Summer Jam Pt 1: Adult Education

My life, both as a Graduate Student and as A Human in The World, has been sort of chaotic of late, leading me to avoid trying to sit down and get my thoughts about the things happening to/because of me into an intelligible format. Not just an intelligible format but more importantly, one that matters to anyone besides my personified diary. 

                Diary: It’s been a while Sue, girl. Tell it how it is! Let it all out. Don’t even worry about how it will all sound. This is a safe space for your tender grad student underbelly.

                Sue: Diary, thank you so much for saying that. You’re always so available and I love that I can imagine you as Donna from Parks and Rec and not feel like I’m perpetuating stereotypes in this safe space.

                Diary: Whatever, girl, I will be as sassy and supportive as you need me to be. All you have to do is write some sentences in me, at some point. Just a few.

Sue: (Fidgeting with a melting tub of ice cream) I’m really sorry I’m so busy right now I can’t write about my life but thanks again for reminding me, you’re literally the greatest. *Sheepishly opens Netflix*

Diary: -_____- Scandal, really? Basic.

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Anyway, I’m hoping to do right by my Diary, who has been side-eyeing me on my nightstand for months, and this blog, by sharing some thoughts retrospectively on this past summer. I’m going to call it Summer Jam, because I wish I went to the Summer Jam hip hop/R&B concert/goliath when I was a teen, rather than exclusively going to Belle & Sebastian concerts, where I skewed the age distribution significantly.

This first portion of the Summer Jam series is on Learning New Things as an Adult. This might seem like a lame way to honor my sassy Diary, readers, my aspiring blog and the eponymous hip hop concert/wet T shirt contest that is Summer Jam, but I promise it’s a more important topic than you think.  Let me show you, by way of Narrative…

*transporting flourish*

My research has taken me to a murky new area (who am I kidding, most of science is a murky, mysterious business): functional analysis of soil microbial communities through gene analysis. For my research questions, this means looking at the bacteria and archaea in soils in terms of some job that they do and the genetic switch that controls how much they can do that job. For instance, if you’re curious about a biological activity like nitrification, which turns ammonium in soil into nitrate (all the plants say: hell yeah, do that thang), you might want to look at the genes that control nitrification. For some of you, that’s equivalent to toasting waffles and calling it a gourmet breakfast, but for others, it’s as confusing as the US electoral college (what is that thing?). As it turns out, that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do, but trying something new has been a separate quest entirely.

My lab doesn’t do molecular anything, so this piece of my dissertation has been more independent from my advisor than any other. To get the expertise, lab space, equipment and patience necessary to learn the molecular techniques for this project, I needed to team up with a lab that could furnish/tolerate me and help me to interpret the results. Enter: The Hewson Lab. Located in Wing Hall on Cornell’s campus, this team of Excellent Humans mostly studies marine viruses but strayed from their watery path to work with my tropical dirt. I walked into the Hewson lab in early June with only a fuzzy knowledge of what PCR (polymerase chain reaction, for those folks who like to front like I did) actually is, and only a few papers under my belt that explained the techniques in that vague way that methods sections do. I was nervous, nay, terrified?, that I was going to be found out as a fraud who needed way more instruction than anyone was willing to give. Nodding confidently as the microbiology grad students explained the steps for extracting DNA from soils, making a “master mix” and running a gel, I was actually just becoming dizzy and making a half-baked list of things to Wikipedia (look, it’s a verb!) later.

My options, going into this new situation, were to start fronting immediately, admit all my ignorance, or pull together some combination that preserved my pride while allowing me to actually know what was going on. As I often do (popcorn/Reese’s Pieces, gin/tonic, Haitian parent/ Indian parent), I went for the combo. My reticence to admit what I didn’t know came from a couple of places. How could I, knowing what people who have gone to high school and Private Colleges are expected to know, tell someone that I have never really done PCR before (not even in Bio lab)? Or that I am not sure why gene copy numbers vary among taxa? Or that annealing temperature is a foreign concept to me? Or that I read a phylogenetic tree as well as I do Italian (badly, with a lot of guessing)? All of these uncertainties stem from my late turn from the liberal arts to the sciences (junior year, NYU) and my protracted catch up routine. 

But how to dispel the anxiety that the people with whom I work, the nice, smart and reasonable people, don’t somehow have these thoughts bubbling somewhere beneath the surface? 

They also come from a less straightforward place—one more steeped in mainstream expectations of people who look like me. There’s a very real set of underlying expectations of Black and brown people when it comes to academic pursuits. You’re either assumed to come from low-achieving schools and therefor have a lower baseline knowledge and experience than your colleagues, or you’re an exception to this rule, a shining anomaly and a testament to the lack of problems and racial disparities in education. When you are that brown person, you’re kind of fucked either way. Whether you do extremely well or fumble through (as most grad students do!!)  you somehow enable a stranger to go: “See, just as I always said!”. And that’s precisely what I wanted to avoid. But how to dispel the anxiety that the people with whom I work, the nice, smart and reasonable people, don’t somehow have these thoughts bubbling somewhere beneath the surface? I don’t know if there is a good way to talk yourself out of that discomfort, or for that matter whether anyone should. Whether or not your immediate colleagues think in overt or subtle generalizations, or in any generalizations at all, someone out there does. And wherever that person is, their assumptions do something real, felt, to the experience of being brown and being an academic at the same time. 

So this is what I’ve gathered about learning new things as an adult. The position of being older, of having made it to grad school, and a fancy one at that, comes with mixed expectations of what you should know. Some of those expectations make sense: understanding the building blocks of life, the genetic basis of biological functions, these things are fair expectations. Others are less reasonable because as PhD students, we’ve come to specialize, and when your research draws from a couple of disciplines, there’s bound to be a moment where you have to learn something from the ground up. And then there are the expectations that are based on what people think they know, and which reveal a confirmation bias born of latent prejudice. This last one, it’s the worst, and I’ve experienced on a number of occasions that I might recount later. The best thing that I’ve learned from fumbling around a microbiology lab most of this summer is that having facts crammed into your head and stuntin’ like you were just born with a PhD is a lot less respected than is the ability to learn new concepts and unite them with your own area of expertise. TBH, this is a relief to me.