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PRADEEP: It was a cold January evening. And I was sitting across the large desk that separated my adviser’s workspace from the rest of his office. And I was sitting in my chair. And I blurted out to him, I’m not enjoying doing research. There was a moment of silence. And then he looked at me. And then he told me kindly, but rather bluntly, maybe you’re not cut out for this kind of work.
When I first came to MIT, I joined my lab in my first year. And was having a lot of fun. I was working on this project with another intern and a senior graduate student in my lab who was also a fantastic mentor. I was at this great place. MIT is like the best university in the world. And this was the perfect place for me to do a lot of cool research and work hard and have a successful career.
That project eventually ended during the end of that year. And then, I decided to take a break to do an internship, which I also really had a lot of fun. And my confidence was sky high. When I came back after my internship, I really wanted to work on something cool and prove myself and wow my advisor. But this was also March 2020 when the pandemic hit. And the campus went into lockdown.
So I was faced with this task of defining a problem and a project to get working on. But very quickly, I ran into barriers. I read a lot of papers but had struggle identifying what an interesting problem would be. And eventually, my advisor noticed this. And then he said, you know, I have this other problem that is relatively tractable. So why don’t you get started with this and run with this as you figure out other things that you want to work on.
And I was like, yeah, that makes sense, while at the back of my mind, I still was thinking that I was not able to identify an interesting problem to work on after so much effort. Like, am I even competent? Am I fit to do research if I’m not able to do this very simple task? But I just put that aside. And I ran away with the project that my advisor had defined for me.
But even there, of ran into difficulties, technical difficulties. And as my progress slowed down, I started getting very anxious and very stressed. And I started to procrastinate. I started to run away from the stress by sometimes just watching YouTube videos sometimes for hours on end.
Also, in the same time, started channeling my energy in other directions. I worked with the MIT Communication Lab and the Teaching + Learning Lab. I also started taking up hobbies like biking and cooking and baking. These were great ways to de-stress myself.
But sometimes, I also felt like I was investing excessive amounts of time into those things and not on my work, which felt, again, more like procrastination. And they led to this loop where I would get stressed and I would procrastinate and then that would lead to more stress because I wasn’t getting much work done and led to this vicious cycle.
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And over time, I started building this mental model that I was not only just incompetent, but I was also lazy and couldn’t actually get things done. And so my advisor, one fine January, called me to a meeting in his office to discuss about the paper, which is when all of this happened. And he said that, oh, I don’t think you’re cut out for this kind of stuff.
And when he said those words, those broke me because he was a person who I respected a lot, both academically and professionally. And he basically just confirmed my own biases about myself, that I was not cut out for this kind of stuff. I was lazy and incompetent. And I was very sad.
And then immediately, I also remember feeling angry because I felt like, well, I felt this way, but at least I would have hoped that my advisor would have more confidence and more faith in me and say, that’s not the case. But he just agreed with me. But eventually, I went back home. I calmed myself down. And I started writing in my journal.
And as I wrote, something that I realized there was that I blurted out that I was not enjoying this. And that was true. That was something that I knew was true deep down. But that was the first time I kind of admitted that to myself. And I really wanted to understand why. And I started reaching out to friends and mentors outside of my academic circle who knew me well in the hope that they’d be able to give a perspective on something obvious that I was missing. And that’s how I eventually ended up in Caitlin’s office.
And Caitlin is the manager of the communication lab that I work with. She said, me too. I’ve been in this situation as well. And then she said that one of the things that actually helped her get unstuck was working through this book called Designing Your Life. So she got me this book. And then we started working on this together. And the first thing that we did was to articulate my work values.
For me, good work consisted of working with other people, working on hard problems, and working on problems that had applications that I could foresee so that it could be useful to other people. And while these aspects were true for the first project that I worked on, they were not true for the other projects that I worked on, which is why I was having a really hard time, struggling.
So this helped me reframe things in my head. And the reframe was that I was actually not lazy or I was not incompetent. And I am actually cut out for this kind of work. It’s just that I wasn’t working on the right kind of problems that excited me in the right kind of environments.
And now, the current project that I’m working on, I’m actually working with experimental collaborators. And I’m also working on problems that are a little bit more applied that have disease relevance, which makes me see like, oh, this can be applied somewhere down the line at some point. And both of those excite me and keep me going in my current project.
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