Yes, you can have a life in grad school
A guide to being an almost-close-to-normal twenty-something who also happens to be getting their PhD
“But I’ll be thirty when I finish graduate school!” “Julia, would you rather be thirty with a PhD or without one?” I have repeated this conversation many times in my head and to anyone who will listen. Before I decided to get my PhD in biology, I had heard so many horror stories about graduate […]
Grad School is Just Chess with Pipettes
Lessons learned from 10,642 chess games that also applied to my PhD
In grad school, I learned how to play chess—and got addicted to it. At first, it was just a fun distraction from experiments and papers, but over time I realized that many of the lessons I was learning over the board applied just as much to my PhD. Strategy, patience, resilience—the same principles that helped […]
Time After Time
The analog antidote to my over-digitized life
The ability to have a shower curtain delivered by Amazon in under twenty-four hours is a recent development, relatively speaking. But the ability to have a printed copy of the latest news delivered to your doorstep, with articles written just hours ago, is not very recent at all, in fact. Home delivery of the print […]
My First Ironman: Where the Road to a World Record Begins
A story of struggle, endurance, and learning to believe in myself
I stood on the beach wall staring out into the ocean as the sun rose, forming the most beautiful purples and pinks. I thought to myself: “Today, I find out if the work I put in over the last seven months was enough.” “Today, I find out if the chase towards a world record begins […]
The Best Professors Teach Humility
How MIT professor David Autor exemplifies what economics can and should be about
I used to despise economics. ECO101, the introductory economics course I took at the University of Toronto, had convinced me that the field only offered dangerous half-truths. “Minimum wage laws increase unemployment,” I was taught. “Rent control laws are economically harmful; fairness can and should instead be achieved through other means.” I had started the […]
