Humanities brain and thrownness
"You have humanities brain," a student I previously mentored in the lab told me.
I didn't take that as a compliment or an insult, more of an observation. And it sort of summarizes how I have felt during my graduate studies.
I'm in my sixth year of a PhD in a STEM field. It's been a long road for me, just like for any doctoral student. And as it's been approaching the end for what feels like an eternity, I can't help but reflect on how I stumbled into this. I haven't my scheduled my dissertation defense date yet, but I know that it will take place by the end of this spring — a relieving albeit scary thought.
I'll start from the earlier days: My parents stopped being able to help me with math and science homework when I was in third grade. I did very well in school throughout my adolescence but never with any penchant for a particular subject besides foreign language, which I still believe to be the case. I learned in high school that I loved all subjects — except economics.
I did fairly well in my STEM courses. But I wasn't accepted into my school district's fancy center for math and science, where those who performed the best on an entrance exam at the end of middle school had the opportunity to study amongst their similarly gifted peers for half the school day in high school.
I still took AP STEM courses. I got a 3 on the AP chemistry exam. I fared a bit better in AP calculus and biology, but I definitely was not the cream of the crop in either subject. German and history were more my style.
Nevertheless, I ended up being a STEM major in college. My parents never pressured me into any area of study. Sure, my mom often suggested during my childhood that I become a doctor because of money and all that. In reality not only were such suggestions not too serious, but to be quite frank my parents also had no idea about how academia works. My mom never really worked, and my dad worked in a company that makes interior car parts. I don't hold that against them; it simply is what it is, so they did not steer me toward or away from anything. Honestly, maybe that was a blessing.
Maybe deep down the prospects of a better salary swayed me toward STEM. I can't say for sure. Science always intrigued me at the very least.
Regardless of my conscious or unconscious gravitation toward my major of choice, let me tell you: I struggled. Granted, my university was challenging. Plus, I went to public school and was all of a sudden surrounded by students who attended fancy prep schools I previously had not fathomed. Not to mention I am a first-generation college student and was raised as an only child, meaning no one in my family could have helped me brace for what was to come. It wasn't until my third year or so that I learned how to properly study. My college transcript had its fair share of C's.
One of the reasons I chose my alma mater was its focus on all the subjects. I did not want to be restricted to STEM day in, day out. To this day I am grateful to have regularly interacted and even befriended those who majored in the humanities and social sciences. Without a common curriculum that would have been a lot less likely.
So, at least I had a breath of fresh air every once in a while. My major was important to me in college, of course, but I looked forward to my German courses. And among the best classes I have ever taken in my life was on film theory; one of the films we dissected became one of my favorites of all time. I loved spending an entire day in the library writing essays on what I was reading in my non-STEM classes.
In second year the idea of working in a lab occurred to me. Before then I kind of thought that I wanted to go to graduate school, yet I had only the vaguest understanding of what that even meant. A lot of people at my university wanted to do that though, so obviously it was a good idea, right?
I think I was really influenced by my closest friend in college. We were in the same major and suffered a lot together. Her parents both had PhDs, and she started performing undergraduate research practically the moment she stepped foot on our campus. Soon enough we were discussing not only homework and lab reports but also our research experiences. Then graduate school applications. It was like I was being indoctrinated into this through her and others in my major: Working in A Lab? Did my parents even know what that meant? I liked science, but did I like it that much?
Somehow we bonded despite our different backgrounds, and I really appreciate that. I had the chance to see her for the first time in five years when I visited her city in November, and it was wonderful to reconnect. Today I find myself wondering if my path would have differed if not for her.
Anyway, though my profile was not as great as hers, I managed to snag a few acceptances as well. And after somehow surviving my major, I was headed to graduate school.
I remember being excited but also a bit nervous, taking things a bit more seriously than I should have when I started. I moved to a new city all by myself. I remember renting a car by myself and crying when I said goodbye to that close friend of mine when it was time for me to leave the apartment we shared.
All the typical challenges of being a PhD student aside, I found myself after only a few months longing for breadth as opposed to depth. I was supposed to do this for how many years?
Everything is new and exciting in grad school for the first two to three years. Then it gets stale real quick. I missed reading things that had nothing to do with STEM. On a positive note, this is one thing that inspired me to start reading for pleasure in my free time again. But it was still difficult for me to dedicate myself so much to my niche topic at the expense of other things.
I was soon under the impression that a lot of my peers, many of whom were my age or close to it, didn't seem to care for any other academic subject even in the slightest. Maybe you're reading this now and thinking I sound like some sort of intellectual elitist, but I like to think I'm not. In hindsight my suspicion was probably not fully correct but not entirely wrong either: after all, we all signed up for this, intensely studying a niche topic for at least five years. Of course you're going to talk about something that dominates your life.
Instead I came to some realizations over the past couple of years:
I get "science'ed out" much more easily than others in my department. Personally, I prefer to get my work done as soon as possible so that I can get away from science in my free time. Otherwise it's overwhelming.
I don't think I'm actually good at or at least not meant to "do" science. I much prefer analyzing the data and writing about it; sure, I can follow a protocol and not make any mistakes. But running around setting up experiments and tending to them often torments me.
I don't like to feel pigeonholed into a specific area for very long. So, focusing on something very specific for 40+ years is not my cup of tea. Granted, some of this is unique to the PhD experience, and life as a professor or even a postdoc is a bit more freeing. But my point still stands.
It became clear to my advisor and my coworkers that I am more gifted in the tasks that the stereotypical scientist likes to avoid: reading, writing, and making presentations.
I have allowed myself to stop being bothered by that, thankfully. And I know I'm not a special snowflake; after all, stereotypes are stereotypes, and there's some other PhD student out there who feels like I do. Though I do sometimes wonder if sacrificing over five years of better pay and who knows what else has been worth it for me though. I don't hate graduate school, but I do sometimes feel a bit out of place. I also have never personally identified as A Scientist; rather, I am someone who does science. Not sure how healthy that is, but I've made it to this point in one piece (mostly).
I don't like to think I have purely humanities brain and that my colleagues all have purely STEM brain. Surely there are some people out there who probably identify that way, but I think all of our brains a bit more nuanced than that.
Instead, I think I have an I-like-all-subjects-except-economics brain. It's funny that that's more or less what I thought a decade ago, and here I am circling back to that.
I still don't know entirely what I will be doing after this. This meaning my PhD program. Everything is so uncertain that I'm living my life a week at a time. But in the long term I am sort of designing my more long-term career around this I-like-all-subjects-except-economics brain I have, or at least trying to do so.
I think these thoughts like to linger in my brain because I very easily could have been someone else entirely. It's only by random chance that I grew up in the United States and not Russia (or some other country), and it's almost frightening to think how different my path could have been if not for very small yet meaningful details. I guess I couldn't end this pool of thoughts without something akin to Heidegger's concept of Geworfenheit, or thrownness. And I guess everyone — not just me — has to grapple with their existence having been thrown into the world, somewhere and sometime.