Directionless

To provide a brief bit of context, this year I have been working as a Postbaccalaureate Research Assistant as a gap year before pursuing a program in an MD/PhD program. An overly optimistic recent graduate, I signed on for a one year contract in what little did I know would be one of the toughest years of my life. Yet in retrospect also one with some of the most personal growth.

When I first joined my lab, naive Megen was so overly enthusiastic to embark on a new research project and get started in her first job out of college, that I missed the signs. Signs that yet again I would be abandoned by my mentor. Signs that yet another person I was supposed to look up to and learn from was all too ready to leave the field of science entirely for other opportunities.

Rather I lavished in those initial days of making new friends, learning new protocols, and filling my mind with information about the project that would consume my mind over this next year. But over those first initial months, the rose colored glasses began to slowly fade until one random day in October, I found out that my postdoc was leaving for a new position.

I know that for many, this is actually a fairly common occurrence. People leave all the time for new opportunities and pursuits. Yet I was caught by surprise as this was not a one time occurrence – this is rather the second time that I have been left to take charge of my own research project and subsequently worked directly with the PI of the lab after my initial mentors took flight. And this time I was also left in a newfound state of directionlessness.

You see, it seems that each year we grow older, the more expectations are thrust upon us. Either by the world or even by ourselves. And in this new position, I found myself being forced to grow to new expectations that I did not even know if I could achieve. With no PhD, no previous classes in immunology, and limited experience in the lab techniques I was performing, I instantaneously found myself in sink or swim mode at my job. One in which every thing I was doing was initially done with an underlying level of uncertainty.

With a PI that rather than nurturing and checking in left me with unspoken goals and distance, I was left to my own devices – reading scientific papers, searching Google and Wikipedia for answers, and seeking out help from anyone who offered. Looking back, I should not have been so afraid of failure as failure is rather at times inevitable. But at the same time, I know that innately, I had a deep need to prove to myself that I could succeed as a scientist and that I was not insane in wishing to pursue an 8 year degree in an MD/PhD program.

So I read, and I queried the internet, and I stayed up long hours writing protocols for myself and even dreaming about what I should be doing next. What would have happened if I just simply stopped? If I left my laptop at work and closed my mind of science and allowed myself to just exist at the level of knowledge and expectation that should be thrust upon a 22 year old?

Well, while I do not know for sure, I do think it would have not been a picture of serenity. Rather, my hypothesis is that I would have felt judgment from the brief side comments made when I did not know the answer, dejection from continual failure of difficult experiments that I was unprepared to perform, and a hit to my confidence and self-esteem each day as the research project stalled and continued in its directionlessness.

And so I pushed on. I continued to read papers until I could hold my own in conversations with my PI. I watched videos to learn new protocols and continually asked my godsends of colleagues for any advice they could offer. And I thought. I thought about alternate approaches to looking at my genes of interest, at ways to better optimize my experiments, about why we used certain time points, and why we used certain experimental models. I troubleshooted, and I repeated experiments again and again.

In some ways, it was an incredible opportunity to be able to take charge of my own research project. For the first time, I saw what it was like to hold some of that power of direction and experimental design. I held some of that intellectual investment and found myself seeing a future in this field. Yet at the same time, I also felt a certain sense of abandonment and loneliness.

While I did grow every single day in my abilities and knowledge, my confusion continued to grow right along side it as I realized that the intricacies of cells and immunobiochemistry is more complex than I could have ever predicted. What appeared to be a simple signaling pathway, I now know is quite the opposite, and my goal of elucidating novel functions of a protein became a task that has proven unfruitful time and time again.

I have come to realize that this field of science is one chock full of opportunities for failure, but the cause of which is due to the complexity of life. Even the smallest unit of life – the cell – holds within it a wealth of information left to be discovered, and in searching for that information, I know I will continue to be greeted by chasms of confusion and unknown.

At still a mere 22, I know I still have much to learn about science, about life, and about being a scientist. Yet what I am walking away with after a year of true independent research is tenacity and somehow – a shred of optimism. I started out this year without even knowing a single thing about immunology, and yet in reflection, I have learned more than I should have and need to know about how innate immunity functions. We hold within us a power – a power to learn. And it is this power that enables us to contribute our own knowledge and insight into the communities around us.

I don’t think I would have chosen this year knowing all that it entailed. I went from having a great mentor that checked up on me everyday to going days without speaking to another human – alone in my thoughts about the project aside from the one or two meetings a week with my PI to try to ascertain project direction. I spent months working on microarray and CRISPR-Cas9 cell line development that epically flopped due to my lack of experience and a lack of background in those techniques. And I somehow was able to consistently provide my boss with the impression that I was not quite as confused and unprepared as I internally felt.

Yet while this year has been tough, I can ultimately say I am leaving it a lot less confused, a lot more prepared, and a lot more confident in my abilities to seek out help and answers. While knowledge is important, being a great scientist means also knowing your limitations and being able to pick yourself up again after failed experiments, wrong directions, and confusion.

The only wrong direction is one in which you are not moving forward.