Here at Savvy Scientist we’re keen to learn more about the experiences of PhD students all across the world. I’m therefore excited to share with you a PhD profile of Vivienne, who is currently studying for her PhD in Canada. I got to know Vivienne last month when we both participated in a Facebook Live panel with Science Magazine which is available here. If you’re a PhD student (or graduate) yourself and would be interested in sharing your PhD experience, please get in touch!
Without further ado, here is Vivienne’s PhD journey!
Please introduce yourself and summarise your PhD in a sentence
Hi! I’m Vivienne, a second year PhD student at McGill in Materials Engineering. My PhD looks at using near infrared light to control chemotherapy release from nanoparticles so that we can develop more personalized chemotherapy regimens for brain cancer patients.
Chemotherapy is incredibly toxic to the body and because we don’t understand which dosing regimens are most effective, we give the same dosage to each patient, meaning that cancer patients are being exposed to much more toxic drug than is needed to effectively shrink the tumour. But what if you could trap the drug in a tiny particle and only release the amount the patient needs at the tumour site? I am working on developing a light-responsive system that hopefully will lead to more personalized chemotherapy regimens for patients.
You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn and my personal website, where I share more personal stories of my PhD journey.
PhD Applications
What’s your background?
I had always loved science. Perhaps it had something to do with my Dad being a professor of chemical engineering, or the weekends of cooking things from the book “Science Experiments You Can Eat” with my Mom. I remember being 10 and watching a movie that talked about the structure of DNA. I asked my Mom what kind of career led you to study that and we decided on biochemistry.
In high school, I was very involved in science fair and worked out of my Dad’s lab, which is where I first got introduced to nanotechnology. Those projects were more environment focused, but I knew my interests still lay in the biomedical field. I then went on to do a major in Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton with a minor in Neuroscience. I knew from my studies that I had a hard time just studying theory; I wanted to impact people’s lives.
The summer before senior year, I was very impacted by spending two weeks at a special needs foster home in a rural village in China, so when I graduated I upended my life and moved to the village for two years.
Why did you choose to do a PhD?
My journey is pretty atypical. Most people either go straight into a PhD after undergrad, or acquire some sort of work experience in industry. But I needed that time of escaping the world of academia I had grown up in to know that I was choosing this path on my own, not just because it had always been my Dad’s dream for me.
My two years in China were some of the best years of my life. It gave me on-the-ground experience of working with kids that I missed being in academia, but it also brought me face to face with the reality of disability, and how limited the solutions are for kids that suffer from neurological disorder. And although I loved being their teacher, I also felt this pull back to science and the intellectual challenge of probing hard questions.
I also discovered a deeper passion for teaching and mentoring while in China, but coupled with the freedom and creativity to explore whatever I was intellectually curious about. This helped me confirm that my gifts and passions were pointing me towards the larger career goal I always had had of being a professor. But I knew this time that going back to academia, I would need to have a strong focus on translation, asking questions like: how is the knowledge generated in labs effectively translated to patients, especially in underresourced settings?
In order to become a professor, the PhD was the next natural step. But I would say the freedom, creativity, intellectual challenge and impact I desired definitely were what pulled me towards eventually making that decision.
How did you decide on a project? What was the applications process like?
I knew that I wanted to work on a project at the intersection of biomedical engineering and nanotechnology, with a strong clinical translation component. I cast a pretty wide net and wrote to professors who had projects I was interested in. But honestly, it was hard being physically far away in a remote village with hardly any networks in those research fields. I realise now that networking plays a key role in landing future research positions.
I was offered an interview in the lab I am currently at and accepted on the spot after I gave a presentation of my research. So I’m grateful that the process was actually very straightforward for me.
What advice do you have for people applying for a PhD?
Many people tell me that they aren’t applying because they aren’t sure they can be that passionate about a subject for that long. The truth is that you don’t have to be. The PhD journey is a very long one, and the research focus evolves constantly. Depending on how much freedom your supervisor gives you, it could even evolve based on how your own interests are evolving.
One of the best parts of the PhD has been the intellectual freedom it offers. So for those who are afraid of being boxed into something for years: you don’t have to be, it is what you make it! Unless of course, you get a horrible supervisor. So if I could give one piece of advice, it would be to choose your supervisor carefully. If you can, visit their lab. Talk to them in person. Ask their students if the supervisor is a good mentor. Just because they have published prolifically does not mean they are good mentors, and you want someone who will be generous with their time, and genuinely care for you and your wellbeing.
Life as a PhD Student
How have you found your PhD so far? Has it differed from your expectations?
I thought the PhD would be a lot more straightforward than it was. I had these big dreams of what I wanted my project to be. But in my first year, I was simply bogged down with trying to replicate the results of the student before me and found myself lost in literature with protocols all telling me to do different things. I didn’t know who to ask for help, and the lack of structure/clear expectations or even expert guidance was definitely disconcerting. There were times I felt like I was wasting my time being directionless, or guilty when I felt I was not making enough progress.
Halfway through now, I’ve come to recognise all that uncertainty and failure as a normal, and actually very growing, part of the PhD. It teaches you to be resilient. And so instead of just going in, expecting it to be this academically rigorous experience, I think the PhD has in fact taught me more about how to handle uncertainty and doubt, how to deal with failure and how to reach out for help when I need it.
What have been the highlights of your PhD so far?
Connecting with kindred spirits
The first year of my PhD was lonely, but in my second year, when I started opening up about my doubts, I found many kindred spirits around me and discovering that community was definitely a highlight. I found many highly motivated, like-minded friends through working at Teaching and Learning Services at McGill and also as I began writing on my blog, I found my experiences struck a chord with many readers.
I was so surprised when one of the pieces I wrote “Why labs should take more coffee breaks” was accepted for publication by Science Careers and connected me with scientists all over the globe who were craving community and coffee breaks.
Travelling to Europe
If you could get a stipend to do school somewhere else and immerse yourself in a different culture, why not? I was incredibly blessed to have received the Mitacs Globalink Award that funded me to go to Strasbourg, France for 4 months where I got to benefit from a different lab’s expertise, explore Europe (always been a dream of mine!) and receive an education on cultural differences! The PhD is a great time to explore your travelling dreams – you just have to search out the right opportunities/funds (or even conferences!).
Starting various passion projects
Yes, you do work hard in the PhD, but you also get to determine your own schedule. Which means that you can take on passion projects of your own choosing, if you know how to manage your time well. For me, this has meant getting involved with organizations like Science and Policy Exchange, which aims to change government policy regarding science and grad school, or being the vegan caterer for an art café-cooperative that believes art should be accessible to all, regardless of socio-economic status.
The PhD is a very unique time in your life, where you have access to many cool educational opportunities, networks of interesting people but also the time and flexibility to pursue them. It really is as boring or interesting as you make it to be.
What do you wish you’d known when you started your PhD?
I wish I had known that everyone is on their own journey, so I don’t need to compare myself with others. I was so used to undergraduate life, where everyone is on the same timeline and meeting the same milestones. The PhD is more about crafting your own story.
You may have a week where nothing is working. Instead of getting frustrated at something you cannot control, maybe the best thing is to step back and rest. Maybe the next week you have a discovery. Science is slow. You’re working at the cutting edge where answers are yet to be revealed. And that’s okay.
Have you found your PhD stressful? If so how have you handled the stress?
The stress comes when I forget that I am on my own journey. Or when I feel guilty that I’m not working regular work days. I have to remind myself that I just do my best with what I have been given, and that is really all I have control over. I cannot control my experiments or plan out how my next few months will look. But I can follow where the science takes me and focus on enjoying the journey rather than trying to force it to look like what I want it to.
Having routines definitely helps, as well as making sure to share my emotions with friends and family. I also of course write in my blog (my therapy!) and recently bought an electronic drum kit I can pound for stress relief (half joking, but not really…)
Do you have any advice or tips you’d like to share?
- Take more notes than you think you need for each experiment, even if you thought they were failures. There are so many times I wish I had jotted down a concentration, or a reasoning for why I chose one reagent over the other, but my lab notebook listed only the bare bones of the protocol. Now, I literally journal about each experiment – things that went wrong, my current interpretation of the results – because it really is more about writing the story than churning out data. So, I’ve been putting my writer-journalist hat on more, even when doing science.
- Be open to serendipity. As I said above, the PhD is full of unpredictability. While that can be stressful, it can also be exhilarating because there are so many turns your journey could take! So, be open to meeting new people, exchanging ideas and seeing where that takes you. My whole collaboration in Strasbourg came about because I struck up some small-talk with the other students as we waited around for a microscopy training session to start. So you just NEVER know.
- Establish a good filing and note-taking system early on. I suggest Mendeley (for citations), Evernote (for note-taking) and have tinkered around with various ways of organizing my data on my computer.
PhD Completion and Beyond
Do you know yet what you would like to do after you finish your PhD?
I just got a national scholarship which will fund me for another 3 years, so I plan to be here for a while more. The track to professorship is to get a post-doc, and I probably would want to pivot to an area that is closer to clinical translation, as the current light-controlled systems are still in their infancy as compared to liposomal systems, for example.
But I also have other interests in science policy, communication and translation, so if opportunities arose I would definitely be on board. Right now, I’m just trying to get the most I can out of this PhD experience – maybe even do another stint abroad (in London this time?).
In hindsight would you choose to do a PhD again?
Definitely. I don’t feel this way all the time, and there are definite ups and downs. But it’s always easier to see the benefits of all the other jobs except your own, and for what the PhD affords me in terms of creativity, independence, flexibility and challenge, as well as in opening up opportunities in the future, I have no regrets.
Thank you very much to Vivienne for her sharing her PhD experience with us. Be sure to check out Vivienne’s personal website for more personal stories from her PhD journey. You can also reach out to her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
If you have your own PhD journey you’d like to share, please get in touch here. Subscribe here to stay up to date:
