Opinion: Coming to terms with six years in science: obsession, isolation, and moments of wonder

There’s a vision people have of graduate students, particularly those from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that conjures quirky expertise — someone with enthusiasm, confidence, ingenuity. I was not one of those students.

The night after my thesis defense, falling asleep in bed, I reviewed the past six years of my life. I thought of the first time that I saw fish and frog embryos, and the gleaming, wooden table where my adviser and I had hourslong conversations about biology. I thought about the experiments and obsession and isolation. I saw my 20s passing by in a flash and wondered: Was it worth it?

I had come to MIT to study developmental biology. I wanted to understand how an embryo grows — how an eye, brain, or tail emerges from a formless lump of cells. Under the microscope, I watched cells crawling over and under each other, forming hollow tubes and staggered sheets of tissue as the soft architecture of the body took shape.

In the laboratory, I felt like I understood life. It wasn’t just the brutal desire to survive — the panic and hunger of prey and predator — but also the logic of cells and their compulsion for order.

The scientists I worked alongside had their compulsions as well. Obsessed with our projects, we worked 60 to 90 hours a week. Together, we normalized our monomania. At times it was beautiful — a force building upon itself to