My PhD journey so far has been chasing unicorns through a series of unfortunate events
Hi all, buckle up cause it's a wild ride...
I'm from a country with a small academic community, so basically everybody knows everybody. There I got both my BSc and MSc and somehow decided a PhD would be a good fit... Well, turned out the lab was quite toxic and I left after 2 years with pretty bad anxiety. Since the academic community was small, and my ex pi was very well known in the field, I decided to give PhD a second chance and to move abroad.
During the second year in my home institution I was busy constantly applying for various PhD positions and after multiple failed interviews I had made to pick between western Europe (same field as my 1st attempt) or a competitive fellowship in a place outside Europe (a completely different field). I decided to go with the second option since the project seemed more challenging and sparked my interest.
Off I went alone, to a completely new place where I didn't speak the language nor was I able to read anything, but full of hopes and dreams that I will become a scientist. The institution I joined is prestigious and is known for doing high risk frontier science.
My first year was quite eventful. After settling down and figuring different administrative stuff for my fellowship it was time for me to get to work. However, the geopolitical context had other plans and an active conflict started a couple of months in my new PhD. This forced me to go back to my home country for a couple of months. While being home struggling to do some type of work for my thesis and wondering if I made the right choice picking this project, I was hit with another devastating situation: my mom got diagnosed with cancer. Due to my fear that the PhD I got was the best chance I'll ever get for having a decent career, I decided to go back to keep working on my PhD.
Between courses, me travelling back and forth a couple of times per month to go with my mom for her treatment, and getting familiar with a completely new field, life got quite busy and it was quite difficult to get some work done for my project. So when a postdoc rejoined the group to help me, it should've come as a relief. They worked on my project before I joined and claimed they managed to reproduce the results on which my thesis was based on (the results came from within the group), however, no matter how hard I tried, or how closely they supervised me, I was never able to reproduce the original data. Since we agreed something was wrong with the initial procedure, we split up and tried to tackle it from different directions. That's when my series of unfortunate events hit again and our pi had a stroke in his office and was rushed to the hospital. Luckily, the project was a collaboration between 2 groups and the other pi stepped up to help us advance with our research. From my side, the experiments were going well, I managed to make progress in a small but steady manner. I also built an optical setup to help with my project (with help from other colleagues). From the postdoc side, things were also moving, even though a little slower.
Things finally seemed to go well after an eventful 1st year, my mom finished part of her treatment and was feeling better, so I decided I needed a well deserved vacation and I went back home for a couple of weeks to unwind. After my vacation was over and I came back to work and I was a bit surprised when I didn't see the postdoc working on my project. Turned out, while I was away the pi that stepped up to lead us decided to fire the postdoc for whatever reason. So there I was, freshly back to work, alone with a difficult project. That didn't demotivate me and I was determined to finish the project and get a well deserved paper out of it.
The second year of my PhD was not as eventful as the first one. Besides 2 other unfortunate events happening around the same time, one being the sudden death of a close friend and me having a trip to the hospital due to a severe panic attack in the office a couple of days later, it mostly consisted of endless lab work, a lot of troubleshooting, and learning completely new things that I couldn't have done if I remained in my first program. The difficulties I encountered during this period were not spiraling down the rabbit hole when my experiments didn't work for unknown reasons and getting a US visa since I was supposed to go to a prestigious conference and do a collaboration there for 2 months. The process of getting the US visa was insanely draining emotionally and long since I had to navigate multiple types of birocratic environments while doing work for my project.
Somehow I managed to obtain my visa about a month before leaving and the only thing needed was to try to reproduce the published results. This is another point to add to the series of unfortunate events, another conflict started and it was worse than the first one. I managed to get back home again, but this event left me with severe insomnia and possible PTSD.
The situation calmed down pretty fast and somehow I still had 3 weeks to get back to my experiments and finish just in time for the conference. I worked tirelessly on my project, but somehow every time something was going bad and the experiment was compromised or showed nothing that was expected. I decided not to give up completely, and after ensuring I made all the necessary preparations for my trip and collaboration, I was off to the US to do some complementary work for 2 months.
The US adventure quickly went from "omg, it's just like in the movies" to "omg, I want back home" all in about 2 weeks. After I wrapped things up at the conference, I was headed to another state to enjoy a nice weekend before starting the work (or at least I thought). Turned out the Airbnb I booked was an overpriced hole in the ground and I ended up spending my weekend fighting with Airbnb to get part of my money back so I could move to a different place. After that was done, I was in a nice place and I was ready to start working again.
Overall, the 2 months I spent there were very demanding, I was running experiments most days, a couple of days were dedicated to analysing the data (mostly since my laptop was too old to handle it), and trying to relax between individual meetings with the US group, part taking in their group meetings every Saturday morning, and periodic updates to my PIs (the one that had a stroke came back after a couple of months of recovery).
At the end of this experience, I was left tired and with data that didn't support the published results. It was time for me to go back, and try again to reproduce the data and convince myself that my thesis had a strong foundation and it was just a tricky experiment.
After getting back and trying endlessly to reproduce the data on my modified system I hit a wall: nothing worked. No matter what I was doing I couldn't observe what the paper stated. After multiple discussions with my PIs, we agreed I need to redo the original experiment 1 to 1. So I rebuilt my setup to accommodate the different sample geometry, I did preliminary tests to probe whether the original system was working since I had issues with it before. Everything seemed to work well so I decided to just do it. It was the time!
Well, turned out it didn't work. I couldn't observe the effect reported even though I did exactly what was reported in the paper. After some discussions with the student that published the paper, I found out there was no documentation left besides the paper itself: the student's personal driver was broken and their lab notebook was empty. So there I was with the realisation that 2 years of my work went to the trash and I basically had no thesis and needed to change projects. The series of unfortunate events that followed me since I picked this PhD hit again: the PI from the US died suddenly and yet another conflict started.
This time I decided not to go back home since I was working on another collaboration (this and the US collaboration were required by my fellowship), and I need to find another project for my thesis. Somehow, in the middle of an active conflict zone I got an idea. My PIs agreed and I started working on it and managed to obtain the necessary stuff while the conflict was still ongoing.
The conflict ended, but I was left being pulled in multiple directions since the last collaboration turned out to be messy (I was supposed to join an existing project and I thought the basics were figured out but turned out not to be true) and it seems it would take more time than expected. This is where I am now, between a chaotic collaboration that has nothing to do with my thesis, struggling to start the new project and realising I moved to an active conflict zone chasing a unicorn, all while having to explain to my PI that I feel burned out.
Thank you if you read this far! I needed to get it out of my system.