#my time as a postgrad has left a mark on my soul

[radramblog]

<untitled uni ramble, i guess>

I’m about 4 or so months away from finishing my master’s degree, and I’m not sure what I’m doing after that.

(fair warning this ended up way more bitter and resentful than I expected :v )

In high school I definitely knew I wanted to do science, but beyond that, I didn’t know what I wanted. After I had a particularly awful teacher in year 10, and realised he was one of the school’s primary physics teachers, I elected not to pursue that line, inadvertently crushing child me’s wanting to be an astronomer (and, though it would take a while to drive the point home, dad wanting me to be an engineer like him). To be fair, I probably would have bounced off of it pretty hard, too much complicated maths I could never really get my head around. At that point my mum was still pushing for me to be a doctor (did she ever really stop?), so hey, Human Biology looks good, and I was pretty good at Chemistry and it runs in the family so why not, right?

The latter took much better than the former, and while I would continue Chemistry into my undergrad, any human element of the biology I studied was left at the door. Rather, I split my options as wide as possible in first year, trying to sample bits of Biochemistry, Genetics, and Pharmacology, the former of which being the main one to resonate with me. Chemistry, I thought, was a shoe-in, but I might as well get the double degree going, since I’m clearly capable of it.

And then I got sick of Chemistry. Failing the last unit definitely didn’t help, having basically only one friend in it didn’t either (I knew a few others in Biochem-related fields and had made a few mates in that course). I felt burned out on it, felt like I was only really completing that unit out of obligation and restriction rather than wanting to do it. I suppose no-one really wants to repeat a unit- that year, 2019, I’d argue was the worst (certainly the most wasteful) of my life, and having that failure weighing down on me didn’t help. But I got through it, and now I have a nice shiny piece of paper that says congratulations you’re good at science. It’s a shame my grandmother, a professor of Organic Chemistry in her time and a large part of the inspiration for me to go down that path, couldn’t see me reach that milestone.

But that piece of paper doesn’t say that I’m good enough at science to get a real job.

For that you need postgrad in this day and age, and its likely that still wouldn’t be enough. My options were twofold- Masters or Honours, Chemistry or Biochemistry. The latter was simple, I just wanted to drop Chem like it was hot, I’d been burned before (literally once or twice), and the former was made easier by the realisations that A. Masters would only take 3 semesters if I didn’t fuck it up and B. Honours isn’t universally recognised, particularly in the United States since I have a citizenship there. So I just audibled into that degree, and here I am now, 2/3rds of the way through it.

Maybe I’m just down because COVID has made Uni the last year a massive pain, despite my surprisingly solid marks. I haven’t been in the lab since 2019, after all, and another year beyond that for a Biochem lab specifically. But either way I’m beginning to wonder what the point of this is. Research is not something that’s a great idea to get into if you want a stable career, especially here these days, but I don’t want to sell my soul to some massive corporate lab. What else is there for a biochemist to do, though? Where else can I apply these skills, ones that depression and imposter syndrome barely let me acknowledge? I just don’t know, and I’m sick of people asking me what I want to do, because it feels like I’ve just gone with the flow for the past…forever.

Uni starts again in a week and a half. 12 weeks (plus a few for exams) later, I should have an actual, honest to god, postgraduate degree. Where the hell do I go from there?

#ramble #personal #real shit