Print This PostOver the past few months I stepped away from academic life to take up an internship as a government analyst. Now, as I begin the shift back into science, I find myself caught between two rising emotions: excitement and anxiety..
During my time in government, my manager set me tasks that matched my skills, checked in regularly to see how I was progressing, and encouraged a strict 5:30pm finish. The work was engaging, the team welcoming, and the balance between job and life refreshingly straightforward. I was even fortunate enough to see my contributions feed directly into spending decisions and policy. It felt steady, secure, comfortable. For a while, I wondered if this was what I wanted from a career. In the end, I decided, probably not.
Spending time in an alternative working environment has been an incredibly positive and enlightening experience. One of the things I have learned about myself is that I crave exploring the vaguely scribbled edges of the map rather than scouting well-known terrain. I crave groundbreaking methodologies that might turn out to provide nothing but statistical artefacts. I crave top-of-the-line research that may well be disproved within a year. The uncertainty inherent within academia is, to my surprise, something I have come to love. I still want my research to have concrete impacts, but have realised I’m happy to take big swings and misses. My entire PhD has centred on how uncertainty impacts our motivation to act, but I had never really considered how that uncertainty impacts my motivation to stay in science. I am excited to get back to the edges of the map, where there may be paradigm shifts, and potentially monsters.
But whilst that excitement is sharp, staring out from the edge of the map also means staring into a void. And at the moment that void is a pretty stunning characterisation of my future within science. I am in the final few months of my PhD, applying to my first fellowships, scoping out my first grants, and looking for postdoc positions. It feels at times that the only certainty is rejection. I apply to everything with the knowledge that my chances are slim. For the first time I start to doubt that I’ll get there at all. The leaky pipeline of academia that I’ve heard so much about now seems to stretch out in front of me, and I’m not sure if I can make it to the end. I think it’s fair to say for anyone that would be slightly anxiety-inducing.
There’s still uncertainty in government positions, as in any job, but the career progression seems so wonderfully stable. Employees will move up the ladder, engage in managed shifts to other departments, and get concrete rewards for work well done. The allure of that stability is hard to ignore.
Uncertainty is a parameter that applies to everything in life. Every action, every outcome, every observation. We can never avoid it completely – only laymen deal in absolutes 😉 But in my brief sojourn from academia, I realised just how much uncertainty we have to deal with in our line of work. Not only uncertainty around our science, which can be as exciting as it is terrifying, but also around our careers as scientists. Perhaps we’re all massive adrenaline-junkies who thrive off the high of never knowing what’s coming next. Or maybe we suffer through the unknown of what our lives will look like in a decade’s time for the sheer love of how we get to spend the days in-between. For me, it’s likely a bit of both.
I’m aware that my age puts me in a position where I can handle more uncertainty.
I don’t have anyone dependent on me for a stable income, and I still have the freedom to move around the country, or the world, on a relative whim to take up job opportunities. But already I feel a spot of fatigue in the sheer level of variance around my job prospects and what the future holds, so why keep going down this strange and untravelled path?
Because its fun. Because it’s an adventure. Because the uncertainty of what comes next feels exciting. This time next year I could be in a different country, researching something completely different, or I could have decided to leave academia altogether. Uncertainty means not knowing, but that not knowing often comes about because of the sheer number of potential options. As a small-town girl, most of those options are ones I never thought I’d have. I could be anywhere. I could do anything. I might do all of it, or none of it, or some of it. I might crash and burn but even then, I’ll have a story to tell, and experience to help me with the next choice in the fractal forking paths of life.
My internship taught me that I have valuable skills already that I didn’t even realise, and that I could easily enjoy a career outside of academia. But it also taught me that I get a thrill from engaging with the unknown. It taught me that stability is comforting, but for now I’m willing to be a little uncomfortable. It taught me that a consistent routine is calming, but for now I’m willing to be erratic. Because the thing about anxiety and excitement is that they often feel strikingly similar: heart rate high, adrenaline pumping, pupils dilated.
All this to say, that as much as I wish the field of academia could make some concrete changes to provide a more stable career for all of us looking to chase the dream of science, I’m still willing to give it a go. Not because I think I’ll succeed, not because I am immune to the terror of staring into the void, and definitely not because I am a rational person without the ability to catastrophise pretty much everything. But because for now, for me, the excitement of the unknown is worth the anxiety of the uncertain.
Rebecca Williams
Author
Rebecca Williams is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. Though originally from ‘up North’ in a small town called Leigh, she did her undergraduate and masters at the University of Oxford before defecting to Cambridge for her doctorate researching Frontotemporal dementia and Apathy. She now spends her days collecting data from wonderful volunteers, and coding. Outside work, she plays board games, and is very crafty, she also has her own YouTube Channel Becky & the Brain.
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