It was not easy to start this letter, as I had a hard time identifying something that is worth writing about. I belong to the lucky ones who never had serious money issues, never had to become a caretaker, and never had themselves physical or mental health problems necessitating chemical intervention.
It becomes easier if one considers that the letter writing project is not a competition in suffering or losses, not a book of grievances, but rather an honest project in which each writer reflects on the difficulties that they have encountered along their academic path. In the end, maybe all of us can identify, in the diversity of situations that are described, the signature of common, systemic problems. For all of us who are writing letters, this means we will feel less like competitors and experience instead solidarity. At least that is my personal take on that initiative.
Most of the days, I love science and I hate my job. This creates in my working life a permanent mix of confusion and anxiety, due to 1) a loss in self-identity and 2) a deterioration of what I would call my “core initial scientific values”. This is what I will talk about in the paragraphs below.
A couple of months after I started working abroad, a global pandemic forced all labs to shut down. I remember clearly what my skeletonized social world looked like during the recovery phase. Two friends, that I would meet without a mask. My family was far, and my relationship did not survive the move abroad. The next one would not survive the next move either.
COVID placed many of us in situations of forced exile and confined solitude. In times of crisis, the support that an individual can get depends on the level of institutionalized care and on the strength of their private networks of family and friends. Access to both is drastically reduced when one lives in a country that is not their own.
I have lived in three different countries and worked for four different universities. International friendships are very special, and I am glad I get to know so many people from different cultures. However, I can’t really reach the level of intimacy I expect since most of my international acquaintances are also my work colleagues – a direct consequence of living abroad and spending a lot of time at the workplace. Next to a co-worker, the relationship that needs to be preserved is the professional one, so I try to present a smooth surface. I simply can’t invest the same amounts of trust in my social circles than ten years ago, and every passing year I feel socially more brittle.
As a young adult – which is still how I see myself despite having hit the wall of my thirties – I feel that my identity has shattered and fragmented along the successive disintegration of my friendship networks. I am also unable to get in touch with a society that is not my own scientific institute – because of ivory entrenchment and language issues.
The increasing confusion I have experienced as a young scientist does not just stem from my loss of self-identity.
Along the years, my relationship with my successive advisors took an ambiguous split. As a PhD student, I felt most of the times they were there to train and mentor me so that all of us can publish together (and I would get a diploma, in the end). The postdoc drastically changed that dynamic. My advisor was still supposed to be my mentor, but they were also my employer, which meant there would be days where I was asked, as an employee, to perform tasks not directly related to my research (helping with the inventory, pre-reviewing thesis and papers for my advisor, etc…). I was often afraid to get fired. When the university closed because of the pandemic, I was called in by my advisor, very formally. I thought I was getting fired because we were running out of funds. It turns out it was only a very formal “good bye, let’s say in touch, I hope we can re-open the lab sometimes”. I went home and stayed there alone for three months.
On other days, the employer-employee dynamics would be less apparent. I would be left completely independent, with the freedom of an unsupervised scientist, accompanied with a lot of generous words regarding support to my own ambitions and scientific career. I never knew which role I was supposed to play: human carpet or independent thinker? I would have loved to see expectations, if there were any, clearly stated.
At that time, I still needed to get training and mentorship, but I was left alone to figure out the science, while still bearing the responsibility of the failure. I entered a vicious circle in which I started hoping I would get some mentorship if only I could get my advisor interested in the project. To do that, I applied the “when in Rome, do as the Romans”. My colleagues had lived for a longer time under the Roman rule, and I noticed that during lab meetings, they tended to present beautiful pictures with exciting narratives that re-employed language elements previously introduced by my advisor. This attention capture was necessary, because the meetings one would get with my advisor were rare and short. During those meetings, I felt like hitting a wall constantly. I was unable to communicate to my advisor what I wanted to do. Was it because I was not able to express myself correctly or because my advisor refused to listen?
As I was getting lost, unable to find the necessary peace inside of me to do my work calmly and steadily, I tried to emulate an ersatz of success. At the bottom of the pit of the impostor syndrome, I thought maybe I could fake success and get away with it. I became cynical, then disgusted by a game I did not know how to play. I lost my ideals about science. I felt like it was still ok since everyone was doing it – it being authors on a paper they have not contributed to, reviewers who are not acknowledged, or reviewing papers from collaborators and competitors. I entered a gray area in which I started compromising with my own scientific and ethical standards. I mean by that “showing representative images” in lab meeting which are instead the best images of my dataset. I mean setting up and running all the analysis pipeline two days before a meeting to get a graph without carefully checking the accuracy of the detection, tracking, and plotting. I also mean hiding my doubts about the experimental design and not showing the control experiment that was mildly convincing. Then I realized the control experiment was not negative anymore, and I could not figure out why, and I did not inform my advisor. At that time, I had lost touch with reality and started thinking that any experimental result could be sold as gold if one could find the words to link it to hot research (it is not completely true, as it depends also on the integrity of the reviewers and editor).
The gray zone can be, by definition, hard to delineate. It is smeared from principles that are initially included in the scientific contract. Let’s look at the necessity to communicate scientific work to the rest of the community, so that results can be used for the common good. Does it have to become an unashamed self-publicizing trend?
Back then, and still today, when I want to open my mouth to complain about those things, there is a second voice inside of me who tells me to grow up. I don’t know where to stand, because clinging to ideals might be too romantic, and at the same time I feel this pragmatism without barriers is just a complete internalization of ultra-liberalism and modern capitalism.
It is a slippery slope, to believe that becoming an adult and a mature scientist implies this kind of compromise with scientific ethics. It is easy to look around and decide that to survive we must be secret and cunning and know the right people like the others before us. I have also met around me established scientists who are generous and honest, and not just looking for their next human ladder.
Three years ago, I was drowning, and I did not know where to ask for help. It took me one year and a half to realize I could get peer-mentoring outside of my lab. I had gotten on the wrong foot in there, but outside there were many other young scientists, PhD students and postdocs, who were willing to open about their difficulties and provide advice. I was afraid of competition or of sounding dumb but most of the time the only barrier was scientific language. Where people were patient and willing to have a conversation, I felt like a scientist again. After I recovered a bit of self-confidence, I was able to start fresh with the help of some faculty members. And I did new mistakes and was met with frustration, etc… up to the day of today. However, I think something improved along the way, because I don’t believe anymore that all the apples in the basket are rotten.
I am still in a state of perpetual confusion and in need of good therapy. I don’t know if I will still be in that business in two years. I don’t know if I will be in Dresden, or back to my home country, or moving to somewhere else. I hear and see, every day, words and attitudes that are not about producing solid and interesting data or learning, but about trading commodities or showing productivity. I don’t know where we are going. I don’t know if we are in a phase of decadence in which we will watch the world burn while talking about abstract problems. I don’t know if some brilliant philosopher or sociologist won’t write tomorrow a theory to bring us to a different state of science-making. I know nothing.
A post-doc in Dresden