#phD

[discoursets]

[one-time-i-dreamt]

I was applying for PhD funding. The guy in charge (whose name I had already forgotten) told me they were going to give £90k a year. He told me it was a lot but you’ve gotta spend your money on something. Then I went outside to see that the zombie apocalypse had begun while we’d been talking.

[xiaq]

Yeah that’s about right

[amnhnyc]

🕷️Meet Joe Arguelles, a comparative biology Ph.D. student in the Museum’s Richard Gilder Graduate School. His research focuses on understanding the molecular drivers of the incredible mechanical properties of spider silks.

🕸️He also studies the evolution of “prey capture systems” (silk, venom, and vision) in active hunting spiders, and how these genes have changed in response to the loss of web-spinning behavior.

[volchiitza]

clearly trying to stop fixating on "productivity" has actually improved my focus

[catboybiologist]

Hey it's a life update that probably no one cared about or asked for

tl;dr: I'm likely quitting my PhD via mastering out, and leaving my program in June.

sappy, overly emotional vent/explanation:

I'm wrapping up my first quarter as an out-of-the-closet trans woman. I've had some serious conversations about where me and my work stand. This was always my intention after coming back from my summer hiatus/social transition: see how "reentry" works, and then assess from there.

For those that don't know, PhDs in the US take 5-7 years. Oftentimes, however, they either give you a master's along the way, or give you an option to quit halfway through with a master's. I'm in my 3rd year and have more than enough to use that option. I've toyed with this idea before, but it feels a bit different now. Last year, I was burned out from science, my project was failing, and I was under constant stress of boymoding and remaining in the closet. Now, I'm out and proud, and I deeply love my project and find it exciting. I fixed some things.

Unfortunately, I have a recurrent problem. Whenever something goes wrong in my life, the first thing to drop off is my ability to drive forward my own thesis project in a coherent way. What the actual problems are vary, but that motif stays the same. I could list off what's going on right now, but I think y'all can assume a bit of what a mid-20s, broke, recently transitioned trans woman in the US is going through at the moment. There's a lot of specifics, of course, but I'm not at liberty to say most of it.

So I'm looking around and realizing I have scraps of half finished projects, I've given support and help for other people's projects.... and then made little progress on my actual thesis. It's enough to pull together into a master's thesis, and maybe even another paper or two, but.... not a PhD.

And then there's the other side of it. The nicer reasons. Could I stay here, buckle down, maybe add years to my degree, and get through it? Probably. But honestly? I don't really want to put myself through that now. It used to be that academics was all I had. It was all my failures and all my successes. It's what I threw myself at, because I genuinely had nothing else going on. Since transitioning, the world seems so much more beautiful and rich, so much more complex and vast, with so much more to do in it. I've even had more negative experiences unrelated to academia, and while they've sucked, they've shown me that life is so much bigger than it was before.

To be blunt, to experience more of my life... it helps to have money, and it helps to have career stability. It's not the only factor by far, but certainly one defining moment when making this decision was trying to create a timeline and budget for transition related surgeries, and realizing that its near impossible in grad school.

Not to be dramatic, but I've also had a couple extremely jarring experiences in the past year that are reminded me that life is short. And I want at least some time to enjoy it.

My heart is honestly broken here, and I'm feeling extremely emotional about this. I love my lab, my colleagues, the environment of doing research, and my project. But I'm realizing that it might not be viable, or what makes me the happiest at the moment. I'm genuinely a bit distraught, and I've been crying a lot for the past few days. A lot of me feels like this is what I am, and this is what I'm good for. That I'm failing myself and every mentor that got me here. Some part of me knows that isn't true, some part of me can't let go of those feelings.

But, I know this doesn't mean "never". So many of the people in my program are significantly older than me, coming back later in life to get their degrees. I'm honestly almost positive that I'll come back to a PhD someday if I quit now. In my 30s or beyond, I think that I'll be able equipped to handle it much better.

So what's next?

Obviously, nothing is decided, and I'm just spitballing here. But I'm honestly shocked at how many viable options I have, in a very good way. A cursory scroll of Indeed was honestly therapeutic. As I said, I still love the academic research environment. I just need more money and stability, and would prefer to have a slightly different relationship to the work I do than a thesis project. Ideally, I would want to be a staff researcher in an institute or academic lab. That lets me keep a lot of the things I like about what I do now, while also making literally 2-3 times the money and having a more stable position.There's positions out there that maximize the contexts I'm the strongest and happiest with, while still being more steady and paying more. Hell, even if my responsibilities were identical, but I had more pay, I could probably more effectively address the personal problems I'm going through right now. I'm gonna stay in California for a lot of reasons, and I'm lucky that there's so many options within the state.

I have a bit of an oddball set of experience. I'll actually have two nonoverlapping master's if I do this. I already have a MS in bioinformatics, which was granted by a CS department. But my current program is in more "pure" molecular and cell biology. I'll have 5 years of grad school, 8.5 years of research experience if I include undergrad research, and instead of a PhD, 2 MSs. Which is kinda funny. But it think it helps represent my experience for what it is. I like to consider myself a "full stack" bioinformaticist- someone who can do both the experimental and analysis portions of experiments that produce large data. Hopefully I'll be able to put that to good use.

I have a lot of professional contacts that I'll slowly be reaching out to over the course of the next 6 months while I tie things up. I know this is a wildshot on tumblr of all places, but if anyone has any recommendations, advice, or contacts, I'm all ears- both for professional and job hunt related things, and also the emotional state I'm in right now.

Thank you to everyone that's made up this wonderful community we have online. I hope I'm not letting anyone down. I'll still be a biologist, I'll still be my trans self. I just won't be "Doctor" anytime soon.

[legogradstudent]

Peeking outside his conference hotel room, the grad student evades awkward encounters with other attendees.

[animentality]

[lottiestudying]

16.08.2024—officially now a #gradblr ! i applied to one school for my PhD and managed to get in. so happy and relieved. that means at least four more years of content for you guys as well 🤍💗

[therepublicofletters]

What you think archival research will be: immediate amazing discoveries about exactly what you’re working on

What archival research actually is: well now I want to know about all of the socks that the Archbishop of Florence sent to the Pope in 1512.

[cyberwareheart]

I'm collecting data for my dissertation! So, I'm working on a project about dying platforms, which Tumblr may or may not be (and all thoughts on the matter are welcome). If anyone wants to spend an hour talking about how they've used tumblr over the years, how it's changed, and how they feel about it, I really want to hear from you! If you're a longtime user, if you've left and come back, if you know anyone who left and didn't come back and want to refer them to this post, please let me know.

for a little more about me in case anyone wants to know, my name is Andrea, I've been on tumblr since 2010 on my main blog (this one I just use for saving posts for research and doxxing myself), and I'm a PhD student at the University of Michigan doing an IRB-approved study that will, god willing, let me graduate

[signals-and-soma]

19/100 days of productivity | 19/01/2024

study break = trying the buns from home weekend special (tea and custard - yum)! found a cute little cafe to do some reading

[vwenties]

phd zanvis in 2024.... going insane

[foxscarf]

9.3.24

Life and work are so so busy but I wanted to give at least a bit of an update!!

This second rotation of my PhD programme is so, radically better! My supervisor is amazing and I'm loving the science very much, it's really exciting and the rhythm of the work suits me so well! It's changed my whole attitude towards my PhD which is a huge relief. Things feel brighter. Meanwhile I'm settling into my city and starting to build up a social life, which was hard at first! So I guess if you're having a hard time making a new start - new job, new city, new degree - you can take this as a sign to take heart, because this came around the corner and took my by surprise. ❤️📖🌸🔬

35/100 days of productivity

[amnhnyc]

Research alert! Imagine putting flippers on a 24-foot Komodo dragon. That’s how Amelia Zietlow, a Ph.D. student at the Museum’s Richard Gilder Graduate School, describes Jormungandr walhallaensis, a newly identified species of mosasaur that was named in part after a sea serpent in Norse mythology.

Living some 80 million years ago during the Cretaceous, this mosasaur is thought to represent a transitional period between other well-known species. In addition to flippers and a stumpy, shark-like tail, Jormungandr had a bony ridge on its skull that would have given it the appearance of having “angry eyebrows.”