Where do you want to go?

A question every faculty interviewee is asked (at least in the US) is, “Where do you see yourself say five years down the line?” The thing is, no matter how good you are with words, you cannot manipulate the answer and lie your way through this question. To answer with honesty requires strong intuition, a lot of deep thinking ahead of time, and having a vision about where you see yourself and your career headed in the future.

On a different but related note, I sometimes have people seeking career advice asking me, “I want to study so and so field. What are the prospects I will have after that?” Let me tell you upfront, this question is every advisor’s nightmare. It is almost like asking, “I have decided to shift to drinking whole milk from 2% milk. How do you think it will affect my skin elasticity?” I have no way to answer that, even if I was the cow. Just drink whatever you want to drink, find out, and go enlighten the world.

So when confronted with this question, I ask back a simple question, “Where do you want to go in life?” I always get stunned silences and awkward pauses after that. It is ironic that even with so many choices, people rarely spend time to reflect inward and understand what it is that they want from life. Many don’t even know that it is a choice to be able to decide what you could want from life. The easier way out is to choose a field where there is ample demand of manpower and join the workforce. The thing is you can become a space scientist after studying engineering. But you can also become a trashy novel writer after studying engineering. So instead of evaluating what jobs a degree in engineering can get you, ask yourself who do you want to be and how might studying engineering help you in that.

My career trajectory looks circuitous, and anything but simple and linear. I have no two degrees in the same field, a bachelors, two masters, and a PhD. So how do the dots connect?

To answer this, I will have to tell you what I have wanted from life. Growing up, the only thing I wanted to do in life is travel. Travel not as a tourist, checking off destinations, but living in different places, understanding people, the local customs, language, food, and so on. I started to think of places that were safer for women. Looked like the US could be a viable option (it was all conjecture at that point, no one from the family had stepped even out of eastern India, forget the US), and if you had good GRE scores, they even funded your education. That was my line of reasoning.

So I started to work on getting into a good US school with funding. It didn’t matter whether I studied material science or animal husbandry. I came to the US with the sole and soul purpose of being able to travel and experience a new country. Now the answer to “what I want to do in life” was good enough to get me to the US, but not good enough to keep me there. After three lab rotations, I realized that studying cells and molecules is not my calling in life. So I was forced to reevaluate the same question again.

Aspirations are not set in stone. They are malleable, and evolve with time. I realized that I was more moved by the human experiences than the experience of being cooped up in a lab in freezing temperatures all day. I wanted to learn more about how people understand, learn, and thrive. So I switched tracks and applied for a degree in the social sciences. 

With time, the answer to “where do I want to go” evolved further. I wanted to understand the experiences of the underprivileged and the underrepresented better. So I started familiarize myself with some of the discriminatory everyday experiences of the underrepresented minorities. I spent hundreds of hours interviewing people and was very moved by their stories. A Latino person talked about their journey from being a first generation college kid to becoming the director of a program. A Black student talked about being mistaken to be the janitor by the professors because of their skin color. A woman told me how frequently she was mistaken as the nurse by her patients because of her gender. 

So I have spent years now looking at the experiences of the underrepresented groups. My research interests were so specific that now, my chances of finding a faculty position doing the same work had become extremely slim. It was the scariest few years of my life. I worried that I would continue to be a postdoc in the unforeseeable future, running other people’s data and fulfilling other people’s dreams. But I knew that work-wise, I was doing exactly what I was meant to do. There were very few positions, which also meant that once I identified the job, getting it was relatively easier. I had spent years preparing myself to do this kind of work. And although extremely lucky, it is not a coincidence that my new workplace has strong interests in studying the underrepresented population.

So now, with my new position, things have come full circle. My experience working in the lab helps me better connect to the people aspiring to become scientists. Of course things look oversimplified when I put it this way. The truth is that my path was not always very clear to me. However, I was always clear about what I wanted. Unless you know where you want to go, you cannot figure out how to get there. If I am standing at the Redmond Transit Center but do not know that I want to go to Downtown Seattle, how would I even know that I am supposed to take the 545 bus? I have planned my career, and my entire life around two simple desires, the desire to travel far and wide, and the desire to understand the human experiences (especially of the underprivileged) better. Once this was clear to me, figuring out the path was easy.

So the next time you want to know if a particular subject has some scope for you, ask yourself, “What is it that I want to do in life, and how will studying this subject help me get there?” Most of the answers in life lie within, and not outside you. The external answers are just signposts to guide you through the process.

sunshine

The Art of Rejecting

I don't have a problem with rejections. However, I have a problem with how rejection letters are usually written. Here take a look:

"Dear Dr. sunshine,

The XYZ Committee met to review applications from applicants for the XYZ position. The meeting required to take some difficult decisions – we had many more applications than we could possibly accommodate. We were guided by the referees’ reports we had received on each applicant’s synopsis. We had to take into account the balance of nationalities, and the role of the XYZ in providing support for different contexts across Europe.

We regret that we are unable at present to offer you a position at the XYZ....."

(The letter continues for two more paragraphs).

I don't have the patience to read 120 words before I know of your decision. Rejections suck anyway, but people move on. Had this been an acceptance letter, it would have started with, "Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that ...."

This is not the only example of a poorly written rejection letter, and certainly not a European thing. I have had many job rejects under my belt the past few years, and the rejection letters all looked the same. Verbose. Babbling. Vague. Vain. Lacking depth and focus. And inconsiderate of the rejected's time and patience. Do you see how acceptance letters are all about the candidate ("Congratulations! We are so proud to have someone like you in our team.") while rejection letters are all about the person rejecting ("We had to make an extremely difficult decision, we had applicants from all over the solar system!").

Have the courage to reject gracefully and respect my time. I should be able to read the first line of your letter and know your answer. I can handle rejections well. You got the candidate you wanted, but I've still got to look for another position. Rejections sting. They will sting still the same if I have to read a paragraph of your justification about why I was not good enough. Treat them like injections/shots. Make it quick. Be brief, concise, and to the point. There is no need to ramble and justify your decision. Because the justification you provide is also vague (too many applicants, too little space). 

And if you really care, what will really help is some constructive and honest feedback ("Your language was not at par, your experience was not enough, your publications did not focus on these things, you did not take a multilevel modeling class, etc."). Not your cookie-cutter cliches of helplessness. Because when I read a poorly written letter like this, I feel like picking up a tissue and reaching out to you to wipe your tears saying, "Don't worry, I can feel your pain. You seem more stressed rejecting me than I feel taking your rejection. Don't waste your time anymore. And don't waste my time anymore."

sunshine

28 and Unemployed - Part 1/3

Part 1/3 .....

Part 2/3 ....

Part 3/3 ......

I was a month past 28. Barely a year out of graduate school. Recent owner of a car after 3 years of dreading and 1 month of learning to drive. Happy with a job that wasn’t necessarily THE job, but was something. It paid the bills, maintained my visa status, gave me something to talk about in typical Indian gatherings when people asked what I did, and bought me enough time to decide where I wanted to see myself headed. I was married to my job- a classic case of an arranged marriage. We met on campus, the recruiters hooked us up, and although I didn’t love it at first sight, I learnt to appreciate the perks that came with it- a name, a recognition, a box of business cards with my work designation boldly imprinted under my name, an unbeatable security, a boost to my self-confidence, a steady paycheck that took care of my passion for travel, and enough time and energy to pursue it. A double masters graduate (a PhD dropout actually), I told myself that I would never go back to school to finish my PhD. There was no pride living the life of an overworked and underpaid PhD student, and the smart way was to get a job and have a life. As I drove to work every morning, listening to the bleak updates of the recession on the National Public Radio, of people losing jobs and organizations downsizing, my heart reached out to these people I did not know. I told myself I was the luckiest person to hold on to my job, more so because I was single and did not have a “fallback option” for a husband. The security that came with my job was something worth every hour I spend doing mundane stuff in office, not knowing who would care about my work if I died working on it. Little did I know about the ill-fated layoff that was awaiting me.

When the clock struck twelve, I stood in the cold and rain, watching the fireworks explode over the Space Needle. Squished in a merrymaking crowd in a pub, I had welcomed the New Year with unemployment. No more playing office every morning. No more pay checks for an indefinite period of time. Unemployed, penniless, homeless, visa-less, and barely a year out of graduate school, I had cried broken-heartedly for all the catharsis in my life.

To be continued .....

28 and Unemployed: Part 2/3

Part 1/3....

Part 2/3.....

Part 3/3 ......

Do you know the one big thing that losing a job does to you? No, it does not drive you bankrupt instantly, it does not make you friendless, nor does it strip you off your visa status immediately. However, it strips you off your confidence big time, eating into your self-esteem, and leaving a dull void of self-doubt at the core. You know you are supposed to go out and meet people, network to ensure you find a job soon, but it seems you have ended up with legs made of lead. You do not want to meet or talk to people. The world symbolically gets on the train leaving the station and you stand there feeling deadweight, seeing the world leave you in slow motion. You hate meeting people, or even picking up the phone because they will either ask you how you lost your job, or will tell you not to worry at the time when you have lost your happiness, your sleep, and your old self beaming with confidence. You hide and sulk, stop taking calls, eat wrong, put on weight, end up looking even more pathetic, question your abilities, look at your degrees with doubt, and sift through your graduation album and cry. Suddenly your friends are nice to you, they take you out for dinner and do not let you pay, and there you are sitting and watching them suspiciously. As an outsider, it is a simple situation where you have lost a job, and you are supposed to move on and find a new job without making a big deal. However when you are in the situation, it is the biggest deal of your life. The voices in your head forever keep nagging, “Maybe I was not good enough”. Our upbringing trains us to deal with success, but does not train us to deal with failure. You tell yourself that you were the college topper, the best performing employee in your previous job, and it does not make sense that you don’t have a job anymore. Few realize that although it is sad to lose your job, you can sail through this phase of unemployment with style, so that the world around you would die to be in your shoes.

Did I sail through my unemployment with style? I do not know about that. I am a liar if I said I accepted reality and moved on. Oh, it affects me till date. It was one single, isolated event on a fine morning when I was told I was leaving. However, I have replayed that incident in my head a million times now, making me feel the pain a million times. I still have nightmares of being asked to leave my workplace. The face of my employers change, but there is someone I always see in my nightmares sitting behind a mahogany desk with an intimidating and overpowering expression, asking me to leave. I was scared, vulnerable, and somewhere in the subconscious, I learnt to believe that I will never be good enough to hold on to a job, friends, or relationships.

I tried for months to get another job, but nothing worked out. Tired of feeling sorry, I gazed out at the waterfront, and asked myself one sunny morning what I would do if I didn’t have to worry about money, success, or what people thought of me. Pen and paper in hand, I started to make a list of the things I would do if I got a break. I was single, unattached, healthy, enthusiastic, could live in whatever part of the world I chose to, didn’t have a child to look after or a mortgage to pay, no ties absolutely. I wondered how I had overlooked these blessings. As I kept writing, my “wish list” kept growing longer. There were so many things I had always wanted to do, waiting for the opportune moment that never came. My unemployment turned out to be that opportune moment in my life. I now had a plan for my life, and a fun plan indeed. My crazy list looked something like, “Going back to school. Traveling Europe. Visiting family. Learning a skill. Losing weight. Watching all the top movies on the IMDB list. Writing a book.” I knew I could not finish even half of them, but I was already excitedly planning my unemployment period. What a welcome break it was from the boredom and monotonousness of doing routine things that everyone around me did.

To be continued ........

28 and Unemployed: Part 3/3

Part 1/3 ........

Part 2/3 ......

Part 3/3 .........

By January, I found myself sitting in music class, cleaning the cobwebs off my voice and relearning my Sa-Re-Ga-Ma. I used to sing with my grandfather as a kid. He took with him the culture of evening riyaaz when he died. 24 years later, I started my classical music lessons. Now that I was singing, I wanted to dance too. I felt self-conscious, I had gained a lot of weight in the last few years, but I had always wanted to dance with the local dance wing, and realized this could be my only chance. I auditioned with them for a show, and the weekdays saw me singing and dancing to the tunes of music for the upcoming show. My muscles screamed in pain, I no longer felt that nimble and flexible I used to feel years ago, and came so close to giving up at times but dragged on for that day I would be on stage feeling proud of myself. February saw me live that moment of pride, performing on stage.

I had a lot of time now but no money, so I started living with a close friend. I helped her take care of her baby, another unique experience for me. Baby and I became best friends, and I learnt skills like feeding a 1 year old, keeping her entertained, talking to her, making her learn new words, and singing to her. By the end of my one-month long stay with her, she was singing Sa-Re-Ga-Ma with full confidence. I had circulated the gift of music I had got from my music teacher, to baby. Taking care of the little one taught me love, patience, and the art of understanding little humans who do not talk to communicate or make themselves understood, not to mention bits and pieces of Tamil. Next, I moved to another friend’s place where I had another baby to take care of, not a little human, but a very understanding and communicative cat. Anyone who knows me would know how scared I am of animals, and I would not even go close to a harmless, innocent animal, let alone live with one. However, I saw this as another opportunity to get over my fears and take temporary responsibility of a living being. Kitty and I had the house to ourselves and we would often sit together in the evenings watching television, playing, or talking to each other. I told her stories and she responded by purring and mewing. We even watched a Bengali movie together once.

By the end of March, I had heard back that I was not granted an extension of my US visa. I was expected to leave the US, my home for the last 4 years. It was yet another calamity that came as an opportunity. I looked at Google maps and asked myself if the world was a playground lying invitingly in front of me, where would I like to play next. I had my answer. I sold most my stuff, packed the rest of my life in boxes at a friend’s garage, left my car in another friend’s driveway, and took off. I took a flight to New York, and another flight that didn’t stop till it reached India. I was in India after 4 years, meeting my family and friends. I rejuvenated myself, felt nurtured with unadulterated love and support that a family provides, and went back to work voluntarily at my old school where I used to teach 4 years ago. I saw this as a unique opportunity to re-establish my contacts, and to do something I was passionate about- teach. All it took me to be happy and feel useful was to discover something I loved to do, and start doing it again.

Before I knew, I had spent months with family, possibly more time than anyone living outside home could ever imagine. It was time to move on. The next 2 weeks saw me backpacking, living, and breathing in the places I had only read about and dreamt of, but had never thought I would visit in this life. I had always wanted to walk the streets of Vienna where my favorite movie “Before Sunrise” was shot, and I did it. I had always wanted to visit an active volcano, and here I was climbing Mount Etna in Sicily. I walked the streets of Dresden, had Gelato in Rome, got a first hand experience of marveling at awe inspiring work of Michelangelo in Rome, stood mesmerized by the beauty of Salzburg, visited the castles of Prague, walked inside the world’s largest ice caves in Werfen, hiked the Alps, even took a train that boarded a ferry while leaving mainland Italy towards Sicily. Map in hand and an indomitable wanderlust, my dream of backpacking Europe, traveling in trains, and living on a shoestring budget had come true.

The best things in life were spread out for me as a buffet, and in 8 months I got a taste of almost everything I had ever desired. Music, dance performance, babies and pets, meeting family, teaching, and walking the streets of Europe. But I still had to figure out my life and decide what I would do after this transitory honeymoon phase. This was my chance to start something new, and learn from scratch, since I had already made up my mind not to go back to doing bench science again. After 8 months of a journey that seemed more like a never ending fun vacation, I wanted to be a student again, but not in the same field studying cells and molecules and writing scientific documents. I wanted to learn more about how people learnt. I applied to a dozen schools, got around half a dozen admits, and went back to school. It was time to start working on that unfinished dream of a PhD. Life had given me another chance to do something I loved, and I grabbed that opportunity and converted my passion for teaching to the pursuit of research. These days, I work on how to make the process of learning more effective. By changing fields, I relearned my sciences from scratch.

My greatest lesson from this journey of unemployment was to see things I built over years, things valuable to me, crumble in front of me, and for me to learn to build from rubble and from the ashes of unfulfilled dreams again. It taught me how to be significantly detached from my dreams to be able to work on rebuilding newer dreams again. I have learnt that it’s okay to have nightmares about losing your job or not succeeding in life or see people leaving you, because your insecurities mirrored through these nightmares will only make you wake up and work harder towards your commitments to ensure that things don’t screw up in real life. I feel like a new person, free of baggage, unfettered from the thoughts of how the world perceives me, and secure in the knowledge that I have taken good care of myself through these months and haven’t failed myself.

My journey through these 8 months of unemployment changed the way I learned to count my blessings. The door that had marked the end of things was also the same door that marked the beginning of brand new, and a better life for me.

sunshine

Tox Talks

Many (used to) ask me what I do for a living. I used to be a toxicologist by education and training before I decided to experiment a little and join grad school. Now being a toxicologist is not an easy job. First, you need to deal with a deep and profound understanding of the nature of cells and toxins and the way either interact to cause cellular injury. Then you have to deal with the knowledge that most people around you are not going to understand beans about what you do for a living.

Not that I am offended or am hurt, but it is interesting to observe consistent behavioral patterns amongst people who are told I am a toxicologist.

A tox what?

Talk-si-what?
-
Understandable, given that we mostly hear of doctors who operate, computer engineers who code (yes that’s as much I understand of comp engineers as they understand of my field), architects who design and build, and so on. Managers. Singers. Interior designers. Journalists. Those are the words we have grown up hearing.

But definitely not a toxicologist.

The situation is different when I am hanging out with my colleagues and professors and professional peers. I am the one then, groping to understand the stuff they do, the big words they throw at me.

I’ve of course had hilarious responses from people.

So do you examine snake venom?

So is global warming going to destroy the world?

So do you design toxins?

Talk-si-what???

I enjoy the responses and the blank looks I get most of the time. No matter how mundane a job I do for a living, I can always make the word look fancy and give a bunch of ideas that makes people think I do something cool.

Forensic science? Criminal investigation? An Erin Brockovich in the making?

Anyway, I am glad that I do something that isn’t understood by many. That way, the toxicologist can finally talk.

sunshine

If Blogging Were A Profession.

Ever wondered what if blogging were a profession? What if blogging was something we did 40 hours a week to earn money, and not something we did to unwind at the end of a long day? I hear that some people are professional bloggeres and make good money out of it. And then there is Adsense too. But I don't mean all that. What if in a party, there were people introducing themselves to each other in answer to “What do you do?”, saying, I am a doctor, I am a journalist, I am an engineer, and I am a blogger? After all, there were no biotechnologists, computer scientists, epidemiologists, graphic designers, or choreographers once upon a time. And then there would be further introductions about the educational backgrounds. So perhaps when the engineer came from Delhi (just randomly), the doctor from a medical school in Bangalore, the journalist from Pune, the blogger too would identify as an alumna of the prestigious Indian Institute of Blogging Sciences, the first of its kid in South Asia. While engineers had specializations in electrical, computer, mechanical, and so on, and management students specialized in finance, marketing, or HR, bloggers could specialize in social blogs, media blogs, review blogs, literary blogs, picture blogs, blogs on politics, food blogs, blogs on activism, sports, child rearing, and so on.

What if there were blogging companies, sometimes multinational, that hired bloggers fresh out of blogging school? These freshers perhaps got a four year undergraduate degree in Blogging Sciences (BBSc) or a masters level degree (MBSc). Of course they could have an option to pursue higher studies in any of the prestigious American schools (or for that matter, anywhere in the world) that had an entire department, “Department of Blogging Sciences and Research” to it. There could be new concepts like macroblogging and microblogging. Of course there would be general GRE, TOEFL, and Subject GRE (depending on what you wanted to specialize in).

In the job sector, one had the freedom to blog about what one was good at. They would help the companies that hired them earn revenue in some way. They had a choice of working in a cubicle in the office with the computer, or going outdoors to write about things (or maybe a combination of both). They had certain rights and as employees, were entitled to certain allowances and emoluments. Their employers could get them transferred to other blogging projects, or even other cities or countries. And blogging as a profession wouldn't just be an extension of media or journalism. There would be new concepts and different dimensions to it. Blog researchers and professors could take a sabbatical and go visit other countries. Like doctors saved lives (and some looted their patients) and engineers made machines to help people save time they don't know what they are gonna do with and managers skilfully transferred their work to the lower rung and marketing professionals made people buy products they could do without and government officials spent all day drinking gallons of chai and chatting and biotech researchers fiddled around all day with genes, inserting the gene of a fish into that of a lizard to see if it could swim better, (no offense meant), bloggers too could have some kind of contribution to the society. After all, the concept behind the establishment of most professions in the society lies in creating a demand among people and then meeting the demand created with a steady supply.

And then there would be such and such ads in the matrimonial columns of the newspaper- “Alliance wanted for tall, fair, handsome Brahmin Blogger (IIBS), only son, own house, working with an MNC in Bangalore, A+, earning 10lac pa, wanted fair, slim, convent educated girl (preferably blogger)”. Mothers could work from home, since it mostly requires a computer and creativity. 

And then the Oxford English Dictionary could have new words added to it, like blogomania (madness for blogging), blogophobic (someone who is scared of blogs), blogstipation (temporary or permanent inability to relate to or write blogs), blogosophy (like philosophy), blogoholic, gynoblogger (a female blogger), a misoblogist (hater of blogs or bloggers) and an anthropoblogist (one who blogged about humankind), perhaps an ornithoblogger (blogger of birds) and a sauroblogger (blogger of reptiles). Of course omnibloggers like me could write about anything under the sun. And with the evolution of the new language, who knows, we could find some innovative swear words related to blogs or bloggers. Come to think of it, if excreta or the technical act of love making can be converted into swear words, then why not this?

And then, two gentlemen newly introduced to each other would converse something along these lines.

Hi, I am a medical student of AIIMS.

Hi, I am a blogging sciences student from IIBS.

Oh wow, that's cool. I took the entrance test for that institute four years ago, but couldn't go beyond the prelims.

I too failed to clear the AIIMS entrance test. Luckily, I made it here.

So what would you want to do next?

Oh, there were campus interviews last month. I got a job in the R&D section of Blogtor & Gamble.

sunshine.