mote-in-a-sunbeam

[mote-in-a-sunbeam]

i actually kinda like it when a character getting better includes them becoming weirder and less polite and more confusing and strange. no more "domestication" i wanna see the weird guy be weird!!!

[mote-in-a-sunbeam]

On a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam: PhD candidacy

I wrote this in the last week of September and thought it should now see the light of day.

So finally, I passed the PhD candidacy exam. Apparently, only 0.001% of the human population is capable of passing this exam. So, even in the beginning, only 20.8% of applicants get accepted to any PhD program and then only very few make it to candidacy so I feel okay that I passed this exam. However, deep down, just before I gave it, I wished they would fail me so that I wouldn't have to stay in academia (read: this department) anymore. I hoped that, finally, I would have a reason to leave this university and try to be happy. The entire process of writing this paper was excruciatingly isolating, sleep deprived, dark, and felt like I was marinating in a sauce that was made of inadequacy. I wonder if this is a structural issue, as if this university is designed in a way that fosters loneliness and burn out, or if it is defined by my character trait of doing everything I can on my own before asking for any help. I'm learning to grow out of this behavior because I used to think that asking for help is a sign of weakness/ignorance/thick brain but now I know that, in some aspects, I'll always be ignorant and it's okay tell someone "I don't know the answer to that" or "I need your help". My old behavior kind of reminds of something Dostoevsky (allegedly) said: "Walk on your broken foot and leave no trace of your hand on anyone's shoulder."

So, anyways, the barebones of my paper took shape in February or March of this year. Along with all the coursework I was taking, I worked on my paper slowly. Then, I had to give the retake of my first-year preliminary exam in June, which took another month of preparation. Eventually, I was in the final stretch of working on this paper, completely fueled by cups of Colombian coffee, instant noodles, and power naps with Stata running in the background. Despite working on this idea for so long (since February), the paper took shape at a breathtaking pace of two lines per day. The time period I worked on it was fine I think because I've heard people work on a single paper for about 10 years. And presenting the paper was also fine. However, I guess the isolation that comes from working on it all by yourself, the not-so-niceness of receiving rejections from the people reading the paper, and the exam requirement of "discovering something new" took a toll on me. I'm sure I didn't discover anything new. If anything, I found something so minutely novel that the novelty is negligible. And one of the criteria to pass the exam was showing that my paper made a "novel" contribution to the literature and "selling" it convincingly, with intelligent arguments. Technically it worked, but it got me thinking what's the point?

Thanks to thinking so much about the "meaning" of it all, I went on an abnormal number of walks during that time, trying to clear my head. The more I walked, the more meaningless everything I did seemed. I'm not saying the whole field is useless - definitely not - just the project that I worked on and more importantly, the school that I worked in. During this time, I noticed that imposter syndrome had become a constant companion.

I'd stare at my laptop screen for hours and hours, staring at the winking cursor, willing the words to come. But it felt like my brain was grimy and spotty from lack of sunshine or something. Even the peeling paint of my apartment walls seemed to mock me, "This is what six years of higher education has gotten you – lack of vitamin D and crippling self-doubt." Despite all this, I sincerely enjoyed reading papers, doing research on methods, running regressions, and plotting pretty graphs with R, and thinking about new hypotheses to test, and questions to work on in the future. I just had no idea if what I was doing was the right thing or if it was important enough and no one to guide me through the existential neurosis.

I spoke to one of the professors in my department after my qualifying exam presentation, and he said, "the time you spend working on one paper is the time you can spend working on another, better one." Well, ex-ante, how do you know if the paper you haven't even started will be better or not? If we think about it --- partly, the solution to this is to present the paper in many places, discuss it with peers and colleagues, and see what they think but if the reaction you get is that the paper isn't good then you've wasted the time regardless. And we're also assuming that they'll rationally evaluate the work we're presenting. Humans are humans. I've noticed in most conferences, the audience ask questions because they want to show off that they're capable of critical thinking, and some presenters on the other hand find it so hard to admit that they don't know the answer to something at the worry of looking stupid. (Side note: One big takeaway from the last two is I've gotten so comfortable looking stupid and accepting that sometimes I really don't understand certain concepts and that's okay because I have a whole life ahead to learn it.) And along with this, there's so much urgency, unnecessary intensity - is someone going to scoop my work? Will this paper still find a place in a journal when I'm done? A good one at that. And the reception of a paper or lack thereof is directly tied to a person. If the paper is a flop (say right question wrong timing), it kind of translates as hmmm bad researcher. And if you can't replicate the results, the original author of the paper gets a red card. Fraudulent practices. I'm totally in support of replication though.

Another piece of media that kept me going through the futility of it all while writing - Carl Sagan's the pale blue dot we call home speech. It gave me a perspective of what I was doing compared to the grand scheme of things.

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. ... Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark."

But also - I see posts on Reddit that go along the veins of "I get a livelihood from reading papers, could life get any better?" Here, I want to quote R.F. Kuang (author of Yellowface, the Poppy War) who passed her own PhD qualifying exam last year, in her Substack, she writes and I agree with her... to an extent: "Graduate students like to complain about how miserable we are. Still I have chosen to spend my life - at least this part of my life - in academia, and I am high on the discovery that despite everything I really do love it. I just love to know things. I love to stare at something I do not understand, and throw my mind at it until it clicks. I love to feel like I am on a dark spinning plane and bright shiny ideas are in orbit around me. I love to sit in a room with smart people and listen to ideas ricochet around the room, transforming, picking up speed. I love leading discussion sections. I love watching my students grow as thinkers over the semester. I love this work we do."

I know for a fact that I'm not going to publish in American Economic Review or win the Nobel Prize. And sometimes I see papers highlighted on Fermat's Library I think " wow, you need the eyes of God to see proofs like this and even ask such questions in the first place". And then I think about my work, my field - Financial Accounting? I seriously shouldn't have chosen this field. (If someone asks me if you could go back in time, what would you change? I have an answer to it now. I'll choose Applied Econometrics or Applied Industrial Organization and steer far, far, far, far away from Financial Accounting) Anyways, Financial Accounting and my paper now feels like it's just a hundred suspicions that were in fact put together as a hypothesis and everything unimportant. Barely anything good. It feels kind of wrong to call this "professional work", for some reason. So, all these ruminations and thoughts ended up culminating in the decision that academia this University is not something I want to be a part of - academia, yes; this school, no. And then, I was at peace. For my qualifying exam, I put together a decent version of my paper, went to my defense on pure adrenaline - a gallon of coffee and a KIND bar. I presented my work in a large room with four professors and one external faculty. And suddenly, I was so nervous that it felt like my chest was on fire and I was too out of it to remove my fleece jacket which could've made me feel much better or cooler at least. My presentation was supposed to be just an hour but ended up going until ninety~ minutes. I got asked questions from all corners of the room and then I flew past the last few slides, saying "I see that I'm out of time, let me briefly go over the results of my supplementary analyses and robustness checks." After that I left the campus on the shuttle, came home, ate a bowl of leftover rice from the previous day and fell asleep. Then I went to Barnes and Noble to just get my mind off the presentation I gave earlier that day, the adrenaline was palpitating despite the fact that it'd been hours. I sat under an umbrella table and started reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. Then right at that moment, my phone pinged with an Outlook notification.

A simple, plain email "The faculty have reached the decision give you a Pass." Officially a PhD candidate. Yay! 🎉 (derogatory) And I thought, oh well. Life. There were times and circumstances when this moment felt like a dream and were days I'd prayed for.

So, I'm trying to feel proud now, triumphant. But mostly, it's just a mix of confusion and nausea. Despite working on a topic I liked and passing a difficult exam, I very much hate my work - kind of like burning your favorite book. It represented everything about this school that made me feel jaded and disillusioned: the ridiculous hoops to jump through, the crushing alienation, the constant grind with so little reinforcement, and the battle royale for crumbs of validation.

Anyways, when I started writing this, the theme I aimed at was humor, maybe self-deprecating one at worst but now this is a full blow existential crisis on paper. Quelle surprise. I'll stop my rant here and continue with Intermezzo.

"Pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam - Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. On a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." - Carl Sagan

────── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ──────

Some months of the PhD was excruciating and put me on a self-destruction-suicide-ideation mode. Sort of reminding me of this Tumblr post: self destruction really is such a fascinating human response to various factors both external and internal. what if sisyphus could leave at any time but kept rolling the boulder up the hill just to watch it roll back down anyway. what if he kept pushing it even as the rock cut into his palms and his legs began to ache with the desire to rest for even a moment and his body became a canvas of bruises and cuts that never have time to heal. what if he did it because it's the only thing he knows how to do. the only thing that gives him a sense of certainty and control in a world that takes both and offers neither. [here]

So, in those days, a few people unknowingly brought sunlight and easiness. My many heartfelt thanks to them: Callie, Cathy, Huijhong, Kang, Liz, Mei, Pavithra, and Zeyu.

To the professors who encouraged me and helped me explore questions out of my comfort zone: Heikki, Giulio, Josef, Lisa, Jeanine, Nese, Greg, Robert, Ron, and Paul.

Blessings have always outweighed my troubles so I'm thankful to my grandparents.