Siliceous and Delicious

The PhD has had its downsides and its dark days. To quote from an email I just got from an old friend:

It seems that the more people I know who are doing PhD’s (and it’s a lot), the more woeful stories I hear. I’m starting to think that a lot of the crap that people have to go through during PhD’s is kept kind of hush-hush; once people get the degree they’d like you to think that it was all easy.

It’s not going to be easy, and as much as my expectation of what it would be like differed from what my experience has been so far, I never thought it would be easy. But I think I’ve let the disappointments and frustrations of the last year lead me too far down the road of negativity, and I think at the end of last year I found myself in an intellectual and emotional cul-de-sac: I was so convinced that nothing would work out, so enveloped in my disdain for the activity of research, that—unsurprisingly—nothing worked out. In the course of the many conversations I had with family and friends over the holidays, I learned one thing, because I heard myself saying (and meaning) it over and over again, rising above the rather plentiful advice firmly in the “well-meaning but unhelpful” category: I do want to finish my PhD. I’m not going to drop out. And given that I want to finish, I must be convinced that I will finish. And since finishing requires research success, I must also be convinced that I will be successful. And however much evidence I have to the contrary, I do think that a positive, optimistic internal narrative is going to serve me better on the road to graduating than constantly focusing on where things haven’t worked out.

So this is where I want to steer this blog over the coming months: besides continuing to be the mundane record of my research activities and lab notebook of sorts, I want to use this as a forum to practise the art of visualizing my own research success, by focusing on the positive aspects that come out of my daily work. And by illustrating how each day, with its inevitable frustrations, fits not into a pattern of failure, but a framework of success. This sounds like the sort of fluffy and touchy-feely crap usually confined to the self-help shelves of the bookstore, but I am frankly tired of being sick of my work. If I am going to graduate, then I’m not willing to suffer through the next year and a half to two years like I’ve suffered through the past months—I want to enjoy them, and I want to feel successful. So, quite simply, that’s what I’m going to choose to do.