Things that are on my mind (Part 1: boys & career)

1) HB

I leave for Chicago this Wednesday to visit HB for almost a week and for his sister’s wedding. We talked pretty extensively last night for the first time in seemingly forever. We laughed the hardest when we joked about how to introduce me to his relatives at the wedding. He might say something like, “This here is my friend. We’re just friends, and you may never see her again. But yes, we’re staying in the same room together at the hotel.”

I told him that I like him well enough as a person, but can’t manage to look past the things that bother for me to consider him seriously as my boyfriend still (I never did say boyfriend anyway, even at the beginning). He got a bit defensive again, asking why things like misspelled words and lack of tech-savviness would be such big deals to me.

So I finally broke it down: those aren't that big of deals, but they are just the symptoms of the underlying problem, which is a big deal. I told him that I can’t get past how differently our minds work and how he doesn’t measure up in the ways that I’ve always use to judge people around me. I told him that I've been trying to see his talents for what they are worth and to remind myself he is good at things that are unconventional to me, that I need to see value in new things that were never on my radar before. But I haven’t been successful in that quest and honestly have a hard time assigning value to the things that he considers himself to be good at.

I guess that was my euphemism for “I don’t think you’re smart. We don’t have to be smart in the same way, but I need to see worth in the ways that you are smart. And right now, I just see nothing.”

He didn’t understand my implied message, and I didn’t want to burden him with a blunt accusation right before he gets on a 13-hour flight. We both debated whether I should just skip going to Chicago altogether. I said that my reasons for still going are 1) to see if things would be different in person, but I don’t have high hopes of this being the case, and 2) honestly, I want to fuck. He said he understood that we’re not really together anymore, and he’s seen that for a long time, and he’s gotten himself to a place where he can “take it or leave it” with regards to the relationship. He’s sad that I see us as just friends, and he wishes that weren’t the case, but he also hasn’t asked me to not come to Chicago because he wants to fuck, and we fuck so well together. So, honestly, that’s great. I’m glad everyone is on the same page, and that we’ll be getting busy in Chicago.

2) Broadway:

I broke down and emailed Broadway mid last week. I’d been having more and more doubts about our breakup, especially as things with HB got worse and worse. (To answer GH’s question on the last post, no, I don’t generally have a pattern of going to a new man in order to escape from old ones). I think in this case, I realized that no one is perfect, that I will have conflicts with anyone I date. It’s a matter of how much I am willing to work with the situation and in some sense, how much I’m willing to “settle.” I’m not 18 and idealistic anymore that there is ONE prince-charming out there who is perfect for me. There are many people whom I can work with as long as the fundamentals are in place and I stay true to my values.

So in that sense, Broadway was good on many of the major fronts. I need someone I can consider my intellectual equal. I need someone I can count on. I need someone who doesn’t need babysitting. I need someone who will care about me no matter how hard I am to deal with. I need someone who can solve problems with me, and not create problems that I would need to solve. Broadway provided all of that. What he lacked were certain social graces (I was always embarrassed by how long-winded he could be, especially at parties when some unfortunate soul mistakenly asks him the slightest question about his research), social confidence (these two are probably related), sexual passion (he had a healthy appetite for sex, but just didn’t know how to show it and to effectively engage me sexually), and lack of optimism about life and the world. I don’t need someone to tell me everything is great about the world, but Broadway was full of cynicism and took that to the other extreme and thought everything was dark and grey.

I emailed him to ask how he was, and to give a rundown of updates in my life and how I’m working to improve myself lately. We’ve been emailing a bit back and forth, sometimes serious, mostly cute and jokey. I’m contemplating asking him to sit down and talk, where I would propose that we give things another shot, but with a greater emphasis on open communication and on going to couples therapy to work on the things where we clash. Visiting HB in Chicago definitely complicates this, and is partially why I haven’t asked Broadway to sit down yet.

3) Job search:

Started seriously job-searching a couple of weeks ago. It’s taking a lot of time and just overall causing all kinds of stress due to the general vagueness and uncertainty of looking for a job. I’m plagued a lot by not knowing what I really want to do. I know I don’t want to keep doing research the way that I’ve been doing it in grad school. Understanding basic science is not enough incentive for me on a daily basis to be motivated enough and to be productive. I need to see more immediate real-world applications in my work. So I thought I might enjoy science policy and went to Beijing for 6 months to do climate change policy (science policy AND the environment! What’s there NOT to love?). But in the end, it was a ton of fun to be in Beijing, not so much fun doing the policy work. It was a lot of report-reading and report-writing, and at least in the environment I was in, not a lot of teamwork. I need more hands-on, field work type of work, and in the absence of that, I need to be working with a lot of people. I honestly felt claustrophobic in front of my computer screen all day, every day, and none of the excitement I thought I’d be feeling working on something so important and so relevant.

So I went back to looking at careers in science industry: pharmaceuticals, consumer products, startup biotechs. The problem with science industry is that I don’t have the science credentials. I don’t have pages and pages of publication records to show off what I’ve done in grad school (in fact, what I’ve done in grad school is to avoid my research as much as possible). I do have a lot of pretty substantial leadership experience and of course all my policy stuff (I also interned in a prominent Senator’s office doing healthcare analysis at the peak of all that healthcare reform stuff). My advisor claims these provide an image of a well-rounded scientist, good for my intended trajectory of a managerial path in science industry. The recruiting company reps whom I have talked say similar things. However, when it actually comes down to granting me interviews, nobody does, and that's really upsetting.

They tell me this is what they are looking for, that so-and-so company hire the *whole* person and not just the scientific experience/training. But then, why can't I get interviews? I feel like they look through my resume and still can't see past the relatively sparse science credentials and decide they would rather go with a "safer" candidate who excelled in grad school. So now I’ve also added consulting to my list of companies to pursue. They claim to value leadership and soft skills and really only see scientific training as analytical training. I feel like a sell-out, applying to consulting firms. I don’t like trying to talk-the-talk in a suit, and I'm still a nerdy scientist at heart. But I’ve gritted my teeth and gone through with it, written the coverletters, submitted the resumes. Lo-and-behold, the first firm I submited a resume to granted me a first-round interview. I have to do it over the phone because I'll be in Chicago later this week, but that's better than any of the science industry positions I've applied to. I’m just sad that I can’t get past the screening process to get interviews and be the scientist that I came to grad school to be.

4) Graduating:

This has been a hard hurdle for me all along. I didn’t think hard enough about the types of projects I wanted to be working on when I started grad school (and not sure I thought hard enough about whether or not I actually want to go to grad school period while in college). So I’ve been stuck in a rut for a long time, for maybe as long as the past four years. I recently met several times in near succession with my advisor, who is great at extracting the big picture from things. We managed to come up with something that could salvage the work I’ve done so far into a thesis. I have one last set of experiments to run to test a set of hypotheses predicted by some computational work I did after getting back from China, but I have maybe 20% faith that the hypothesis will test out to be true. I’m not sure what will happen the other 80% of the time.

I’m now entering my 7^th year in this PhD program (granted I took off those 6 months to go to Beijing), and that’s just demoralizing in general. I’ve been doing the SAME THING for 7 years. I need to get out of here and move on. Despite that feeling of panic and of needing to get out, I can’t seem to wake up in the mornings with enough motivation to get myself to lab and thaw cells and set up assays and run experiments. My motivation needs serious help.

Other things I’m thinking about coming in Part 2 (frisbee, friends, my knees, groupons)