Hanging in the balance

Wednesday, August 29: She has calmed down but is happy still. She wishes her father was alive to see this day. Her father would have been very proud of her, if he were alive. They would have talked about how she shines in life because she has her father's genes* **. In other news, she is worried about her lab meeting on 5th September. She has literally done nothing research-wise since her defense which was in December, 2018. She pauses her train of thought. Life is back to normalcy. She has returned to worrying about lab meetings and her choice of boyfriend and has had the first fight with her mother in 5 months (No! You are not bringing him to India in December? Are you crazy?! - her mother had said). Ah! Sweet life is back. She ain't hanging in the balance nomore.

*P.S: Her father was a talented guy and an intellectual but also a communist and a college-dropout and who chose to stay in Kolkata despite better opportunities because he wanted to go to "Coffee House" every Wednesday.

**Coffee House is a cafe in Kolkata where friends meet to have long conversations over long periods of time (two decades in my father's case) about inconsequential things.

Monday, August 27: She gets an offer from the Nobel laureate in New York City:

Dear Rai,

I would like to invite you to join our lab. I was irresponsible in not getting back to you sooner. I am away today but perhaps we can talk over the weekend. It will be fun to have you as a member of the lab. If you give me some times and the best number to reach you we can discuss the details.

She has to slap herself many times to know that she is not dreaming. She spends the entire afternoon wandering around in the corridors of her institute, around the pond outside, in the rooftop, postponing experiments as she is too excited and delirious with joy to do anything. He phones (?!?) her up. He invites her again to New York city to 'think through some ideas together'. She has started calling him by his first name. She will join his lab early next year for a postdoc. He is flexible with her joining dates. She is going to New York City. To the lab of a person who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology for his stunning work in olfaction. She has done nothing to deserve all this but she doesn't care.

Tuesday, August 21: She gets the offer from MIT. She is happy as she admires the woman and knows that she is fantastic. She is sad that she is leaving MIT to the Salk Institute at San Diego, and that if she accepts the offer she has to move to San Diego with the lab. She was hoping to stay in the East Coast. San Diego is beautiful (sure) but has an underwhelming improv scene. She writes one more time to the Nobel laureate in New York City because she is a child with unrealistic dreams. She finds herself murmuring to "God" - surprising herself, as she thought she was an atheist.

Friday, August 17: She has got offers from Harvard, Stanford, and NIH now. She has inevitably found something odd with each of those positions. She interviews at MIT - the woman, who was the only woman she had applied to, seems nice but is, however, moving her lab to San Diego. She doesn't know if she will get the position but she wishes so. No word from New York still. She learns that an academic silence means 'no'. In conclusion, she has not got the position in New York.

Saturday, June 17: Her interview in NYC is fast approaching (in less than a week). She is just back from India, where she has spent most of her time in cancer hospitals comtemplating life and death and what it means to be alive. Her thoughts have had little to do with anything remotely close to science. Obviously therefore, she is very, very nervous. She is going to NY next weekend.  She suddenly realizes that she is going to NY again, the weekend after. She is performing with her improv troupe, ‘Bombay Vindaloo’, at the Del Close Marathon. (Bombay Vindaloo performs fully improvised bollywood movies, usually at random shoddy places in DC, and, occasionally on structures that look like stages). In fact, they are performing on MAINSTAGE (!), Upright Citizen’s Brigade. She has double-checked to be sure that they are indeed performing on the mainstage (wtf?!?). This is, by far, the coolest thing that has happened to her in a while. Poking around in the UCB website she discovers their ‘Diversity Scholarship’ page. She tells herself that she will apply for this if she ever makes it to NY for a post-doc. She has so many dreams.

P.S: Tuesday, October 15, 2019: She goes back to this post as she has a thing to tell her one-year younger self:

She also wants to share this with her younger self: She is in the new lab - the lab of her dreams - she lives in the heart of Manhattan - she does improv every week - YET she is equally empty and life still feels meaningless and hopeless to her. She applied to 5 postdoctoral fellowships and got none. Perhaps that is the source of her distress. The UCB Diversity scholarship makes her very happy - but she catches herself thinking, 'I am getting all the wrong scholarships'. There is no moral to this story - but there definitely is a recurrent pattern. 

Saturday, June 02: Let's say life has not been very easy for her of late. So she wants to write about this in third person, and this is a sacrilege in a blog named 'in First Person'. So she tags irrelevant additions to this post, though this stream of consciousness has nothing to do with her postdoc hunt. Anyways, life has not been very easy for her of late. Her mother was diagnosed with a lung tumor, then the doctors changed their minds about it and calls it now an infection. She hopes the latter is correct but she is paranoid. She got this news on May 09, the day she got the NIH job, after she had returned home for her celebratory long-distant toast with Mum. She took the next flight out and is in India since May 10. She has been pretending that everything is fine but rarely anything is. Her mother has to do a CT scan after 3 months to conclusively prove one thing over the other. How will she spend these 3 months without constantly worrying? She doesn't know. She, after all, doesn't really like uncertainties.

Wednesday, May 16: She gets a Skype interview call from the only woman she has written to, whose lab is in MIT, and whom she admires exceedingly. She has written to 10 scientists. 9 out of the 10 scientists were men. Why? She is troubled by this. She tells herself that this is just a coincidence. After all, there are so few female scientists and even fewer who work on what she is interested in. That's a valid point, she thinks. She realises that she has only written to tier-one institutes and mostly to tenured professors, and almost everyone meeting those criteria working on what she is interested in were males. Why are there so few female scientists in tier-one institutes? She is suddenly depressed. She tells herself that she can work in tier-three institutes, that will still be okay. She loves science and all what matters is that she gets to do this with love. She cheers up briefly. She looks up statistics on women in academia. Now she gets irreversibly depressed.

Wednesday, May 09: She gets the job at NIH (see Tuesday, April 03). She interviews, they give her the job right away, at the end of the day. They tell her that they are thrilled about her, about her work, and that she can join anytime she fancies. 'Hmmm.... fishy', she catches herself thinking.

Later, April sometime: As part of the plan, she writes to two new labs. One of them gets back immediately, saying that he is considering multiple other people and cannot commit to anything. Her heart breaks into a few hundred pieces. Thereafter, in a moment of panic, she signs up for a big talk to present her work in the institute. Her rationale being that she will get many influential scientists interested in her work, who then can help her find a postdoc. She regrets this immediately but can do nothing about it anymore.

Thursday, April sometime: She got an interview call in the lab of a Nobel laureate in New York City. The lab of her dreams. The city of her dreams. She cannot believe it. She decides to not tell anyone except her mother. Then she writes a blog post about it. The blog is her only friend who listens, what can she do. She tells herself that nobody reads her blog anyways, so what does it matter. She is certain that the interview will go horribly and she will come back crying. She decides to have many back-up plans, write to other labs, etc. Suddenly, she catches herself thinking 'What if it happens? What if it happens?' and aggressively shuts her thoughts down. She is wise and knows that wishful thinking only brings heartaches.

Saturday, April 15: Perturbed by the thought that only 1 out of the 9 labs she applied to actually gave her an interview invite, she has several questions. She changes the title of the post from 'Postdoc Hunt' to 'Hanging in the balance'. The latter, she feels, is a more appropriate title. She also switches from first person to third person, in an attempt to sound less whiny. She wonders why 2 out of the 9 people never replied. She wonders what happened to 2 out of the 9 who said they would get back to her soon, a month ago. She wonders whether the 4 people who had said that their labs were full were (in fact) politely brushing her off. She looks up inspirational quotes in the interwebs and finds these: 'You can do everything right and still lose. You can do everything wrong and still win.' She decides to persist.

Tuesday, April 03: She got her first interview call. She wonders how and why. She reminds herself that this is because she is doing good work and had written a compelling postdoc application cover letter.

Saturday, March 31: She has been writing to labs for a postdoc position and she is nearing the end of her wish-list with very little success. Her dream lab is full. This really crushed her heart. She is sitting at a cafe in the heart of DC, feeling impossible. 

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