One of the really great things about my co-op placement in a science lab full of students is the opportunity to partake in things like the summer school they host every year in which they invite various lecturers from all over and host workshops. It is typically aimed at grad students, but this year they said advanced undergraduates are welcome to apply. My mentor may have just about given herself whiplash with how quickly she gave me a LOOK. So of course I applied, and I got in! My supervisor was very encouraging.

And so I started attending the sessions. A lot of them were great! I was learning many new things, trying to absorb everything I could while I could. A few were a bit advanced for me, but they were being recorded so what I did was watched them in small chunks on my own and looked up what I didn’t know while taking copious notes. One of the lecturers in fact gave me a really neat insight into why we look for dark matter the way that we do, which is important for me to understand as I have worked on two dark matter experiments. It may seem strange to look for something we can’t see (click here to read my Science Snippet on Dark Matter) but scientists have worked very hard designing ways to possibly detect it. Check out my new science snippet that talks about one of the ways in which we try to look for it: Dark Matter Detection With Noble Gas.

But then there came a series of lectures that were so far beyond the level I’m at that I didn’t even understand the questions other scientists were asking the lecturer. And I started to panic. Here is a snippet of what my brain started to cycle through during this talk: “Is this the level I’m expected to get to? That is so much pressure. What if I never get to this level? Does that mean I fail? Am I really cut out for a career in physics? Am I capable of this? But I can’t fail, I’ve uprooted my entire life to do this…” And so on and so forth. Sometimes because of my unique path (see About Me) I feel like I am under a lot of pressure to succeed. And it only took one lecture in which I felt completely lost to send me into a spiral of doubt.

Then we had another visitor come to the lab, Dr. Claire David. Dr. David is another example of someone with a unique and unconventional pathway in a science career. She decided that she wanted to follow her dreams in life, and that doesn’t always line up with what a “typical” career path looks like, so she bravely and boldly resigned a permanent position and began a life of adventure. This led to things like moving to South Africa to be Academic Director and lecturer in a brand-new AI for Science masters programs, and finding her passion in mentoring students. She just completed a bike touring challenge, cycling from Victoria, where she graduated in 2016, to Montreal, where she plans to settle (for a bit). Our lab was a stop along her way and I was fortunate enough to be one of the students in the audience when she talked about her life and career thus far. You can follow her cycling adventures here (she informed me she will update her blog in a couple of days) : https://clairedavid.travelmap.net/

Two things she said really stood out to me. Here is the first one:

“If we push to go at the pace of the fastest ones, eventually people are left behind and we drift from excellence to elitism.”

This really stood out to me because of the panic I had just previously experienced. Academics can sometimes feel like I’m in a race, running alongside my peers and just trying not to fall behind out of the pack. But a race means winners and losers. It means successes and failures. Wouldn’t it be better to instead have us all walk together as we learn how to run?

And I’m aiming to be an experimentalist. That means my finish line is a completely different one than those aiming to be theorists. And it was in a theory lecture that I felt the inadequacy, the shame. One of my other mentors saw me panic in that lecture and took the time to have a coffee with me and reassure me. He told me that even he barely understood the lecture, and that as an experimentalist I don’t need to be at the level of the theorist who gave the talk. I wish I had known that beforehand… But it was a learning experience – and not just about nuclear physics, but about how we don’t actually have to learn everything, be good at everything, succeed at everything in order to accomplish what we set out to do. I don’t have to be able to follow high-level nuclear physics theory to work on experiements looking for dark matter or neutrinoless double beta decay.

The other quote from Dr. David that stood out to me was this:

“In academia there should be a role for everyone. If it doesn’t exist, create it.”

Hearing her say this felt so validating, so reassuring. There should be a role for everyone. That means there should be a role for me. I am still in race, and there are no losers in this race, there is only crossing that finish line. We might all cross it at different times, and it might in fact be a different line for everyone, but we can all get there.

I did get Dr. David’s permission to mention her in this post and to quote her, and if she’s reading this, I want to thank her for being the inspiration that she is and I look forward to following her journey online as I continue my own.