For the past five years, I've been in graduate school.
But for the past five years, I've
also driven back and forth between Stanford and Los
Angeles about once a month.
And so here are some things that I
wish that I could go back and tell Alex of five years
ago on her first drive just when she was starting her PhD.
And maybe some of these things will
be things that might be helpful to others
who are starting their PhD too.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So grad school is full of some ups and some downs.
I think one of the biggest things I learned in grad school
was to roll with the punches.
But that doesn't mean that you have to be, like, impenetrable
and like a wall of force and grit.
I cried a lot in grad school because sometimes stuff
was really hard.
And I learned that in grad school,
one of the biggest things that I had to learn
was to ask for help.
Sometimes that was in life.
Sometimes that was in lab.
Sometimes I would waste a month trying to figure something out
on my own, only to realize that once I asked somebody,
they were like, oh, the trick is this.
And then I would get it done in an hour.
OK.
It tastes like raw garlic.
Also, when you have those down moments, talk to people.
There were so many things that happened in graduate school
that I felt alone in and that I was upset about.
And I thought that it was only me,
and this wasn't happening to anybody else.
It was because I was a bad scientist,
or I was a bad co-worker or whatever it was.
And a lot of these happened in third and fourth year.
Those are hard years of graduate school.
But then later on when I actually talked with people,
and I figured out that they had been
going through the same thing.
And they too thought that it was only them.
So find your support network and talk to people.
You don't have to be everything.
You don't have to be a superhero.
I mean, now I've got it, and it's going to melt.
So I guess I have to eat it.
One of the best pieces of advice given to me in graduate school
was handed down by a postdoc in my third rotation
lab who told me to take data and make it into a figure
as soon as I'd collected that data.
And that was so helpful, both because it
allows you to more easily see your data
and because it means that when you're
going to make a presentation or a publication,
you already have that figure made.
It's already right there.
What I would add, though, is that you should also
take the time to write out a paragraph or two about what
you did to collect that data and what it is.
Specifically, I would generally do it
for experiments where I knew it wasn't going to go any further.
So it wasn't going to wind up in a paper.
It might just be an appendix of my thesis.
And so I would just write up what I did, what the data was,
and what the data showed.
Super simple, super fast, right?
You do this.
You write, like, a page every now and then.
And then when I went to put together my thesis,
those chapters were so easy because I already
had it written.
And then there was a figure.
And then I just magically had a couple pages of my thesis.
Another important piece of advice
here is to pick a color scheme and stick with it.
Then you don't fall into the trap
that I did where you get to the end,
and you're making your thesis.
And you have all these figures, but none of them are cohesive.
And none of them look alike, so you have to remake them.
Pick a color scheme, and pick it early.
Also, label everything.
Tubes in the wet lab, files in the dry lab-- label everything
before you put any data into any folder,
before you put any liquid into any tube.
Label it, label it, label it, label it.
Take way more notes than you think you're going to need.
You're going to do an experiment and think, oh, I'll
remember what volume that was.
You will not.
You're going to start to write something down and be like,
oh, I'll remember which enzyme I used.
You will not.
Take more notes than you think you need.
I promise.
I also found that having a clear, consistent labeling
system helped so much.
When I first started out in those early notes,
I was labeling things experiment 1 or experiment A.
And that was not helpful.
After about the first year, I started a system
where I had the type of experiment it was.
So if it was a silencing experiment, it might be SIL.
And then I would have the date, and then I
would have a double letter code for which experiment it was.
And once I had a consistent system for checking everything,
it got so much easier to track my results
and where everything was going.
Pick a labeling system, whatever works for you.
[CAR STARTS]
One of the biggest lessons that I learned in graduate school
was how to embrace I don't know.
I feel like, so often, we all want to come up with an answer
when we're asked something.
But in science, we don't know all the answers.
And trying to make something up on the spot is wrong.
And you can do your best to make educated guesses,
but I think that it's really empowering and exciting
to be able to embrace the I don't know in life
because that means that there's still something to learn.
So it's hard.
It was really hard for me to be able to get up
in front of my department or even
to be in a conversation with someone and to admit,
I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that question.
But it was fun when I got to follow it up with,
but let's find out.
And so that's really what science is, is saying,
I don't know, but let's find out.
And for me, starting to embrace saying I don't know
was really empowering.
That's a good thing.
We should all be saying, I don't know, but let's find out more.
Always remember why you started.
People go to grad school for really different reasons.
Some people go to grad school because they
want to be a professor.
Other people because they want a career in policy.
Other people because they love science.
I went to grad school because I wanted to learn
how to ask good questions.
I feel like that's a really important skill in life.
And I also wanted to learn how to think about answering
those questions.
And those things are important to me.
But I had to keep reminding myself sometimes
that that's why I was there.
I was there to learn these things
because it was really easy to get
swept up in comparing myself to the people around me
and looking at all their publications
and my tiny amount of publications and just feeling
awful about the fact that they were doing so much better
than me or whatever it was.
And none of that mattered.
I wasn't in grad school to compete with anybody.
I wasn't in grad school to become the world's most amazing
scientist.
That wasn't why for me.
For me, it was about learning how to ask good questions.
And sometimes, in the really hard moments or the moments
where I felt lost or the moments where
I felt like everything was going wrong, reminding myself why
I started was really important to me.
[SEAT BELT CLICKS]
Now that I'm done, now that I've finished and I've graduated,
am I still a scientist?
Everyone in my life keeps telling me, yes, of course,
that I've done all of this really specialized training
to be a scientist.
And so I am still a scientist.
But part of me feels like it's a job title,
and I don't still call myself an associate producer for my job
before grad school.
And I don't still call myself a Home Depot employee because I
don't work there anymore.
And I don't know.
Am I still a scientist if I'm not doing science every day?
This is a question that I think about a lot.
And I'm really lenient on this for other people.
I think that for other people, I'm
like, oh, if you ask questions, you are a scientist.
But for myself, I don't know.
I feel like now that I'm graduating,
I have to hand over those titles.
And I don't know if that's right.
I don't know if I can still call myself a scientist.
I don't know if I can still call myself a geneticist.
And I think what I'm settling on is science communicator
because that's what I'm trying to do,
science communication, science video production.
But it's weird not being able to call myself a scientist
anymore because I've worn that mantle
and I've worn that title proudly and excitedly
for so many years.
And so I don't know.
This is one of the big questions of this chapter
change in my life, literally as I'm moving to this new place,
and I'm changing what I'm doing on my day to day
and really moving on.
It's really an identity question as well.
And I'm curious to see how that develops as things progress
and as I keep driving down this road that I'm driving on.
OK.
I need to get gas.
[MUSIC PLAYING]