About six months after I defended my dissertation proposal, at the end of my second year in graduate school, I finally took a good, clear-eyed look at what I was doing and why – and couldn’t come up with a good answer. The glow of being a new graduate student had faded. Nothing in my well-thought out thesis proposal was working and I was convinced that I was doing a horrible job at mentoring a high school student that was in the lab for the summer. But really, aside from the surrounding circumstances, I had the jarring realization that I was where I had planned to be all my life and I had no clue what was next.

See, since as far back as I could remember, I was a planner, as most scientists are. In junior high, I made plans for high school: I was going to be wildly popular (I never was), be a great athlete (um, no that didn’t happen either), and I was going to do well academically (that happened, 1 for 3). In high school, I planned to get into college (check), get a full-ride scholarship (check) and turn down someone’s Ivy League school (check). In college, I was going to major in chemistry (check), graduate with honors (check) and go to graduate school (check). But now what? I’m staring at 3+ more years of graduate school in the face, picturing myself rolling through my 20s, and....? Did I really want to be a professor? Did I really see myself, 30, or even 10 years from now, still working at the bench?

Stressed out and homesick, I went home for few days for comfort food (mmm...BBQ) and my friends and family. Two days before my flight was scheduled to return me to Stanford, I changed my flight. I was not ready to come back. I thought about, fantasized about, never coming back. I was convinced that I was a lousy scientist, teacher, mentor, and student. Sure, I liked immunology, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend my entire professional career dealing in minutia and convoluted animal models to gain understanding. My parents, eternally supportive but lacking this experience, told me that I would be fine and do well, words that rang hollow to me at the time. Had they ever done this? No. Could they even really understand? I doubted it.

I got on the plane and came back to school. I didn’t gain any great insight, but I was here. I came back to lab still unsure of my future, but showed up everyday and did experiments. I spent lots of time thinking, “soul searching,” and listening to John Coltrane. Finally, near the end of the summer, I decided – gasp! – that a lab/bench work-based career was not for me. I figured I would probably get better at conducting experiments and getting data, and would probably make some interesting observations along the way, but this had lost its appeal. I lacked that extra ingredient beyond skill and intelligence that you need to make the pursuit of science your life’s work. There is a sense of relief to finally know, or in this case, know not, what I wanted to do. What followed this relief, however, was guilt and fear. “If you’re not in school to be a scientist, what are you here for?” I thought to myself. I also thought that all these good people here at Stanford have in invested me to be a scientist, not to not want to be one. But what I was really afraid of, what kept me up at night was that no one – corporate or otherwise – would give me a chance to do something different with a Ph.D. I was afraid that I had picked this path and would be trapped by it.

I am convinced fear and self-doubt are toxic. I remember reading somewhere that the opposite of love is not hate, but fear. What I was feeling was debilitating for a while until I sat up and decided the NO ONE was going tell me what I can and can’t do with a Ph.D. I was going to have to make up some new options for myself when I graduated. I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I figured that if I could eventually write a dissertation, and more importantly, have data to put in it, then I could certainly figure out how to get a job that wasn’t at the bench. So, I split my time between trying to get and keep my experiments working, and looking around for other job/career options for me when I finished.