I told y’all there would be multiple iterations of this…

I can’t believe I am already at the point where I can say, “I will be taking my qualifying exam next month!” Time moves so fast. It’s hard to keep up.

I have been feeling like I’ve been in a really good place. After returning from my family vacation in early July, I had solidified my Specific Aims page and gotten the thumbs up from both my mentor and the University’s writing consultant. For those of you less familiar with academic research and research grants, the Specific Aims page is considered to be the *most* important page of any grant that you submit. So, it needs to be really, really good if you hope to be funded. Following my qualifying exam, I will be transforming my qualifying exam document into an F31 application (an NIH Trainee Fellowship Grant that will look stupid good on my resume and help pay my salary)…aka I really hope to be funded off of this document 😂 Thus, I need my Specific Aims (and everything else) to be really, really good! 

ANYWAY, it seemed like as soon as I got my Specific Aims page in really good shape, I was back in the throes of heavy experimentation. I was working long, tireless days. Every day. And early mornings too 😭 I’m not a huge napper, but one night over the weekend I slept for 11 hours and still took a 3 hour nap the next day 😂 And then did the same thing again the next day. Just to highlight how exhausted I was…

It was that same weekend (just last weekend) that I looked at my calendar and realized that my document is due to my committee members in exactly one month. (You submit your document 10 business days prior to the oral exam). Anxiety immediately set in. I had felt like I was in a good place, and then suddenly I felt behind. I was never a huge procrastinator until graduate school. Taking those two years off of school really did change me…

We had our lab meeting two days later (my boss is in Indonesia right now, so she only knows what I tell her) and I told her I’d get her a draft by the end of the week. This really put a fire under my butt to get things moving. It was exactly what I needed, but it was also really, really stressful. In my head I had thought I would be able to send her a complete draft, but I quickly realized that simply would not be possible. This made me more stressed, but I worked really hard to get as much done as I possibly could. Though I didn’t get everything done that I had hoped to, I realized, there really was no point in waiting to send this draft to her. I have questions that need answered, and having them answered now would be a lot more helpful than it would be a couple weeks from now. 

I messaged her that I would send her whatever I had done early the next morning. I feel really lucky to have a boss that I feel comfortable sharing how I’m feeling, even if it might reveal that I’m not being as productive as she might hope I’m being. (My boss has high expectations of her mentees…but it is because she really believes that we can achieve them 😊 Sometimes it can feel like a lot of pressure, but, truthfully, it means the world to me that she has so much confidence in me. If she believes I can do it, I know I can). So, I told her something that I thought was very profound…I really cannot think of a better way to describe how I’m feeling right now: I’m feeling stressed, but I’m not worried.

Essentially, I’m feeling stressed because I do have a million and one tasks to be done, between writing my document, reading papers, preparing my slides AND analyzing all that data I just collected, analyzing other data I have sitting ready to be looked at, generating new data etc., etc.). BUT, I’m not worried, because I know I can do it. And this week really proved that to me. This week my 8-week experiments have come to a close, and I finally felt like I had a moment to breathe (and actually get a good night’s rest). And, would you believe that once I had time and energy to do the work I needed to get done, that I was actually able to do it?? And do it well?? I’ve always said this (because I do truly believe it), taking a break is productive. The work that I did after taking some rest was probably both better quality and quantity than it would have been had I pushed myself past my means.

I sent my incomplete draft to my boss and she was impressed and said that I have done a lot. She was able to give me helpful feedback so that as I continue adding to this incomplete draft, I can do it more accurately (and thus, save both of our time and efforts). If you know my boss, you know she loves a good motivational quote or metaphor 😂😂 (I already know I’m going to tease her for this when I defend my thesis…heck, I already do tease her for this during lab meetings 😂). So, naturally, she sent me a few quotes: “Things are difficult before they get easy” and “There is no substitute for hard work” …finished with “You are doing an amazing job 👏” 

I don’t know how she does it, but she always knows exactly the right thing to say. No matter how stressed or behind I’m feeling, she always finds a way to make me feel better – a few months back when I was dealing with some personal things, I had warned her that I might cry during my 1:1 meeting with her…I ended up giggling so much during that meeting and walked away feeling so loved and supported. And even while being approx. 9,908 miles away right now, she has done it again!! One of my biggest goals of graduate school was to become more confident in myself as a scientist and as an individual. It is thanks to amazing mentors like her (and all of my amazing colleagues) that I feel like I have been able to do this. I do not thrive in a competitive environment. I do much better in a supportive and collaborative environment. Though graduate school and life in general can get difficult, I am so, so happy with my decision to come here. Work is honestly one of my favorite places to be 😂

I’ve still got a lot of work ahead of me in these next few weeks (and beyond), but I am confident that I can do it. And I’m confident that I can do it well. I can’t wait to see. 😊