hey, hello, hi!
It’s been a minute… I’ve written, rewritten and deleted this blog post too many times to count. My intention has always been to update Girls Who STEM with PhD bits and pieces, as a branch of the original (slight update: we now own girlswhostem.co.uk domain – a proper YAY moment) GWS movement, in an attempt to break down the stereotypes that come with a PhD title. It turns out, it’s not as easy as that (who was I to think it was…).
Firstly, easily and probably very obviously… PhD life has been hard. In every single sense of the word. Draining, difficult, isolating, demanding, intimidating, confidence-killing, brutal and really bloody hard. Now I’ve got the dramatics out of the way… I’m 2-out-of-3 years in and I’m not sure there’s a word in the English dictionary to describe how truly terrifying that feels. I guess it takes “time flies when you’re having fun” to a whole new level when you add ‘overworking, trying to balance a social life, maintaining some kind of positive mental health, trying to recharge your own batteries, exercising and just generally battling other life stuff’ to the end of that saying. You’ll be glad to know (I hope) that while it has been two years of balancing probably too many plates to carry safely, I can still say I absolutely love doing a PhD.
Being 2/3 of the way through means I have a much narrower focus on where and how I want to direct my research – I’ll do a whole separate blog post on the nitty gritty details of my research for those of you who may or may not be interested in it. But the broad overview of what I’ve been looking at for the last two years (in the most normal-people terms I can club together) is the effect of repetitive head impacts due to heading a ball in football, on the brain. I recently did a guest blog for STEM Untapped (please go and check it out!) where I described a PhD as one big science experiment similar to what the majority of us would have done at high school. You start by reading around and attempting to understand your research area, which comes with its own list of challenges. I found this part really tough, particularly towards the end of this section of my PhD. While I’ve always loved reading for fun, I found the comprehension side of it almost impossible. Short of reading and rewriting every sentence from every paper I read, I felt like I just wasn’t making any progress. In hindsight, I was really tough on myself to read and understand something straight away – you’d never expect to read a passage of text in a foreign language you’d only been learning a short time and understand it straight away. Even now I’ve begun establishing myself within the bubble of head injury research, there are still papers I read and think qué? (ironically, Spanish for WHAT?!) what are you trying to say. And, while this has the potential to come across as big headed, there are some research papers out there that are either written awfully or are so inaccessible to anyone other than the authors of the paper. Anyway, moving on from the small rant about inaccessibility of research, I am so glad (I wish there was something more than bold font I could use to get across how incredibly happy I am) that section of my PhD is mostly over. Now for the fun part… I’ve completed the majority, if not all of the experimental portion of my ‘big science experiment’. I’ve spent the last year working with a professional footballer, presenting my work at a conference in the USA, and taking two trips out to Abu Dhabi with about 10 footballs in my suitcase to get enough data to analyse and complete my PhD. Obviously it goes without saying that these are major highlights of the last year. I’ve also cried far too many tears, navigated PhD life through a break up, confronted my mental health head on starting therapy and antidepressants, spent many a day and night sat in my bedroom on my own because I couldn’t face seeing even my bestest of friends, flaking on plans because my anxiety shouted louder than my rational head, the list is endless. Please, don’t get the violins out in a hurry, I’m not writing this down for any kind of sympathy, I’m a strong gal and in a much better place now. I am instead telling you this in the hope that someone somewhere reads this and can resonate with even a tiny portion of it, so they know that they aren’t battling this crazy world on their own. At times, I’ve sat and thought to myself “well, at least it can’t get much worse than this” and sure enough, somehow life throws another curve ball that hits me like another ball to the head (what’s a sad story without a terrible pun). But, on the flip of that, there have been times where I’ve been at my lowest and thought “this is it, this overwhelming sad feeling is how I’m going to feel forever”, and something silly will happen to bring back that smile and suddenly the world doesn’t feel so dark. I guess what I’m trying to say is that life can be really horrible and there is nothing you can do to prepare yourself for life to crumble around you while you’ve still got to show up everyday. But that pain is only temporary. It’s not going to disappear overnight and I’m sure there will be times when you’re sat surrounded with the people you adore, crying with laughter and suddenly that pang of sadness is going to overwhelm you ,most probably uncontrollably, but it won’t last forever. Chances are, it probably won’t last the rest of the day.
At risk of turning this into another one of those self help posts, lets get back to PhD life. I feel so incredibly lucky that every day I get to wake up and make ground within a research subject I feel so passionate about. The important people in my life tell me off for saying I’m lucky, based on how hard I’ve worked to be where I am today. But I do genuinely feel lucky that over and above all the craziness that life has chucked at me in the last two years, I get to focus on the wider picture of creating a career for myself where I have the potential to make ground-breaking changes within the world of sport. I take every opportunity that presents itself to talk to anyone who will listen about head injuries – anyone who’s had to suffer Meg after a couple of drinks at the rugby, I apologise for chatting your ear off about the complexities and nuances of rugby-related head injuries. My whole world now revolves around either footballs or head injuries because of my PhD and while that sounds toxic and probably is for most other career paths, it’s what gets me through the down days. My PhD is so much more than a qualification, a title, a next step. Because I feel so passionately about it, I take on massive disheartened feelings when someone else doesn’t share my excitement. This part may be a hard read for my friends and family so apologies to my loved ones in advance but I promise the ending is a happy one. To paint a picture for you, I was recently on a lovely break away in Cornwall with my mum and my nan (if you’ve read my previous posts you’ll know these are one of the many diamond women in my life) when I spotted a book “The little book of balls”. I was embarrassingly excited about a book with a whole chapter on the design and manufacture of footballs… I know, I know but please stay with me, there’s a point to exposing myself in this story. Anyway, I stood there and read the whole chapter despite knowing all the information anyway. I took it to show my mum, who was much less excited about my find than I was. I felt so disheartened (sorry mum) and it got me thinking back to how many times I’d tried to talk about my PhD work to people. Everyone can hold a conversation about something they’ve read in the news about head injuries in sport – whether their opinions are based on facts or not. However, 90% of people, including the majority of my family, rarely ask about my actual PhD or tend to shut off when I want to talk about it and share my stresses and frustrations. Now, that could be for a number of reasons. I’m not for a minute saying my family and friends don’t care about what I’m doing, I’m certain they’re just as excited as I am that I’m doing a PhD and will ultimately sign all my Christmas and birthday cards “all my love, Dr Meg” when I finally finish. I’m also not saying that they don’t want to me to reach out when I’ve had a bad day. But unlike the trials and tribulations of the majority of jobs, a PhD is unrelatable to the almost everyone except other academics. I already know from their own admission that the people around me have no idea what I do everyday – I’m sure some people think PhD life is a bliss of working from home whenever I want and having a day off without question if my mental or physical health is bad. But this only furthers the disconnect between academia and conventional jobs. My typical bad day is when an experiment I’m trying to do hasn’t gone the way I wanted it to which adds extra stress and pressure because I’m likely on a very tight schedule to get this data. Or when I’m trying to write a paper for an academic journal and my brain has other ideas (that can include crippling depressive and anxious thoughts to having one song on repeat in my head the entire day) as to what it wants to think about. While these stresses are part of a typical day in the life for me, and probably most PhD students, the chance of the people close to me sharing or dare I say it, understanding, how stressful these things are in real terms, is pretty slim. And why would they? I don’t have the everyday stresses of working as part of a team where one person isn’t pulling their weight, or having a manager that has to micro manage me for their own ego boost. My point though is these work struggles are things I’ve experienced in other jobs as have the majority of humans on this earth (unless you’re a micro manager who isn’t pulling their weight, then I guess everyone else is the ‘problem’). Whereas, like I said before, academic careers are so far detached to what society deems normal life, that people can sympathise my stresses without being able to empathise with them. I imagine we’ve all been there when someone is trying to vent about a stress that you just don’t get – I have very quickly learnt that everyone’s stress tolerance is different. But, back to my original point it means that on top of the widely known isolation attached to a PhD, it also creates an environment around you where it feels like no one understands, or wants to understand, what you’re going through. At the risk of sounding like I think everyone is against PhD students and that we’re so far removed that no one understands us, I want to reiterate the title of this blog post girls who… are HONEST. As I said earlier, this will probably be a hard read for most of the people close to me. I’m not for a second implying that what I do everyday is better, or more stressful, or harder than any single job in the world. For the record, fair play to anyone who has to deal with the general public on a daily basis, you have more patience than I will ever have because some people are rude (I know that’s the understatement of the year). I’m trying really hard to highlight the disconnection between academia and the wider world and how much it frustrates me in my personal life. I’m more than happy to sit and listen to peoples frustrations surrounding their job, but when it comes to me venting, a lot of people tend to shut off because they just don’t get it. This isn’t an uncommon theme though, how many people who hate football zone out of a conversation about football because they just don’t get the frustrations around it? It’s no different to the examples I’ve presented here. However, I guess you’ll always find someone who will share your frustrations about football.
I’m sure some of you are sat there thinking ‘hun, just find other PhD friends to vent to about the same frustrations’ and boy do I wish it was that easy. I don’t want this blog post to be doom and gloom (I promise) but the reality of not only being a PhD student, but a PhD student in an engineering department that is predominantly male makes it difficult to find your people. GWS have done a fair few Women in STEM Wednesday episodes where a lot of people have highlighted the stereotypes involved with being a woman in STEM. I’d love to tell you that these stereotypes are just that, stereotypes but I’d be lying. I don’t like using the word minority because it feels like another label to add to the already long list of being a young, mixed race female engineer in the STEM world – for the record, I’m just an engineer. FULL STOP. But my personality, hobbies and interests have also presented themselves as being part of a minority, within my engineering school at least. The girls I made friends with on my undergrad course were 100% my people and I adore them still now. However when most of them SELFISHLY upped and left Cardiff to move to the big city, I was left in a department where I felt, and still feel, like an outsider. Not only are there no girls to dress up nice with, go for cocktails and exchange PhD frustrations but there are also very few guys who can treat you like a platonic friend to grab a coffee with. Side story: last year I met two guys who were part of a PhD friendship group. They weren’t my people and didn’t share any of the same interests as me but they were nice enough and at least we had in common the stress of doing a PhD. Within a week, one of them told me that the other one was interested in asking me out and ‘fancied me’ despite knowing that at the time I had a boyfriend. It just feels impossibly disheartening when you work tirelessly to try and change the stereotypes for future women in STEM when it’s so evident that these ideas of what being in STEM is like, are true. I end up being the figure head of so many undergraduate events to try and paint a picture of what an engineer can look like (i.e. not just white men). Don’t get me wrong, I love helping make STEM accessible, or at least feel accessible for other people. But I’m not the poster girl for breaking stereotypes when I feel like I’m working as a lone ranger. It says a lot when of all the people I’ve met in my academic career so far, the person I have the most in common with is my supervisor… I’m sure there are other girls in my engineering school who also work hard to challenge the stereotypes in the STEM world, meaning technically I’m not a lone range (shock, out come the dramatics again). But, we are so few and far between it’s hard to hunt them out to stick together with. And, the chance of finding a PhD gal in your department who shares the same interests as you is like the worst, hardest game of Where’s Wally? ever.
Reiterating my first point, PhD life is hard. I don’t want to deter anyone from applying for a PhD because it’s by far the best decision I have ever made. But more so, to highlight the complexities that go with it. The detachment people around you feel because few people do a PhD. The isolation outside of an already independent working environment. The mental load associated with constantly having your research infiltrating your brain, even on days off. The difficulty finding other PhD friends that either share your interests or don’t sexualise you for being a woman in the workplace (I appreciate this isn’t an academic specific issue, unfortunately). It turns out, the research part is actually the easiest part… When I first applied for my PhD, I was very guilty of over romanticising the idea of it. I got to, and still do, go to work and research something I feel so passionately about that also manages to fit into my everyday interests. What a blessed position to be in – there aren’t many jobs out there you can say you do this. I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy three years, and honestly, that made it even more interesting to me. But no one was honest to me, and I certainly wasn’t honest to myself about the realities of furthering my academic roster. I’ve written this blog post as a way of telling you what I wish I knew two years ago when I was a fresh faced overly enthusiastic new PhD student.
Million dollar question: knowing what I know now, would I still have applied to do a PhD? Yes. Without a second thought. Yes because (hopefully) one day it will be my research changing sports policies to better protect athletes from long term head injury risks. Yes because (again, hopefully) it will be my research that everyone reads in the news and decides they are informed enough to hold opinions on what sport should and shouldn’t be doing for head injuries in sport. Yes because of the pure joy it brings me boring my friends at the rugby about the side of head injuries people fail to understand. My supervisor asked me over two years ago now in other words what I would dream of doing in the future – my ‘I know I’ve made it when…’ moment if you will. I said to him, I’d love to be sat next to Alex Scott (my biggest sporting role model) on BBC sport chatting to her about head injuries during a big game of football. I’ve never wanted to be famous, ever – my brain works too quickly and words come out of my mouth that I haven’t filter checked before hand so I would probably be cancelled before making a name for myself for saying something I shouldn’t have said live on air. But now, I want to show the world that women are allowed to be experts on predominantly male interest, such as sports like football and rugby. I want to be the Alex Scott of the engineering world. Dream big girl I hear you say, dream big…
It turns out, the reason I found myself writing and rewriting this blogpost so much was because I was doing the opposite of being honest. Mostly to protect the feelings of those around me but also because I didn’t want to put anyone off doing a PhD, which ultimately after reading this you might be. But the most important point I’ve concluded from rambling on about life in the last two years is, do something you love and feel passionate about. Because love and passion prevails everything, even bad days, always.
All my love, Meg x
Girls Who STEM 