I woke up, somewhat nervous. It was a warm, April Saturday. Typically my PhD adviser had not invited me for meeting outside of work. Much less on a Saturday. I decided to wear a grey button down shirt, black jeans, and suspenders. I had recently had some idea that I should start wearing suspenders, that suspenders would some how establish my hipster identity, and that today of all days was the day when I should get started. I thought maybe I should look nice, and recently I had decided to get out more, so I decided that I could go walk around the city after my meeting. Walk through the forests that populated the city center, or the Saturday flea markets, or maybe just sit in a pub and enjoy myself. I had earned it, I had done nothing that week to work towards my PhD, but I had convinced myself that the emotional labour I put into my PhD was enough. I deserved a weekend. I arrived at the cafe and my PhD adviser was already there. I could tell he wasn’t exactly happy with me, I had known this for some time. For whatever reasons, we didn’t get along. He wanted this of me, I wanted that of him, and we never seemed to see eye to eye. I still attempted to produce research, but it always felt like the wheels were spinning and the car was never going anywhere. But mud was everywhere. But it wasn’t my mud. In that moment I was sure of that.
It’s not working out, I heard my PhD adviser say. Maybe if I had spent more time building the software library, but the software library hadn’t been built. Maybe if my focus on research had found some profound result the lack of production on the software library wouldn’t had been such a big deal. It didn’t matter that I had built three different versions, nobody was using it and so it had been a failure. And so far the spatio-temporal variability of the power law distributions I had been calculating were less than profound. They were mostly boring. We both seemed to be at a loss as to how to publish any of this work. My PhD adviser let out a deep sigh and sat quietly thinking of what to say next. It wasn’t working, something needs to change. We both knew that, but to be honest I wasn’t ready for what came next. That was April.
In January of the same year, prior to the April meeting, I attempted suicide. It’s kind of a funny story, I don’t really think about it as being a big deal. I tried hanging myself. But I didn’t really put that much effort into it. I had thought about it and did some kind of trial runs and this one I decided would be the real go for it. I would hang myself with a belt from my loft bed. I thought, what better way to do it than to do it on purpose, knowing that I could just end it all because it was my choice, not because I had set up some contraption that I couldn’t escape. Now it seems so silly. First, I can’t believe I was ever in the mindset that I could leave my dead body for my poor roommates to find. Not that they wouldn’t recover, but still, what a lack of empathy for the people around me. Second, science is not THAT important, and there I was, hanging from my loft bed from a belt around my neck, hoping that my vision was actually getting dark from the sides and it wasn’t just my melodramatic nature, creating a cinematic vision. I’m pretty sure it was just melodrama. Sometimes when you think about memories you think, is this even really what happened? Have I told myself this story so many times I created a fiction? It is a slippery slope to thinking you have no right to feel anything at all.
After hanging there for a while I got bored waiting to die. It’s so ridiculous, I got bored with my own death! The whole plan was that I would have the will power to see myself through, but so far this plan had made it easy to circumvent. So I got myself down and sat wondering what to do next. My neck was rather sore but I knew that if I just sat in the house I might as well die. It was still January and too cold to simply go for a stroll. So while mindlessly scrolling my email on my phone I noticed an email for a meetup.com group for karaoke that met on Saturdays in the city. Thinking, “why not?” I walked out of my flat and went straight to the train. Well, I got a beer on the way. It’s nice to live in a country that lets you walk on the side walk with a beer. I recommend trying it out. I sat on the train with my beer wondering if I would talk to anyone at all at this karaoke thing but at least I was out of the house. Trees turned to houses which turned to town homes and apartments and rivers and bridges as I crossed the city on the train.
A frown crossed my advisers face. Maybe this just wasn’t the topic for me. It wasn’t that I was dumb or incapable, it was more that I seemed unhappy. That I didn’t seem like I even wanted to do the work. That there seemed to always be something that kept me from progressing and maybe that something was under my control. But it seemed like, I came to work every day and opted not to take control. At the time I blamed my adviser for not “advising”. Why didn’t he tell me what to do?! But I think I he did a really good job of trying with me. He introduced me to multiple colleagues who might have projects more closer to my computational interests. He gave me a lot of opportunities to travel to work with colleagues at other institutions to try and find new problems that could engage me. I simply did not want to be engaged. Cats are often times quite playful and curious, but then they have some sort of anxiety, and suddenly your hand is the enemy. I was a cat.
The karaoke bar was across the street from the train station. Basically no effort from my door to this karaoke bar. My kind of travel. No transfers, direct, almost mindless. Easy street some might call it. I quite like karaoke. In the good old days of a different research community, I had quite enjoyed going to the annual conference simply because they had a karaoke night. You could show up to a karaoke bar and perhaps 150-200 other people from the conference would be there. People would sing all night long. There would usually be dancing. And at some point a physics professor from the south west United States would get up and sing the national anthem of any country you could think of. He had memorized them all phonetically as a hobby. It was quite welcoming. I think in retrospect the social hierarchies of that community were quite complex but on karaoke night, it seemed like no matter how people thought about what, everyone could meet at the karaoke bar one night a year and have a good time. Ironically, that was because it was organized by someone who balked at the hierarchy and wanted to bring people together. I saw karaoke as a kind of safe space away from hanging by the neck from my loft bed.
I think you should stop your PhD. The tears inside me were almost overwhelming. My dream was to become some kind of intellectual. A PhD was my ticket. Without it how could I prove my worth? My dreams were about to be snatched away from me. How could he? How could he not see that it is not my fault? I excused myself to go outside and scream. I knew, no matter how much I wanted to scream at my PhD adviser, if I did so, that would be it. I would never escape that. So I went outside. It took a moment to calm down, however, when I composed myself I decided that no matter what, I was going to convince my adviser to give me one more chance. At the very least because I was so afraid that if I lost my job, I would also lose my visa, I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent, and I would probably get deported with no money. That scared the shit out of me and I didn’t want to live it.
I came back in and sat down with resolve. I can do this PhD, I heard myself saying, we just need to make a plan to recover it. We are only at the halfway point, I can recover. I heard myself agreeing to whatever was being said. These plots, those analyses, I would and could do them. Just give me time. In retrospect, I was already planning my escape. I knew I wouldn’t get to the end of the PhD, I didn’t know how to get there, I didn’t even see where there was, but I did know that I could get to my next paycheck. So I worked out some rudimentary plan to recover, to re-evaluate in six months, to increase my performance and stop dragging my feet. I could do this, I promised.
Walking into the karaoke bar I checked my coat. I had actually shown up before the main event. The karaoke bar was both an open style karaoke, where you sang in front of strangers, and an Asian style karaoke, where you rented individual rooms with your friends. The meetup was supposed to take place in the open style karaoke which had a full stage, but no one was there yet. In fact, the stage wasn’t even ready. They asked me to wait in the front for a minute while other people started showing up. There is a moment between when you start a conversation with a person you don’t know, and when you first see a person you want to talk to. You sit, in that feeling of loneliness, of scariness, wondering if you will actually talk to anyone at all tonight. Or maybe you will just sit here by yourself and never do anything. Then, suddenly, you are thrust into a conversation with someone.
In that cacophony of loneliness your eyes meet with another person and you both realize you are there for the same reason. To meet new people, to push out of the static and connect with others. To form a bond, even just for the evening chatting about your lives or nothing in particular. Samantha smiled a big friendly smile filled with straight, white teeth. She was much smaller than me with thick, straight black hair, horn rimmed glasses, and dark eyes. Samantha had grown up in Taiwan and had moved to Europe to do a bachelors degree in Economics. We began talking because we simply were the first two who showed up to the event. She reassured me, don’t worry, she was there to meet another man, but she had a friend, Jennifer, who will come later and I would get along with her. Jennifer was Japanese, studied both mathematics and political science, and therefore more intellectual than Samantha according to Samantha. Samantha flashed me that big smile again and then went off to find her friend. I sat wondering if I would ever meet this Jennifer when suddenly the music started and I felt pushed into the amphitheater. Someone was already on stage singing a rather good version of I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston. That someone was Jennifer.
Back at work, I did the best I could do, while also finding the way forward. I talked more openly about the difficulties I had been having in my PhD with receptive colleagues. I applied to about a million jobs in the city. I had a few interviews but no offers however I think ultimately those jobs would have been a mismatch for me. At least who I was at the time. I knew that I needed something different. Before this PhD I had worked on how students clicked on videos, interacted in online courses, and generally how online education was evolving over time. Discussing with someone I knew from then, he told me about a PhD in Norway that I should apply for. It would be on a similar topic, predicting when students drop out using machine learning, and I could start over. Begin anew. I applied and was accepted and left for Norway.
It’s amazing who you meet in life and how they change you. After singing, Jennifer found Samantha who introduced her to me. Jennifer was skeptical of me. She was uninterested in listening to me complain and mostly she wanted to discuss other topics, or at least, push me in the direction of self assessment. Jennifer was obsessed with the song Hold On Loosely by 38 Special and spent a lot of energy trying to convince me this could be a new way of life for me. Jennifer wanted me to see my life was my own and I should do something about it. We spent most of the night at karaoke discussing one thing or another and made a plan to go out a week later. We became fast friends. I think I was quite happy to have someone outside of my PhD program to talk to. Jennifer even came with me the day that I told my adviser I was quitting. She waited for hours outside the office for me to get through those difficult conversations just so I wouldn’t have to leave and be alone afterwards. It is quite amazing how important friendship is to survival. I suppose she enjoyed the conversation. And probably the melodrama. We remained friends for years before drifting apart. Lives get busy and friendships are hard to maintain across national borders, even in the information age. And sometimes the people we need we only need for that moment.
Ultimately, it was the best decision to drop out of my first PhD. Later that year I moved to Norway. Upon arriving in Norway I decided to take Jennifer’s advice. I sat down and wrote out all the reasons I may have caused my first PhD to fail. I didn’t seek solutions I described problems. I discussed people instead of ideas. I was afraid. I let my fear drive my decision making. I was defensive towards criticism. I was afraid my lack of knowledge would be found out. I vowed to change. I decided that I wouldn’t let my second PhD go the same way as the first. I would be different this time around. I would not be so afraid. I would focus myself towards my goals and lose the negativity. I also tried to think about the lessons my first PhD adviser tried to give me that I refused to learn at the time. Always search for a win/win situation. Write the thesis of your idea first, then see how it fits with your result, i.e., challenge your ideas with your data. Be patient and kind with your words. Be understanding even when the other person is not.
It worked. My second PhD created years of positive memories with others. I had a blast with a group of people in a place I never knew was possible. I got to work across disciplines in a manner that was way more suited to who I am as a person and a scientist. And I did a lot of science along the way. Of course not every moment was perfect but I felt like I had found a moment in life where I could be me and discover who me was. Those moments can be fleeting, don’t miss them. Years later, my first PhD adviser found me at a conference and told me that he was proud of who I had become. That he always knew I had it in me, but maybe it just wasn’t the right time the first time around. This story doesn’t have a real ending, it is just life. But maybe it is an interesting story to someone.
John Aiken has a PhD in physics, is editor-in-chief of low impact fruit, mayor of rainy-city.com, a Recurser, and passionate about saving the whales. The story told here is autobiographical, incomplete, and happened almost ten years ago. Currently John lives in The Netherlands, happily hacking away at various problem spaces usually related to computers.