who knows what the next one will bring?

Oh, and for posterity’s sake, the old signoff seems fit…

Until next time, don’t stop learning!