[Second place winner in the Synapse Storytelling Contest Fiction category.]
It’s been seven something months since you finished your first year of graduate school. Second year! How blissful…right? You moved into a better apartment, got to join a wonderful lab and develop a project. As you find yourself dancing around your new lab bench, give a few lab meetings about your to be thesis project, you find a deadline creeping up on you suddenly.
QUALIFYING EXAM.
Masqueraded as an exam, it’s a stony mountain high-altitude pass that you need to survive to get into the Candidacy land. Failure to pass and you are met with difficult consequences. But its not just a stony pass where you prove to the world that you know your project and are ready to do but fire arrows are shot at you by your qualifying committee members. I’m only kidding of course. They are just going to ignore your emails after accepting to be on your committee. Don’t worry half the challenge is finding a committee and getting all of them to pick a date. In a few select cases finding a date was harder than the actual exam itself.
Subject line: Please share your availability for quals
Subject line: Re: Reminder please share your availability….
Subject line: Re:Re: Just following up again :)
Several such subject lines later and after successful negotiating magically 30 minutes from different professors, you set a date and time for this exam. Honestly that itself feels like a major victory and leaves you wanting to celebrate. Alas you must celebrate by writing your proposal. A whole proposal about your project! It is your project after all! You arm your proposal with some munition called preliminary data to help you get a running start to crossing the pass.
It's spring! The flowers are flowering! The weather is sunshines and rainbows everywhere yet you are sitting inside your apartment forcing yourself to write about your proposal. All about the protein interactions and pathways! Nope! Couldn’t be interested in the sunshine, or the blooming flowers. You could always take a break to meal prep for the week or clean your apartment. Of course, the laundry isn’t going to do itself neither is the trash going to take itself out. Soon all your distracting essential chores are done, and you force yourself to go to a coffee shop to work. You buy yourself an overpriced cup of coffee and start typing. “ Hmmm maybe I should change the entire project to focus on another interesting aspect aka my newest shiny idea that I haven’t done any research on yet.”
It does seem impossible to pick a path out of the countless that emerge in your head. So, you shortlist few, write about it. Feeling a sense of accomplishment about it, you send it out to the PI for thoughts. When you meet with them, you walk away with entirely new aims. So, what now? You restart typing and chorcrastinating (a word the author invented).
Several days and multiple panic spirals later, you have a draft. Do you love it? Absolutely not! But it will have to do, given that you are three behind your soft deadline to submit. You slack your PI the draft and think that you have a whole day of bliss.
A WHOLE DAY OF BLISS LATER…….
“Such great work on your draft! I have few minor edits attached. “ – a NOTIFICATION pops up on the screen
You stop cooking dinner mid-way and read it. Opening a document with few words being highlighted in black while most of it is in red. You process track changes settings to realize all the suggested edits are in red and all your 100 words of original text is left in black. You start working on it, and since you stopped mid-way with dinner prep, you snack away your girl dinner quickly on the side. What’s on the menu? The project proposal with a side of crackers and a protein bar
Tired, several hours later, you decide to sleep. Floating away into dreamland you find yourself floating around all the changes in the texts, your accidental mistakes vs ones your never realized were wrong haunting yourself all the way till you wake up.
Another day another draft – the new anthem of your life!
STOP! You decide since you are working so hard you must plan celebrations after quals! Some visit new cities while others choose to staycation in SF. So many exciting choices! You open your messages and scroll past the invites you have had turn down thanks to chorcrastinating. Fueled by the ambition to find your past life again, you feverishly starting typing.
After several meetings with your PI, you finally find yourself ready to send it to your committee. You mentally prepare yourself for their feedback – remind yourself that when you met with them, they also thought your project was a good idea! That’s still true…right? So, you can always use that if they now changed their mind. With a lot of doubts and concerns in your mind, you press send. Off goes your proposal to your committee members inbox. Your project proposal – your big thought child – your academic soul -now lives in their inbox!
You wait and wait and wait. Well you do have to prepare for the actual presentation. Ready to do a mock with your lab? No! But you have to do it anyways. It should really be called a Roast. You find senior graduate students, old lab mates, your cohort members, members from your committee members labs and basically anyone who is a part of your academic life and choose another time for a mock. Another mock with your lab. A mock to mock yourself?
You catch a glimpse of your committee member walking in the corridor. Share your comments please! you mumble knowing that they can never hear you.
Fret and worrying about what you know and what you don’t. It’s time for a mock. People ask great questions. The only teeny tiny problem was that you are the person with a marker who now needs to know the answers. A few I’ll look that up! or That’s a great point, I’ll read about it. later, you find yourself done with the mock. Exhausted but done! So much more to read but you did know something! Didn’t someone tell you at some point that a mock with your lab is almost always worse than the real thing. You treat yourself to another overpriced latte and make your way to the next mock, a bit more prepared this time.
Stil no comments yet but you ask to meet with the committee members-after all not too long to go for the great quals. They reply to this email! You feel lucky yet unlucky because still no comments. Wearing your project proposal (a grad student’s heart) on the skin, you head into the meeting. They seem excited about it but raise a few good points. You jot them down and make a mental note to go to your PI with these points. Feeling encouraged but just a little bit more scared you walk away to prepare more.
Then comes the day! The day on your calendar, your friends and family’s calendar – the QUALS and the after PARTY day!
On your marks, Set, GO!
2 painful hours (that seemed like minutes) later, you emerge.
Victorious. Exhausted. Happy!
Celebrations ensue and off you are to the valley of hope and despair AKA third year of grad school! And Candidacy land!
It’s been so hard to see yourself here but it did happen!
Author promises that this piece was not written as an alternative to working on their proposal. (Okay, maybe just a little).
