Tag: This is Rachel

Guide to Graduate School Grief

Hi friends.  I’m glad to be back in this space.  I hope you enjoyed reading Meridith’s life update last week.  While we all have our own struggles, my year has been particularly difficult.  This is your warning that I’m going to talk a lot about death and grief, so if you’re not in the place to read about that, I totally understand if you bail now.  I’ve bailed on a lot over the past 365+ days. But, bailing out means keeping your boat floating, and, with lots of help, I’ve managed to do that too.

“To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.” –Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

I want to write about this, in the imperfect way I am able, because I know it will help someone else to read it.  Maybe you? We know that graduate school is uniquely difficult on folks’ mental health. I want you to know you’re not alone.  If this isn’t you, but it is someone you know, I suggest you start thinking about the support you can offer. This twitter thread is a great place to start.

I want to want to write about my brother specifically, but I can’t do that yet.  The short version is this. Last summer my older brother, Jake, was in a car accident on the way home from work.  By midnight on the day of the accident I was flying home to Kentucky. After nine days in a coma, my brother died.  

I want to write this to talk about my own experience over the last year as someone grieving as a graduate student.  I want to talk about the things that helped me and the ways that this type of pain gets mixed up in the head of one anxious, highly driven person.  I don’t intend this to be prescriptive. I know everyone’s grief and grieving processes are unique, and you don’t have to be grieving a death to have some of these things resonate with you.  I formatted this as a list of dos and don’ts, but there are no dos and don’ts.  There is no way to do this wrong.

I thought, in the hours we spent planning the funeral, that when this was all over I would want to write everyday. But, as the weeks passed, I felt my grief like cotton stuck in my throat.  I want to write about this because I think it will help me too.

Guide to Graduate School Grief (to be taken as loving insight with the full knowledge that only you know what is best for you)

IMG_2897

Continue reading “Guide to Graduate School Grief” →

User Guide for Grad Students Worried about the End of the World

Note: I originally published this article in the 4th volume of The Brickyard, the graduate student publication edited and put together by a group of folks in the UC Davis Grad Group in Ecology.  You can find a link to that publication here, and the article below is largely the same.  I’ve made a few minor changes and conjugated the title in a more pleasing way. I hope you like it!

IMG_0443 

On the fourth day of the new presidential administration, I got an email from my funding source saying they didn’t know if the money would keep coming.  I knew the attitude toward science would shift with the change in power, but I never expected such concrete impacts to my life within the first week.  When my paycheck did come two weeks later, I knew I had to change my approach.  I wanted to feel I was working to make things better, and if I experienced a near miss, it’s almost certain someone else had taken the hit.  Like any good type A personality, I knew what I really needed was a plan.   

I read a lot of think pieces, I talked to a lot of folks I respect, and, in the end, I developed an approach that felt right for me.  I offer you my own guidelines now, not as prescription, but as an attempt to empower you to make a plan for how you will approach the coming years.  Interrogating my own motivations and priorities was emotionally taxing, time consuming, and frustrating.  Inventorying my special skills required grappling with imposter syndrome for the millionth, and I’m sure not last, time.  I still haven’t gotten over the daunting size of the issues we face, but as Cairns and Crawford once wrote, “It is almost too late to start, but tomorrow is even later.”

——— Continue reading “User Guide for Grad Students Worried about the End of the World” →

This Blog is about My Life (#acutallivingscientist)

Last year, maybe October, I was listening to an episode of the She Explores Podcast.  The guest spoke about the role of social media in her work in a way that really struck me.  The analogy was basically this:  social media is a window into our lives, and we control the size of that window.  People want to peek in, but if you make the window too big, you might make folks uncomfortable.  If we make the window too small, it may fail to serve our purposes.  I’ve been walking around with this tidbit in my shoe for months.  How big is my window?  Have I made it too big for online platforms I strive to keep more professional (Twitter, Tumblr, this blog)?

Then, last week, two Twitter hashtags caught on pretty much simultaneously.  #DressLikeAWoman was born in response to an anonymous leak claiming Donald Trump likes female staff “to dress like women.”  (Whatever that even means.)  #ActualLivingScientist was started by Dr. David Steen, reportedly in response to a 2011 survey reporting 66% of Americans can’t name a single living scientist.  Obviously, I adore both these things.  First, I love it when the ladies of Twitter clap back, but when lady scientists join the fray, I get extra pumped.  Second, I love how folks in the #ActualLivingScientist feed distilled their work down to a single tweet.  It’s good practice for learning how to communicate our ideas outside of our own community.

rachel-tweet

Yesterday, it clicked.  The coupling of these ideas represent why this blog is so important to me.  If I ever made my window too big, or the only reason I even made a window, was so folks would know what it was like to be a scientist.  But more than that, Meridith and I wanted people to see what it was like to be young, to be in graduate school, to be a woman, to be from the south, to be frustrated, to be uncertain, to succeed.  I’ve always said that Sweet Tea, Science was a science lifestyle blog.  I stand by that now more than ever.  We are actual living scientists, and these are our lives.

Continue reading “This Blog is about My Life (#acutallivingscientist)” →