My father is a scientist at an organization that is located inside the campus of India’s best University. I spent my childhood within the campus grounds of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay… which means I grew up in a campus filled with India’s brightest minds. I went to a high school that was also located within the campus and had really smart kids. All my friends were annoyingly smart. Everyone did well in school.
I, on the other hand was pretty phenomenally shit at school. And I mean it when I say ‘phenomenally’. I got an E- on my fifth grade Math exam. (I was so bad my grade was closer to a musical chord than a grade.) I’m not entirely sure what the saving grace was that pushed me to grade six. I have a suspicion it may have been English. I was good at English which was probably because I used to sneak out of bed and watch movies all night long. I would mute the TV so that my parents didn’t wake up and I read subtitles for movies a 10-year-old should probably never watch.
I rarely studied for tests. I mostly doodled behind my notebooks (which was great for my art skills today). My parents were constantly worried and told me how the other kids in the building are getting better grades than I am. Like that would somehow make me want to study more. No one ever told me why I was studying what I was studying and why it was important. No one in my high school seemed to care about how cool it is that scattering makes the sky look blue. Everyone seemed to care about how many marks you got for answering the question on Rayleigh scattering. I didn’t. So, I was pretty shit at school.
I think the first time I felt motivated to study was because I wanted to impress a boy. A cute boy in class asked me a science question and I vowed to read that entire chapter so that I could answer it. Before I knew it, the chapter became more interesting than the boy and I did fairly well in science that year. So, thanks cute boy from grade nine whose name I no longer remember.
In India, we try to do well in school so we don’t lose face in front of our neighbors. I’m sure that every Indian kid has heard the phrase, “What will the neighbors say?” My parents tried to motivate me to study by telling me that the other kids are doing better. My teachers tried to motivate me by telling me that I won’t get into a good college if I don’t get good grades. Ironically the one thing that did motivate me to study was the thing my parents and teachers had told me to stay far away from. Boys.
Fast forward a few years and I was applying for college. People often ask me why I took geology and how I ended up studying rocks on Mars. My answer is very simple and uninspiring. I took geology because my mother told me to. After the big bad high school final exams were over, a lot of my classmates were preparing for the IIT entrance exam. Because, you know… they wanted to go to the best damn college in India. Some students travelled for hours to get to the exam center to take the exam. I lived in the campus and I could not care less. I just sat back and relaxed because high school was finally over. Then I got yelled at by my father because I was supposed to be applying for colleges or some such thing. All my friends wanted to be engineers or doctors or lawyers or dentists… or things I did not want to be. Ever. They knew which colleges they HAD to get into. They had found their parent’s calling in life. They had a schedule. They walked from one place to another with such purpose.
I looked for a college which required no entrance exam, no rich parent and which offered a decent course selection. I chose a government college that offered to teach me science for less than $85 a year. Best decision of my life. The next best decision was to take geology. During the admission process, I had to choose 3 subjects for the year. I chose physics, chemistry and math. My mother suggested I take geology instead of math. She said she knew someone whose kid did well in geology…so she thought I should take geology too. Her reasoning was not based on sound logic, but I couldn’t find a reason to say no. I mean I couldn’t possibly be worse at anything than I already was at math. So, I took geology. It became my favorite subject ever. I had the best professor, who recognized my interest and encouraged me to do better.
I got so much better that by the end of my three years, *I*was preparing for an entrance exam for IIT. That’s right, I was set on getting a master’s degree from the Earth Science department at IIT. I found my purpose too! I got to tell people that I was busy because I had to study (something I NEVER imagined I’d say). I gave the entrance exam. Then I got in. It was great. Because I lived right there in the campus. (Now that I think of it, this is probably the reason I never learned how to drive… because I frikken never left the IIT campus)
The classes at IIT were okay. They were hard and somewhat challenging, but they were not all that fun. The students in my class were the best in India. They studied hard to maintain a GPA and to get a job in an oil or exploration company. I wanted a good GPA because I had been told all my life that I should get good grades. I didn’t know why else I wanted a good GPA. My classmates graduated and got the jobs they wanted. I didn’t know what I wanted so I hung around. Mine was a masters-PhD program so even if I wanted to leave, I couldn’t. I had to stick around for an extra semester to graduate because of the requirements for my program. So, I watched my classmates be excited about their high paying exploration jobs and asked myself, “When am I going to be that excited?” That semester I got selected to attend an international internship at Japan. A fully paid trip to go to Japan and do science. I was excited. I got there, and everybody was great, everything was paid for, the instruments in the lab were fantastic and new, my co-interns were amazing. It was like science Christmas. I gotta give it to them, they did a fabulous job at advertising their lab. They flew us to Japan, fed us sushi, took us to Japanese temples, let us analyze meteorites on all their super expensive instruments and threw parties for us nonstop. They had all of us 20ish-year-olds writing home about how great Japan and science in Japan was.
I was so excited, I even signed my name off to the devil and told the director that I wanted to do a PhD at their lab. Worst damn decision in my life.
As soon as my next semester at IIT was done, I promptly collected my master’s degree and flew to Japan. My naïve 20-something-year-old ass had NO idea what was about to hit me. It took me about a year to understand the degree to which the internship was a façade. Took me a whole year because I spent about six months of it in denial. The staff and faculty in the lab were not nearly as nice to me as they were when I was an intern a few months before. My supervisor at this lab was and still is the single most horrid man I have ever met. He was this micro-micromanaging, English correcting, sexist and racist busybody who was massively insecure and took it out on students and lab techs. He checked on me about every other hour and told me every time how I did most things wrong. He came into the lab and constantly insulted the lab tech. The lab tech, at this stage, already resembled a wrung-out, over-used kitchen towel. I dreaded all my meetings with my supervisor and hated talking to him. He regularly said things like “I don’t think you will finish your PhD in 20 years” or “You are not smart enough to come up with the ideas that I have”. One Sunday, there was a blizzard and I didn’t want to bike to the lab because it was dangerous. When I called my supervisor and told him that, he said to me, “Is that your excuse to not do science?”
You know what I should have said? I should have said “HELL YES, that IS my excuse to not do science.” I should have packed my bags and taken the first flight out of that hell hole. But I didn’t. I biked to my lab in a blizzard and worked on a Sunday for nine hours. Then I reported to my horrid supervisor at 7 in the morning the following Monday. I did similar things for three and a half years. I worked for 11 hours a day, collecting three PhDs worth of data points over three and a half years. I kept thinking that things would get better. They didn’t. They got worse.
Eventually, I got sick of everything at the lab and decided to speak up. Not to my surprise, the director of the lab completely supported my supervisor’s behavior. The director said things like, “Your country is stupid, and you can’t do advanced science like this in any other country.” The director really did not like me speaking up. It somehow resulted in me not being allowed to publish any of my work or attend any conferences. They told me that my science was not good enough to be published anywhere. They told me that the lab had high standards. I didn’t believe it. This institute had more than 10 high precision instruments within one building, and the lab of about 30 people had one publication in 2016. (I mean for the entire lab and not one for each person.)
I eventually found out that two out of the three other students my supervisor had supervised quit the program because of depression and mental health issues. Also, my supervisor has no first authored publications (to date) in peer reviewed journals since 2012. HOLY MOLY. And the dude had the audacity to tell me that *I* would never publish. Self projection much? I should have checked my supervisor’s background before I signed up for four years in hell. So many regrets!!
The people at this lab were so screwed up, I had to take therapy so that I wouldn’t spiral down into depression. My Japanese therapist said, “You know all this is common in Japan… I don’t think you can do anything.” Every time I tried to speak up about the issues, it felt like I was up against a culture and not just a few individuals. It sucked.
The one person who did stand up for me was a new Canadian faculty member at this Japanese lab. He recognized all the behavioral patterns as they really were. Unfair, xenophobic and sometimes illegal. He wrote me a recommendation letter for McGill University. I applied and got accepted. Then I gathered all my belongings, left behind three and a half years of work and moved to Canada to start over. I think it was a good decision.
I restarted my PhD at McGill University in fall of 2017. I study the geochemistry and habitability of Mars using data from the Curiosity rover and even get to be a student collaborator with NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory! My project is super rad! McGill has a great environment where open discussion about your research is not only allowed but encouraged!! (“WOW! Is that a real thing thing?!” me two years ago would have thought). Opportunities are for everyone and not just for people higher up in the hierarchy. In the time I’ve spent at McGill so far, I got a chance to collaborate with amazing scientists who work on NASA projects, went to Australia to see some of the oldest preserved lifeforms on Earth, got a chance to speak about my research at the Canadian Space Summit, met an astronaut, got a scholarship to fund my fieldwork from National Geographic, submitted an abstract for the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (my first big conference!), and wrote my first first-authored paper about past water activity in Gale crater.
These may not seem like great accomplishments for more experienced scientists and students who have been luckier, but for an Indian girl who was repeatedly told by a lot of people that she was not good enough for science, they are. I am glad I didn’t give up on science. I have a lot of respect for scientists who have been dealt bad cards but are still doing awesome things today.
So, I guess the takeaways from this tediously long blog post are:
- Scientist are not where they are today because they were just born smart, they are there because they persevered. They are there because of the sheer hard work they put into something they are passionate about.
- Academia and academic environments are different in different countries. Not all of them may be a perfect fit for you. If your environment is negatively affecting your wellbeing more than it is contributing to your career in science, leave. I realized the hard way that working with incredibly difficult people in science is not worth my time or energy.
- Science is for everyone. It should never matter what gender, ethnicity, nationality, skin color, age, or sexual orientation you are. If you are being judged due to any of these reasons for your ability to do science, then the person or organization judging you is in the wrong. Not you. Be brave and speak up. If no one else supports you, I will.
Now that I have gotten this story out of my system, hopefully the next posts will be a little more upbeat and be about the awesome science itself. Stay tuned & science on!