Your Family Will (Probably) Never Understand; A Retrospective Study of Thanksgiving Dinner Conversations
A retrospective study in a type of study where you look back at existing records and data and try to use statistical methods to draw conclusions from that patterns in that data. They are generally not as powerful as experimental studies designed to answer a specific question, but are still extremely useful, especially in medical science. In this study, I will be looking back at the last week as I spent time with my family for the holidays.
I come from a reasonably well educated and in general highly intelligent family. Although I believe I am the first person in my family to pursue a PhD, you would have to go back several levels of my family tree in every direction to find a first generation college student. My kith and kin include small business owners, teachers, cafeteria managers, electricians, meteorologists, and my mother was trained as a microbiologist; just generally smart people. Given some time, I can sit down and explain my research to them. So, when I say "your family will (probably) never understand" I'm not saying that your family can't or won't understand the substance of you work. Of course, for some families and some lines of work that could certainly be true (plus there's always that one aunt or uncle in every family who is certain your degree will be useless no matter what it is). No, what I mean is that unless you come from an academic family, no one is going to really understand what you do on a day to day basis. Graduate school is a strange half-way point between being in school, and working. I refer to being in the lab as "being at work." It's how I think of it. It is my job. The work I do is why I am paid a stipend. But especially right now (in my first year) I am also taking classes. I have homework, I have exams. I have all the traditional "student" things going on to. It is my observation that anyone who hasn't juggled this sort of split situation, and especially anyone who works a typical sort of job that you can leave behind when you walk out the door doesn't understand how graduate work can and does spill over into other aspects of life.
This was driven home to me this week while I was out to dinner with my uncle and a couple of family friends. See, I brought home a couple of papers I need to read. One of them is background material for my current rotation, and the other two are papers related to something I want to learn more about. My parents brought up how I had spent most of the morning with nose buried in journal articles and Dave, our family friend looks over as says "you have homework at your job?" I explained that my classes were almost done at this point, and that this wasn't really "homework" but it was something I was reading so I had a better understanding of the state of my field he said, "oh so this is just something you're doing cause you're interested in it," and effectively dismissed my reading as just some little side project. At that point I just let it be because I was tired of trying to explain, but it struck me then that as long as they thought in terms of "student and homework" vs "job that stays at work" no one in my family would ever really understand that my job IS to read and understand the recent developments in my field so that I can apply that new knowledge to my own work. That this "just for my own interest" reading is one of the core aspects of my work as a scientist.
You will occasionally here people say of students (usually high school or undergraduates) that "learning is your job right now" and usually they mean that as a way to encourage people to work hard and to prioritize their school work of social and entertaining events. The thing is, right now, learning really is my job. It's actually a part of what I'm paid to do. But because no one is assigning me specific things, because no teacher is saying "you are responsible for this material" somehow that idea goes right out the window. Because I have the added responsibility of finding and choosing the things I need to read and learn, somehow that is no longer a "job" in the minds of other people, it's just a personal project. I don't know whether to describe it as more of a Schrödinger's student situation, or as Schrödinger's job1.
Setting aside something as simple as readings, I haven't even tried to explain things like getting publications, posters, and conferences, or worse yet, grant funding. How even though my work is supported through the graduate school whether I get training grants or not, that I need to get training grants both to bring money into my lab so we can do more and better work, and also to advance my own career prospects going forward.
Maybe I'm being defeatist, or maybe right now I'm just frustrated and tired, because even though I love science communication, even though I pride myself on being able to break down what I do to a level anyone can understand, right now I feel like no matter what I do or how well I explain it, no one in my family will actually understand what it is I DO on a day to day basis, what my work involves and what worries, cares, and responsibilities I sometimes bring home with me.
This is probably not an experience that's unique to grad school. I imagine a lot of you who do something that is very much outside your family's realm of experience deal with this too, but it definitely a particularly frustrating aspect of the grad school experience. Most people know what it means to be in school, and know what it means to have a job, but it's tough when you're in between those boxes, and your support group doesn't quite get it.
And that's my depressing holiday diatribe. Until next time,
Be well and always look at the data,
Faxe MacAran
Twitter: @TheMacAran
1) This is a reference to the apparently paradoxical Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment wherein, through the vagaries of quantum mechanics, a cat is described as being both dead and alive at the same time. This video is a good explanation of both what that is, and why it's important.
I come from a reasonably well educated and in general highly intelligent family. Although I believe I am the first person in my family to pursue a PhD, you would have to go back several levels of my family tree in every direction to find a first generation college student. My kith and kin include small business owners, teachers, cafeteria managers, electricians, meteorologists, and my mother was trained as a microbiologist; just generally smart people. Given some time, I can sit down and explain my research to them. So, when I say "your family will (probably) never understand" I'm not saying that your family can't or won't understand the substance of you work. Of course, for some families and some lines of work that could certainly be true (plus there's always that one aunt or uncle in every family who is certain your degree will be useless no matter what it is). No, what I mean is that unless you come from an academic family, no one is going to really understand what you do on a day to day basis. Graduate school is a strange half-way point between being in school, and working. I refer to being in the lab as "being at work." It's how I think of it. It is my job. The work I do is why I am paid a stipend. But especially right now (in my first year) I am also taking classes. I have homework, I have exams. I have all the traditional "student" things going on to. It is my observation that anyone who hasn't juggled this sort of split situation, and especially anyone who works a typical sort of job that you can leave behind when you walk out the door doesn't understand how graduate work can and does spill over into other aspects of life.
This was driven home to me this week while I was out to dinner with my uncle and a couple of family friends. See, I brought home a couple of papers I need to read. One of them is background material for my current rotation, and the other two are papers related to something I want to learn more about. My parents brought up how I had spent most of the morning with nose buried in journal articles and Dave, our family friend looks over as says "you have homework at your job?" I explained that my classes were almost done at this point, and that this wasn't really "homework" but it was something I was reading so I had a better understanding of the state of my field he said, "oh so this is just something you're doing cause you're interested in it," and effectively dismissed my reading as just some little side project. At that point I just let it be because I was tired of trying to explain, but it struck me then that as long as they thought in terms of "student and homework" vs "job that stays at work" no one in my family would ever really understand that my job IS to read and understand the recent developments in my field so that I can apply that new knowledge to my own work. That this "just for my own interest" reading is one of the core aspects of my work as a scientist.
You will occasionally here people say of students (usually high school or undergraduates) that "learning is your job right now" and usually they mean that as a way to encourage people to work hard and to prioritize their school work of social and entertaining events. The thing is, right now, learning really is my job. It's actually a part of what I'm paid to do. But because no one is assigning me specific things, because no teacher is saying "you are responsible for this material" somehow that idea goes right out the window. Because I have the added responsibility of finding and choosing the things I need to read and learn, somehow that is no longer a "job" in the minds of other people, it's just a personal project. I don't know whether to describe it as more of a Schrödinger's student situation, or as Schrödinger's job1.
Setting aside something as simple as readings, I haven't even tried to explain things like getting publications, posters, and conferences, or worse yet, grant funding. How even though my work is supported through the graduate school whether I get training grants or not, that I need to get training grants both to bring money into my lab so we can do more and better work, and also to advance my own career prospects going forward.
Maybe I'm being defeatist, or maybe right now I'm just frustrated and tired, because even though I love science communication, even though I pride myself on being able to break down what I do to a level anyone can understand, right now I feel like no matter what I do or how well I explain it, no one in my family will actually understand what it is I DO on a day to day basis, what my work involves and what worries, cares, and responsibilities I sometimes bring home with me.
This is probably not an experience that's unique to grad school. I imagine a lot of you who do something that is very much outside your family's realm of experience deal with this too, but it definitely a particularly frustrating aspect of the grad school experience. Most people know what it means to be in school, and know what it means to have a job, but it's tough when you're in between those boxes, and your support group doesn't quite get it.
And that's my depressing holiday diatribe. Until next time,
Be well and always look at the data,
Faxe MacAran
Twitter: @TheMacAran
1) This is a reference to the apparently paradoxical Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment wherein, through the vagaries of quantum mechanics, a cat is described as being both dead and alive at the same time. This video is a good explanation of both what that is, and why it's important.
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