The importance of stopping
Life as a PhD student is unique in many ways, and in some respects it really does resemble the Olympics. Olympic athletes, in fact, put (at least) 4 years of hard work on the line in a few minutes, and those few minutes can shape the next 4 years, or an entire lifetime, because that’s all that gets seen from the outside. Likewise, during a PhD you work for (at least) 3 years on a myriad of different projects and, if you’re lucky enough, some of it gets published in a journal or presented at a conference — and that’s not only the one moment where we feel entitled to (brief) gratification, but it’s also what can go on to shape the following X years, because that’s all that gets seen from the outside. During ‘submissions,’ though, you have to juggle between the journal’s guidelines (because every journal has its own!), supplementary materials, and the temptation to strip your paper down to nothing while responding to reviewers’ comments — especially the legendary reviewer #2. And for conferences it’s almost worse, because on top of all that comes the weight of the deadline, a genuine ’line of death,’ because if it doesn’t go well you have to wait (at least) until next year to try again. In short, all this chaos means you forget to stop. Always working on the long term, sometimes on abstract subjects, leaves you floating in this cloud of unawareness, always leaving you with the feeling of emptiness under your feet, as if you weren’t actually building anything. Well, stopping is essential to realize that we really are working, to give it value, to look from the outside at where we’re headed and understand whether it’s the right direction. Stopping is also nice for celebrating your own milestones — the ones that get seen from outside and, above all, the ones only we can see — because you can’t wait for the Olympics to come around to celebrate! So, last week was a tour de force between a short stint in Italy and the competition I took part in, and it was only once I got back to Nijmegen (where I’m doing my period abroad) that I realized I’d forgotten to celebrate! But celebrate what?
- The first month alone of my life (I know, 28 is a bit late, but better late than never)
- The first month abroad (I’m in Nijmegen (NL), in the lung group of DIAG, at Radboudumc, working on a malignancy prediction model for lung nodules)
- The first tiramisù where the custard curdles but that, turned into ice cream, becomes a masterpiece
- The new friendships I’m building and the ones that have always been there
- The new projects and new ideas that keep coming up (as if the ones already in progress weren’t enough)
- The Coimbra Group - 3-Minute-Thesis Competition - Unibo edition! A real challenge in which 10 Unibo researchers present their PhD project in 3 minutes, using language everyone can understand and with just one slide (the competition livestream is available here)
Yeah, that last one I didn’t see coming myself. Sure, my passion for science communication has grown more and more over time, especially after the workshops for middle-schoolers run with Ossigeno S.C.S — thank you Eliana, Danilo and Pier for what you do. But managing to talk about my own PhD project in 3 minutes, in English, in front of a jury, was definitely not in the plans of the Giulia who, at 8 years old, was too shy to even say her own name.
This morning I’m 28 (well, have been for 10 days now…) and I’m stopping to celebrate, to figure out a bit more what I like doing and where I want to go, professionally and not, and to thank the colleagues who took part in the competition and reminded me that doing science is the best job in the world.
See you soon, Giulia