The end of a long road
I keep my responses helpful and professional, but what I really want them to know is that no decision is right or wrong – that their life will unfurl and bloom no matter what they decide. There is no control twin to take the other path, against which outcomes can be compared. It can all swerve off-script but then eventually, come out right.
This is what I don’t tell them:
Once upon a time in a land far across the sea, a little girl dreamed of becoming a scientist.
The dream came from literally nowhere: no family member had ever expressed an interest in science, and she knew no role models personally that might have ignited this spark. She watched documentaries on public television, and devoured books about science from the library, including a fictional series about a boy who solved scientific mysteries with a supportive (though disappointingly submissive) female sidekick and a nutty old professor. One of her first memories was a flickering black-and-white square with faraway voices talking about small steps and giant leaps.
She collected fireflies in jars, swooped butterflies into her net and looked at planets and moons through her father’s telescope. She studied hard and did well at school, suffering the small cruelties doled out to students who enjoyed learning. She gained a liberal arts degree at a prestigious undergraduate institution in the Midwest, majoring in Biology but broadening her viewpoint with a wide variety of other courses, from archeology, geology and literature to Ancient Greek, linguistics and ethnomusicology. She waved placards at demonstrations, played tenor pans in the school’s steel drum band and – living in the shadow of a massive government loan – was able to afford food and toiletries only by working multiple odd jobs on and off campus: drawing advertising posters for the college catering company; doing admin at a local art museum; scrubbing the excrement from mouse cages in the science building. Each afternoon she parked her rusty bicycle outside the massive concrete cube of the main library and spent more than eight hours a day studying.
In her final summer of university she spent a few months in Bethesda, doing research at the National Cancer Institute. The viral papilloma genes she studied made no sense to anyone, a vast black box of mystery. Today it all seems obvious, but then, she felt like no one would ever understand – and that was exciting, but it also made her a little wistful. She cultured cervical cancer cells, treated them with cytokines and chemotherapeutics, and did flow cytometry with a middle-aged tech who liked to slurp icy soft drinks from a straw as she operated the machine. During one bomb threat evacuation, she looked up from the lawn and through a window high above, saw firemen trying unsuccessfully to pull a resisting white-coated researcher from his experiments.
The summer was long, and hot in more than one way; during one lab mishap, she spilled radioactive iodine-125 (half-life, 59.49 days) onto her favorite boots and some grim-faced white-coated men came to take them away. (“When can I have them back?” she asked. “In about 150 years,” came the terse reply.) She doesn’t remember how she got home in stockinged feet, but does recall that the postdoc in charge of her got a bad telling off from the department head. This wasn’t the same post-doc who sneeringly told her that girls made terrible scientists, so why was she even bothering, and convinced the department head allow him to use her as a slave, photocopying hundreds of articles from heavy journal compendiums in the dim NIH library stacks.
There was never any question that she would earn her PhD and become a jobbing scientist. The path was as well-lit as a motorway, pointing in only one direction. She got into her first-choice graduate program in the Pacific Northwest and finished six years later with half a dozen papers and several postdoctoral job offers – one made on the spot at a poster session at a high-profile East Coast conference. The future seemed bright.
The postdoc in London started out well, but somewhere along the way it all began to unravel. The lab head decided to move his lab to America eighteen months in, and she didn’t want to go back. She moved to the Netherlands for love and joined an exciting start-up company. Four years later the venture went bankrupt and the dream seemed over. Unemployed, the novels started pouring out of her as if she was possessed, but she couldn’t find any lab willing to gamble on someone on the dole. Eventually she accepted that the road had ended, and went into scientific publishing back in London, the only place that still felt like home. Many years later she found her way back to academia, and after a few false starts, found the line of research that finally clicked.
Fast-forward to now, and she is well-established, enjoying the culmination of all her dreams. Maybe she has never been happier, caught in the confluence of having the right team, sufficient funding, the perfect experimental system, the ride-or-die friends and collaborators, the international standing, the few years’ distance from a toxic situation that nearly broke her and – after two decades at the university – the proleptic appointment that has finally given her career security.
So many infection points, so many agonising decisions – but in the end it all came out right.
If only somehow had told her, early on, that it would. That no decision is the wrong one, that an infinite number of paths lead to happiness.
She probably wouldn’t have believed it.
