birthmarks / trademarks

“would you rather be smart or successful?”

to say that i have been in a rut as of late would be an understatement. one only needs to take a look at the presentations that i submit to my boss twice a month to update him with my progress. for the last month and a half, the submitted presentations can be summarized to not having results, either because i am too lazy to do experiments, or because the few experiments i actually do go to shit very easily, or a combination of both. i have been patiently waiting for my boss to give me the “bandwidth speech”, a monotonous monologue reserved for lazy/uninspired/dumb graduate students, in which he pursues to ask rhetorical questions to probe the source of your distraction or the state of your mental health. i used to loathe getting that speech, and always kept myself working hard just to avoid it. yet, lately, i have been looking forward to it, mostly because it will not be a monologue. the once rhetorical questions have an answer.

-“you seem distracted in your work.”

it’s not that i am distracted, it’s that i have no interest in it whatsoever.

-“your work is important, but you downplay your results and their prospects by having a poor work ethic.”

i will be the first one to say that my work is not important, at all. i used to work harder but then i realized that hard work was going to get me to the same place as being absolutely lazy, just 10 days before.

-“i wanted to talk to you about an exciting research opportunity, but i don’t think you are capable of handling it.”

reverse psychology stopped working on me after the age of 12. further, if this exciting idea is as exciting as your other ideas, it most likely is impossible or irrelevant or someone else has done it already. finally, you do realize that the expression “exciting opportunity” is reserved for pyramid schemes exclusively?

-“don’t you want to be the best scientist you can be?”

i am almost certain i don’t want to be a scientist anymore.

ten years ago i had to face the decision of what to do with my life. at the time i lived in a country that only values engineers, medical doctors and lawyers. i opted to study biology and become a doctor. the fourth week of college i took my first general biology and general chemistry exams. i had a b in biology and an a in chemistry. i figured-never having a b in my life-that i sucked in biology and was decent in chemistry. i changed majors. not wanting to go to med school (as i hate people in general) i decided to go to chemistry graduate school, which would also give me the opportunity to move out of that wretched place. six years later, i am here.

which brings me to the title of this post.

one of my duties as a graduate student is to consistently go to meetings and seminars from which i learn nothing. the meetings, which involve my coworkers and our superiors, are comprised of talking about the same ideas ad nauseum, staring at the floor or the ceiling after the often rhetorical questions are asked, and the passive/aggressive gestapo-style questioning that my boss employs as a tool to solve problems that are never solved. sometimes people talk about their research, rarely the presentations are coherent or well put together. practicing yoga regularly has taught me some techniques in contemplative meditation; skills that i have perfected in the duration of such waste-of-time gatherings.

yesterday the boss man went on a diatribe about the virtues of high-throughput screening. we have all heard the same message about a hundred times. it surprises me that there are still group members that dare question his argument, not because it is unquestionable, but because there is no way of winning. just say yes. for your sake. for my sake. for everyone’s sake, really. after a lukewarm exchange among some group members and the boss, the latter asked, in all seriousness: “would you rather be smart or successful?”

i was instantly removed from my happy place and inserted in the middle of a storm. i looked around and everyone’s eyes were huge. or maybe they looked so because mine were.

although the question was completely out of context, it synthesizes my issues with graduate education and my future so motherfucking well. i ended in graduate school because i failed at properly defining what smart and successful were. i thought that smart people pursue graduate studies, and that pursuing graduate studies was the only way to work on your brains. i thought that only smart people were successful. hence i needed to go to graduate school so i could prove i was smart and buy myself a ticket to be successful. i was so motherfucking wrong.

graduate school has always been frustrating for me. i have only enjoyed certain moments; most can be reduced to having papers published by friends of my boss that did so so that my boss would publish their own papers. i have learned very little. i have gained no life skills other than critical thinking, which i could have learned from life in the first place. i have no money, my health insurance is shitty, i am not saving for retirement, i am often tired and bored. the only really great thing that i have gotten out of grad school is access to a huge library full of books i want to read.

i am about to finish a phd that has very little meaning to me. i used to think that although meaningless, it was valuable. but the lesson i have learned in the last weeks, were i have been seriously thinking of what will be my next step, is that the degree is not valuable if you are not interested in the prospects it offers. and while i am not one to need my job to change the world, i am finding it difficult to find a job, period. everyone wants me to get a postdoc-an experience where you go to another lab and do some more research, this time more independently; a shitty job of sorts if you ask me-but i don’t want to. i don’t want to be a professor, and the thought of teaching makes me feel a bit sick. i don’t want to be a consultant, as i don’t want that lifestyle. industry jobs bore me to death. as you can see, i was not lying when i told the career counselor at school that i should be a prostitute, a joke that she did not receive very well.

all i want is a job that allows me to keep the lifestyle that i have right now, with some additional money to buy clothes and save for my retirement. i am happy renting the studio i have in pilsen for the rest of my life. i am happy driving my economy car until it dies on me. i do not want to have kids and that will save me a lot of money. it should not be this hard to start the rest of my life when my expectations are not even high. i guess having expectations has turned out to be difficult enough.

i have no goal to work towards right now, and that bothers me. i have nothing to look forward to, and that makes me sad, especially since it took so much effort to get to this point. i don’t know what to do about it, and that is what worries me the most.

to say that i am lost as of late would be an understatement.