How did THAT lead to THIS? On Belonging, Drift, and Finding Your Place
Why on earth am I here? This is the thought that kept running through my brain as I watched the cardiac procedure taking place. A few weeks before, I had been teaching psychology, and now here I was wearing scrubs for the first time in my life, surrounded by a ton of medical equipment and a flurry of activity. I tried my best to just stay out of the way.
This was part of my orientation as a new data scientist so that I could learn the clinical context in which I was working. As I came to understand, the day-to-day activities of the role are actually quite similar to what I did before (coding, analyzing data, writing reports), and as time went on, the new role didn't feel so jarring. However, the sudden change in environment that I experienced in the first few weeks really took some getting used to, and even now four years later I find myself questioning my sense of belonging at times.
This becomes especially apparent on the occasions when I am asked to present to the department. When most people giving similar presentations describe their background, they'll talk about the other medical areas they worked in, and how that led to their interest in their current work. I instead mention how I studied reading development in children and did research in schools, and I can just see the question marks popping into their heads. How did that lead to this?
I think this impact on belonging is one of the consequences of drift. And what I'm wondering is whether addressing it requires some updating in the stories we tell about ourselves. Perhaps a throughline isn't just about what we do and our underlying why, but also about how we want to show up in our work. For me, this looks like being someone who can bridge different worlds, who understands what it's like to approach a field from the outside. It's about finding the unique perspective I bring. And it's about discovering new things to be curious about, even when the path that brought me here wasn't the one I planned.
I suspect I'm not alone in this. Many researchers find themselves in rooms where their background doesn't fit the expected narrative: not academic enough, not clinical enough, not technical enough.
Maybe a sense of belonging isn't about fitting the expected narrative. Maybe it's something we construct by claiming the story that connects where we've been to where we are, even when that story looks nothing like anyone else's.
You Need to Stop: The Cost of Saying Yes to Everything as a Postdoc
"You've taken on too much and you need to stop".
I had just submitted my very first NIH grant application, which ended up being down to the wire and submitted hours before it was due. I had lost a lot of sleep, and yet rather than rest and take a few days to enjoy the summer weather, I felt compelled to catch up on all the projects I wasn't working on when writing the grant. I immediately started sending updates to collaborators, apologizing for falling behind while the grant was consuming my time. To one of these emails, a senior colleague replied telling me I needed to take a break.
I am grateful to this colleague for even noticing how much I was working and for her deciding to tell me this. Many postdocs don't have anyone watching out for them in this way. But I do want to name the academic culture that made this feel necessary. I felt such pressure to produce, and felt like any time off would have a domino effect on everything that came after. That same year, even the five work days I took off to get MARRIED took a lot of willpower to quiet these voices in my head long enough to allow myself to disconnect from postdoc and be present in the moment.
I wonder whether a throughline would have helped me. At the time, I had no framework for evaluating opportunities. I was just trying to accumulate more papers, more collaborations, and more grants. What I didn't see was that the thread of my work was slowly disappearing under the pile. This grant, the one I had lost so much sleep over, wasn't even something I was excited about, but rather something I felt that I should write because it would allow a connection between two institutions to form, and I thought that was a good political move for me to make. It wasn't funded, but if it were, it would have taken my work in yet another direction unrelated to my scientific curiosity, and compounded the drift I was experiencing even more.
If I were to come up with it now, my throughline might have been something like understanding how the organization of the brain supports language learning. Considered in this light, this grant would have been a clear mismatch. What I might have worked on instead is a project that would have allowed me to further my interests, such as working with bilingual speakers. Instead, I tried to fit in cross-linguistic work in an unfunded capacity during both my postdocs, and because of that, it ultimately made up a small fraction of my CV.
What I Would Ask Now
Looking back, here are the questions I wish I'd been asking, questions that a clear throughline would have helped me answer:
If this grant were funded, would I be excited? If it weren't, would I be relieved?
Am I genuinely interested in where this work leads, or am I just trying to get a publication out of it?
If I were to get a position doing this type of work, would that interest me? Would I want to build a research program around this?
Am I saying yes to this because I want to, or because I'm afraid of what happens if I say no?
If saying yes to this means dropping something I'm already doing, what would I drop? If I can't answer that (or if nothing seems worth dropping), that's a clear sign.
If you want to work through these questions for your own research, I'm hosting a small group workshop on May 8 where we'll do exactly that.
Find out moreThere are real structural forces at play in academic careers, and a throughline won't solve everything. But having one gives you a filter, and a filter gives you permission to say no. If you say yes to everything, you risk burning out before you can do the work that actually matters to you. Or you end up drifting so far from your curiosity that you end up building a research program that doesn't feel like yours.