Dreams at the edge of a long winter

On Thursday I finally passed my comps exams and advanced to candidacy. It was the single scariest moment of my life as a student. But it is behind me now, and I can continue forward.  I had never really thought about what else I should do if I didn't pass, because I put all my eggs into this PhD basket, and there was no Plan B. Grad school is a huge investment in time and effort, and the pressure to succeed is enormously stressful.  I had invested six months of preparation, including three months of rewrites, and it was beginning to erode my heath and self-esteem to the point where I felt it would make or break me physically and mentally for the rest of my life.

To try to ground myself the night before and calm my fears, I prayed. I'm not religious, but it's funny how people turn to the idea of higher powers when we're most afraid. I recited a prayer that I heard in the 1970 movie: "Little Big Man." If you're not familiar with the movie, I suggest you see it. Soon.

It's a story about a white boy raised by the Cheyenne in the frontier days. His adoptive father, the chief of their village, prepares to face death by reciting a prayer, the first part of which inspired me to recite it at sunset, and again at dawn:

Thank you for making me a human being! Thank you for helping me to become a warrior! Thank you for all my victories and all my defeats! Thank you for my vision and for the blindness in which I saw further!

With increasing dread, I had only just started to think about Plan B. What if I don't pass my comps? How will I ever have the energy and will to face it again? If I can't hack it, where do I go, what do I do?

The warrior's prayer made me see that defeat is honorable.  And, when defeat is allowed to be an honorable part of life, suddenly all choices in life become valid, all are equal. All are good.

I began to see real options: One, just stay put and keep on working. Two, take a semester off and then resume afresh. Three, quit grad school and go do something else. I had many reasons not to pick Number Three. But it became a good, valid choice once I allowed myself to realize that nothing--nothing!---is worth sacrificing your health for.

By putting my own heath at the top of the list, it gave me the freedom to choose to opt out. On the morning of my comps I was prepared to face the day and accept whatever outcome lay hidden before me.  I know that I stumbled a few times during the exam. But I also know that I answered other questions well.  I may not be the most brilliant grad student that ever faced a dissertation committee, but I love my project and I work very hard.

I had to go out in the hall for the committee's deliberation. While trying to eat a bagel that I couldn't taste, I looked out the window at the snow and the trees and told the Universe that I accepted whatever happened from that moment forward, and I would still do my best to be happy.

And then Donie came out and gave me the thumbs up. I almost couldn't believe it. It was like I suddenly lost a thousand pounds.

And then twice in the same day I had champagne. Really nice champagne. Donie and her husband threw a little party for me in their office that evening. And later that night I shared another fancy bottle with my neighbors, who brought food--and jello shots. I'm not from the jello shots generation, but I'm beginning to realize jello shots are just as important as a good bottle of bubbles.

And finally, at the end of the long week, while splitting wood in the yard it struck me that man, I have it made in the shade. I have a great project where I get to study the Arctic and live in a beautiful little house in the woods where I can see moose and the aurora from my couch, I have good friends and neighbors, a great graduate advisor and committee, and a nice big pile of firewood.  It may not be somebody else's dream, but it's really what I want right now. Where it will all lead is not yet known to me, but I am thankful for the uncertainty.

I LOVE my school!

The Croissants of Shame

[compiled from several emails sent today]

Hi Everyone,

If you were following the news a couple hours ago you heard that one of our fellow students took his own life on campus.

The Newsminer gave the student's age: 48. By that definition, whether he'd heard of us or not, he's a non-traditional like us.

We all know how stressful student life can be. Especially at the end of the semester and the end of the year--when the fun weather and darkness sets in along with the projects and tests and grades and all that fun sh!t.

I've been reading all semester for my comps. I took my writtens the week before Thanksgiving. I got feedback from a couple of my committee members, and successfully got through some rewrites before the week was over.  On Tuesday of this week I went to take my scheduled oral exam. I got there early and sat outside the conference room for a half hour. After what seemed like ages my advisor finally came out and told me that the committee decided I wasn't ready to take the orals, because some of them were not satisfied with my written answers. 

I was completely shocked.  It was all I could do to hold back tears.

In hindsight, I should not have been subjected to that. I should have been contacted beforehand by each person who felt a rewrite was in order. Well, Thanksgiving week came and went, and blah blah blah. It (and I) fell through the cracks.  It really sucked. I spent $ on breakfast items for them, I had to request an outside examiner weeks before, and the poor fellow showed up just to have his time wasted. Worst of all, my advisor had emailed all my friends the day before to announce that she was throwing a big party for me (with CHAMPAGNE!) on Wed night to celebrate my advance to candidacy. She had to email them all back and explain why the party was being cancelled. That REALLY sucked--now everyone knew!! And so I went home in tears with my bag of croissants, and wondered whether I should continue being a UAF student or just give up and fling myself and the croissants over the Goldstream Creek Bridge.

Before I left campus that day, however, I met with the members of my committee who were not satisfied with my written answers, and we discussed the issues. They gave me a framework for rewrites.  I just sent rewrites to one of them a little while ago, and I am in the process of rewriting for the other. 

If all goes well, I should be able to reschedule my oral exam for early January.

Sounds easy. But it wasn't.  I was doing everything I could to hold it together. My advisor had hugged me and apologized. It wasn't her fault.

That poor student. I know how he felt. I came close. [I didn't tell anyone about that part]

When I got home, I sat in my house and cried for hours. I didn't eat or drink or light a fire, and the house got cold. I thought about driving up the Elliott Highway some ways past Fox and pulling over and just walking out into the snow. I thought about the thirty thousand dollars in loans and scholarships that would need to be given back. And I thought about my Dad, who went to college on the GI Bill after surviving the final campaign through Europe during WWII. I emailed him and he called me; we talked for over an hour.  

When something like this happens, it's not good to internalize your feelings. It may be embarrassing for others to know, but holding back the pain can seriously damage one's health and prevent us from going forward, which is what being a student is all about.

My advice to you guys, if this should happen to you, is to keep your chin up.  Also, don't harbour angry feelings. Faculty are human, miscommunication happens, holiday weekends happen, and sometimes everything comes together to create the Perfect Sh!t Storm of Humiliation hitting you, the student, in the face. Allow yourself one day to scream your head off, cry your eyes out, eat Ben n Jerry's, whatever [my Dad's advice]. The next day, get up and do your student thing as usual. Day by day it will get easier.  I talked to my girlfriend in California (a UC Davis non-trad) and we ended up laughing about my croissants of shame which I ended up giving to my neighbor's sled dogs (that felt good). The day you laugh again, you will be out of the hole.

I'm not saying you will be the way you were before. No. You won't ever forget it, and certain things may trigger bouts of tears for a while. But (my Dad again), you must let go of the bitterness. 

If you continue to feel resentment it will poison an otherwise awesome education opportunity that you worked so hard to be part of. And I'm sorry to say, it can poison your whole life from that day forward. 

If you want to use this group as a forum for this kind of support, please feel free.This group is whatever you want it to be. We all have a voice, we are all in charge. And I wish this group to be a safe place to fall for all of us.

OK, so I had my horrible experience on Tuesday. Today I am feeling much better. Writing this, I am feeling much better.  It helps to let it out. University is meant to stimulate our curiosity and develop our intellectual skills, and I often feel I learn more from my mistakes than I ever could by doing something "the right way" which, remember, is often subjective and consensus-based. By that logic I ought to be a frickin' genius by now, but oh well...

Albert Einstein's teacher supposedly told his father that the kid was an idiot who would never amount to anything. (and they didn't have Title IX back then when Einstein was a college boy...)

We all know student life is peer-oriented and can be very judgey and cliquey.  You can't stop someone from judging you negatively, but remember, judgments like that are fear-based, and very different from the constructive criticism that shapes a student into a critical thinker, a skilled writer, an impassioned and highly skilled doer. In the culture of academic excellence it's easy to feel inadequate, and the quickest ego boost for low self-esteem is to look down our noses at someone else. But don't forget that you are individuals.  Nobody can place a value judgement on another person's individuality. What you have is unique and irreplaceable, it's really your hard currency. Each one of you struck me as a kind of maverick when I first met and talked to you. This is what is so interesting to me--perhaps that's why we're all in this Non-Trad boat together!

So continue to be the awesome Non-Traditional mom/dad/grandparent/soldier/community leader/artist/mountaineer/philosopher/engineer mavericks that you are. And make friends with some sled dogs just in case you need to ditch a wasted committee meeting breakfast in a hurry :-)

And please have a wonderful break.

Your friend,

Diane

Last weekend before comps...

OK, I'm ready. I think.

Ogodogodogodogodogod!!!!!!!!

Have you ever felt like a toaster in a cheap suit surrounded by a room full of robots?

This New Yorker cartoon spoke to me. It seemed to be saying: Look Dee, IT'S YOU!

toaster= idiot

cheap suit=what I buy from Value Village

robots=graduate students

You will see what I am getting at.

OK, I am a graduate student, so I guess that makes me a robot too. After all, a toaster is a type of robot. It's a machine programmed or otherwise wired to perform a certain function with a certain amount of accuracy. Robots like the ones above, however, are supposed to be more sophisticated and autonomous, with complex circuitry that allows them to do lots more things than simply make toast.  Although the humans in Battlestar Galactica tend to refer to their robots (called cylons) pejoratively as toasters.

So far nobody has accused me of being a toaster.  Or a cylon (I wish!). What is my point here?

That graduate school is challenging. That sometimes you feel out of place and out of time, like a machine built in the last century (which I was), and you wonder what made you decide to forgo having grandchildren and letting yourself go for a life of papers, classes, teaching, statistics, grant writing, data entry, seminars, grading papers, and the ubiquitous departmental social gatherings? and all this in addition to the lab and field experiments. For most of my life I WAS a humble toaster--I did the same job day in and day out, boring as it was, and knew little else, but it paid the bills. Now I'm in the world of the sophisticated machines, the ones with the big circuits and complex functions.  I'm not saying it's all bad. But it's approaching midterm and I'm pretty well tired at the end of each week. I sometimes forget what day it is. I even sometimes forget to make myself toast in the morning.  The other day I nearly got in the car wearing bike gear. If my helmet hadn't smacked the door I might have driven off to school and gone to class dressed in bike shorts. These are the kinds of things mothers with small children are prone to do. I feel for those moms, for they are the ones that have to divide their brains into 18 thousand compartments to remember all the little details of childcare and logistics and such.

Add to that I went for an annual exam and my doctor recommended I get a booster shot for tetanus because I'm around other students all day. This shot was not just for tetanus, it was more like a vaccine cocktail for several different diseases (diptheria and whooping cough--wasn't that supposed to have been eradicated along with TB and polio way back when?). By the end of the day my arm was sore like I had pitched nine innings straight. Next morning the pain had spread to my upper back and shoulders, making turning my head and generally moving about difficult, so I cancelled all my appointments and stayed home on the couch. I went to bed thinking a good night's rest would help. This morning I woke up feeling like I had been run over by a truck. Vaccines are supposed to protect you--why do they nearly kill you in the process? I decided it's because I'm getting older and, perhaps, a bit more frail. I dislike that word, frail. It makes a person sound like a little wafer--thin to the point of being transparent, and unable to survive for long outside of a protective container. So I decided to stay inside my protective container another day. By this evening the mack truck feeling has dissipated, I'm far less sore, but it represented a setback for me. Graduate school is like a treadmill--you slow down or stop and you're on your ass before you know it. Finally this evening I had the strength to grade some papers. And, I found out I had left out some details I should have gone over with the students on Tuesday. Oh, well, it's not a major problem. But. With my frail toaster brain, I worry that I might miss things an average robot would have caught.

But the fact that I got most of it right must mean that I'm an above-average toaster.

"Now then, baboons—what is a corpuscle?"

"That's easy. First there's a captain, then there's a lieutenant, then there's a corpuscle."

 

May, I mean June

Hmmm, haven't posted anything in a while. I've been Really BUSY! I've peered into four hundred little green gardens. That have now turned into mold/fungus gnat gardens. I'm trying to count ungerminated seeds by looking at pinches of dirt under a microscope. It's a bit like flying over a plane crash. Bits of black, twisted stuff everywhere, not much is recognizable, there's no life.

For a contrast there's the seedlings which are growing nicely.

Well Joe just called, he's back from Toolik so I gotta run!!

March Madness!

We hit the ground running after we got back from our trip to Santa Fe/Chicago.

I had signed up for greenhouse space at the UAF greenhouses to begin my germination experiment.

The 70 or so samples I collected last summer were washed into sieves to capture the seeds and exclude rocks and roots, and then poured into 400 little plastic pots all lined up like soldiers whose mission is to test the seedbank (seeds in the soil) of native tundra that has experienced two types of climate-change linked disturbance: wildfire, and ground subsidence caused by melting permafrost (known as thermokarst).

I figure there's a chance the disturbed areas could favor seedling germination compared to intact tundra, which is just so crowded with plants all jockeying under the midnight sun to suck up what nutrients they can. The tundra of the Low Arctic is considered a type of green desert--think of the moors of Wuthering Heights--yet during that brief summer it does a tremendous job storing carbon as the plants capture CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into roots and shoots. Then the long cold winter sets in, and what has died stays frozen for a long time, accumulating layer after layer like a really disgusting version of a Baskin Robbins ice cream cake made of the partially decomposed remains of carbon-based life. A changing climate can potentially transform this cake into an oozing mess, whose seething surface will then spew all that CO2, along with gobs of stinky methane, into the atmosphere. But life has a way of trying to persist, and along the way, any number of things can happen. One of the things I'm interested to know is if some of this melting is just enough to favor the germination of certain types of seedlings. Why should this make any sense at all, in a world of hotter summers, longer autumns, brutal winters, and earlier springs characterized by stormy weather? One of the things noticed in the last 50 years is that the tundra is beginning to resemble something less like a golf course and more like a vast thicket of bushes. So how come the bushes are winning? The current wisdom focuses on the story of increased nutrients released by the warming soils as the hungry microbes process more and more nutrients all snug and insulated under thicker blankets of snow. This could be very good for the bushes, especially the ones that have made it this far. More bushes trap more snow, which could make the microbes happy to release yet more nutrients--to feed yet more bushes. That's where I come in with my brilliant idea (said rather dryly): the tundra is like a green mat, and the scars formed by the ground subsidence and the fires can act as openings in the mat to let new generations germinate in that warmer, richer environment. And if the babies don't make it, perhaps the bushes just push into those warmer richer pockets and clone their way across the tundra.

That's the hypothesis anyway. Not only will I be testing for babies, I also have a plan for screening for the rise of the clones.

So, without knowing whether I'd be accepted to the PhD program at UAF or not, I plunged into my seedbank germination experiment, committed to watering and surveying the contents of these 400 pots for the next nine weeks. I have seeds from remote parts of Alaska's North Slope that have experienced some dramatic disturbances in recent times: the huge Anaktuvuk River Fire of 2007, and a few lakes near Toolik whose shores have gullied and eroded through the melting of the subsurface ice. What's important is that I need to compare the seedbanks of these disturbed sites to nearby undisturbed tundra, and though I have seeds from a couple of areas in Anaktuvuk that did not burn, I need to sample a couple more undisturbed sites close to the thermokarsted lake shores in order to really be able to test the idea that disturbance favors the bold (seedling, in this case).

(cute lil' seedlings found in pieces of tundra recovering from the Anaktuvuk River Fire during the 2011 vegetation "pluck")

Long story short, I've been acting like I'm already in the program. And then I got my letter of acceptance.

I got in.

I got IN! I'm starting in September.

Me—a PhD student? Is the Universe cool or what? People have begun to call me “Doctor Dee.”

I guess this means I have to walk the walk now. But for now, I'm watering my pots, and have spent the last two weekends working my butt off preparing these pots (with the generous help of my dear husband and our next-door neighbor Helene), followed by a weekend of nonstop partying with Simon, Chris, and their friends and dog mushing clients. I met a really cool Kiwi couple on holiday who fell in love with the Alaska mushing scene and invited Joe and me to come visit them, and two really cool Norwegian gals who are heading to the White Mountains for a six day trip.

(went to ice alaska on friday)

Last night it was square dancing in Ester, followed by beers at the Golden Eagle until 2:30 am. I don't know where all this energy has come from. But I definitely feel things have shifted. For awhile I was feeling like I would never find anything beyond the job at the lab, which pays the bills and is a good learning experience but was not something I intended to do forever. And just as the routine was beginning to get to me, my application came through. So things will be different. I will continue in the lab doing much the same as I do now, but my position will be as an RA and not as staff. The rest of my time will be my own, for doing my work, writing grants, attending classes, etc etc. It reminds me of what it was to be an art student, but with more structure, without sacrificing creativity. I just hope I can find out something cool about tundra seedling recruitment in this changing world, and I hope at the end of it I can say I was happy to be a flea standing on the scientific shoulders of the giants.

As if to illustrate this last point there is a fungus gnat in the living room trying to fly up my nose....