One sunny spring
morning, I walked along a road by the coast of Monterey. The lighter blue of
the sky contrasted the darker of the sea, though the border between the two was
difficult to make out in the distant horizon's haze.
I soon reached my
destination, the Hopkins Marine Station, where we were to have our annual
neuroscience student retreat. I walked into the little conference building and
immediately gravitated towards a cup of tea (though like Ikea furniture, it was
not pre-assembled). I sat down, chatted with some of my classmates for a bit,
and settled down for some excellent talks.
Alas, our first
guest was unable to make it, so we moved on to a panel discussion with the five
professors we had in front of us. Some smiled amicably, while others retained
their normal, stern countenances. There would be curious questions, a little
friendly banter, and perhaps some grains of wisdom about life after a PhD that
some of us could incorporate into our sand castles of self-confidence.
Then the first
question was picked out of a hat.
"How do you
justify your life?"
How do you live with
the path you have chosen? the question asked. You are obviously extremely
hard-working, brilliant people. Why haven't you put these characteristics to
use in a way that helps more people? Why aren't you doctors and directors of
non-profits that seek to educate, heal, and bring people out of poverty?
Kind of a loaded
question.
That day, my own
answer to the question (though it was not asked of me), was simple. You need to
hone a knife before you can use it to its greatest extent. My PhD will teach me
skills that will allow me to do a whole bunch of things. I will discover something in my research that
will help a large number of people at once, rather than just one or two for a
short time.
But some days, I
simply can't justify it. I spent at least a quarter of my college career doing
a minor in Global Poverty and Practice. I rode the roller coaster through
Ananya Roy's class on the hopes and challenges of trying to alleviate poverty.
The challenges, the
factors that encouraged poverty were systemic. They were entrenched so deep in
the laws and the culture and even the language that it seemed impossible to
budge them. Austerity measures, neo-capitalism,
why couldn't people see how badly these things hurt the countries they
were meant to help? Or did they, and did they persist because of the gain to
their own? How could you possibly change the world when it looked like this and
when people had purposefully made it so?
And then, hope, most
often from the bottom up, from people who worked tirelessly in some small patch
of the globe, focused on a simple goal. Getting clean water to a village,
teaching the next generation of children principles of sanitation and hygiene and
that disease is not always inevitable. Empowering a woman to establish a
livelihood with a micro-loan and a way to keep her savings. Working with a
constituency to design structures that fit their needs. Small things, perhaps,
but each person involved was an agent of change. With so many agents in the
field, that change added up, and society began to change in a positive way.
But then there were
the moral quandaries, those that came with speaking for another population,
with trying to change a long-held tradition simply because you thought it was
for their benefit, with the patronization and the view that there was a single
path to being "developed".
But again the fact
that we were being trained to avoid many of those pitfalls, or at least to
think deeply about the unintended consequences of our desire to help, reminded
me that there was a chance things could work out.
Then I spent a month
teaching, doing science experiments with kids in rural schools in India, and
good god, that was frustrating! And exhilarating. And extremely rewarding. I
prepared for that for a semester, and still I didn't know how to navigate the
differences between what the teachers wanted out of me and what I wanted to
contribute. But I muddled through it, and it felt like I had done something,
something tangible, something to help the world. It wasn't just voluntourism, I
had gone to my own country, to a place where my skills, especially my ability
to communicate in both English and Telugu, were useful. I worked with the
teachers, I tried to design experiments that fit into their existing
curriculum, that were cool but taught essential scientific principles, that the
teachers could continue to do after I was gone.
I could justify
that.
I came home, and I
dealt with the aftermath, with thinking about how to continue helping that NGO
(the Rural Development Foundation, if you're interested), with analyzing what I
had actually done, what I should have done, what my role was in the world.
And then I went to
grad school to do basic research in neuroscience because that was what I had
always wanted to do and because discovering the unknown was exciting! Perhaps I
turned away from because it was so confusing.
I settled back into my comfortable life plan. I'd get a PhD, do some
groundbreaking research, go on to win the Nobel Prize, etc. etc. But I feel like I've abandoned a part of my
life. I put so much time into thinking about issues of poverty, and my
interactions with professors, classmates, and the people I worked with in India
changed the way I thought about a lot of things.
Now here I am. I
haven't followed through on the helping people part. I'm not working to
alleviate poverty. Sure, I've helped teach some kids about the brain here,
tried to get them excited about science, but I'm at Stanford, in the middle of
Silicon Valley in California. Shouldn't I be helping
where I am most needed? The vast majority of the middle and high
schoolers in the immediate area are fairly well off, but then again, it's often difficult to see those who aren't. It's much easier to see and want to help spatially distant neighbors than spatially proximate strangers (I'm taking these words from this excellent GlobalPOV video at the bottom of the post). There's good for me to do here, so why have I narrowed my focus to grad school?
I was being selfish.
I am being selfish.
Do I have the right
to be selfish?
How do I justify my
life?
Some days, I think I
have the right to do what I'm doing. Neuroscience is a passion. This is what
I'm good at (when I'm not feeling the effects of imposter syndrome). My time is
best spent where I have the most skill, and that is where I will make my contribution
to society. I need to learn to focus on one thing, become a master of one trade rather than a jack of, in the end, none. I don't know where exactly my path will go, but I believe that in the future, I can still help
people, whether through my work or outside of it.
Some days, however,
I just can't quite justify my choice (because it is a choice). I guess this is one of those days.
