Starting before feeling ready — PhD Research Proposal

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There are a lot of things in life that leaves us in that limbo state where you know you need to make a decision, but none of the options look ideal, or you feel there are too many unknowns or uncertainties at play, so you delay your decision making as long as you can.

For some, the decision to go to grad school is one of those decisions that puts them in the limbo state. For others, the decision to be a grad student wasn’t even a big deal. But the decision on what his/her thesis topic should be is one that takes well over a year to make. Unfortunately, time isn’t something that’s very good at waiting on people.

Throughout this summer, I’ve come to realize that a doctoral program has a lot to do with how much you don’t know, perhaps more so than with things you do know.

The more educated you are, the bigger expectation you and others have for you to have the answers. But I don’t think that’s quite the way things really work. You read more papers, conduct more experiments, learn some more. But at the end of the day, you find out that you still have a lot of things you don’t know, and you’ll probably never have the time to know them all. So, to keep yourself sane, you just gotta learn to be at peace with the fact that you’re just a tiny fish swimming in the vast ocean of unknowns, thinking that you’re going forward, but that’s just a guess from the fish’s point of view. It’s a very humbling experience.

Those of you PhD students in UBC Mech Eng who started their PhD last September are probably in the same boat as me. We are in a big rush to decide and put together a RPD (Research Proposal Defense) for November. It’s one of those things that you must do before you can fully obtain your PhD Candidacy and get rid of that student status you’ve had for like… twenty years…

According to the Department’s program guidelines, all Mech Eng PhD students need to decide on a thesis topic, write a proposal about it, and defend it in front of a research committee within the first 18 months of starting our PhD program, usually during May or November. Actually that changed for all new students, and now it’s 12 instead of 18 months.

But how do you decide on a thesis topic before you really know what you’re doing? How can a mere 18 month period be enough time for someone to have covered all her basis to make an informed decision about things like this? I mean, this decision will affect the rest of your PhD career that could last anywhere from 2.5 years to infinity (in addition to the first 18 months of your PhD program). Well, I am sure the Department has a secret rule on the maximum number of years a person needs to finish his/her PhD, but let’s just say that none of us will have worry about that… And depending on the kind of project you decide to do, doesn’t it label you as an expert in that particularly field, hence affect where you’ll be headed after you get your doctoral degree? Unless you become a prophet or a futurist or some sort, I don’t think you’ll be able to predict which thesis idea will give you the wings you’ll need to fly in the future.

For many weeks, I’ve been going through this mental cycle of “OMG I know nothing, and I’m supposed to know stuff enough to propose things that’ll work out in the future”. Then I realized that I was perhaps over reacting.

The RPD is not supposed to be my PhD thesis defense. I don’t need to know things for certain — ’cause then, you wouldn’t need to do the work you’d be proposing anyway. And if I feel significant sort of certainty that what I’m about to propose will work out, chances are the work may just not be very interesting, or other people might be able to come up with the same idea easily.

My strategy of figuring out my thesis topic was to seek certainty in things I was curious about. I came up with a handful of things that I thought I would love to work on for the next few years poking around, and decided to take first steps in almost all of those things. That way, maybe I’ll have done pilot tests on all of them, have a handle on how promising/challenging each of the thesis directions are, and make my decisions from there. But, of course, this didn’t work out quite well for me, because each project takes a very long time, and I was greedy enough to want to do all of them as full studies instead of pilots.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I made peace with myself and the thought that I’m not going to get any more certain about any of the work I am going to propose. So, I can’t wait until I am ready. I guess that might be why the department asks us to propose our work so early. They know that we can be in this limbo forever — might as well force us to choose and start something than keep us poking around at different things forever.

Anyways, I have a draft proposal, and I am having fun learning about things I didn’t know, finding links that I didn’t see, and framing my ideas using words I’ve never used before. Just gotta keep wearing a positive attitude and say ‘I don’t know if this is going to work, but I’m still going to do it’.

Creating Connections, Equal Opportunities?

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Creating Connections 2013, opening panel. Photo by Dave Pelletier

A couple of weekends ago, I attended the Creating Connections 2013: Working Together to Transform our World conference. Creating Connections is a biannual conference that aims to empower women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) by fostering discussions and conversations about gender issues in these fields.

If you are curious why we have these kinds of conferences in the first place, what people talk about at these conferences, or not sure what the whole gender issue is, then maybe I can help do my part to relieve your curiosity.

Dr. Jennifer Gardy

And please allow me to say this, but if you are one of those people who roll their eyes when hearing about women in STEM initiatives and think, “Ugh, seriously? Another one of those women in engineering things? Women have it so easy. Why don’t men have these things?” then I hope you this post will be helpful in changing your attitude about it, and then maybe we can be friends… eh hem.

Before you read on further though, here’s a disclaimer.

As a blogger who values posts that are written to be true to the writer’s opinions/views, rather than to serve secondary motives, I need to be honest with you and state that the conference was organized by one of my supervisors and people in the department I have close interactions with — i.e., I am heavily biased to highlight the positives, and positives only because they are really awesome people. I am not lying when I say that the conference was really great. It was really well organized, with amazing keynote speakers and panelists such as Drs. Roberta Bondar (Canada’s first female astronaut), Aimee Chan (CEO of Norsat), and Jennifer Gardy (Senior Scientist and guest host for Daily Planet), just to name a few out of the many.

Bob McDonald

But at the risk of making this entire post potentially brown-noser-sounding, I’m going to skip over all the compliments (albeit well deserved). Instead, I am going to talk about the meat of the 1.5-day conference, things that were said and unsaid, and stories that made people laugh and think hard – I might have to have a part II of this post now that I think about it. I think that would do more justice to the spirit of the conference.

Dr. Carin Bondar

The conference started with a punch on Friday evening with a panel of well-known science communicators: Bob Mcdonald, Dr. Carin Bondar, Cam Cronin, and moderator Dr. Jennifer Gardy.

Given the fact that all four of them are science communicators for public media, the panel discussion itself largely consisted of how media portrays men and women in science. There are some general and historical background that allude to the gender problem in science. Historically speaking there are brilliant women scientists who were left more in the background than they should’ve been because of their gender (e.g., Rosalind Franklin, Marie Curie). Bob Mcdonald said that even today, it’s hard to get female experts to talk on Quirks and Quarks, not because they don’t try to look for them, but because there really aren’t that many.

Cam Cronin

The panelists alluded that the issue may lie in gender stereotyping in the media. When kids see more male scientists than women scientists on TV, are girls more likely to think that science is more of a boys’ thing? The close connection between media and how children may stereotype scientists was echoed by Saturday morning’s keynote speaker Dr. Roberta Bondar. She humorously said that when she was growing up, she hadn’t matched astronauts to be a particularly male occupation because they were always wearing these thick suits. She thought they were known as space-people – you know, just another kind of people, like Asian-people living in Asia.

Then someone in the audience asked a question that a lot of people dare to ask women in STEM. That is, “why is it important that more women are in STEM?”

The panelist framed it well I think: It really shouldn’t matter whether you are a male or a female. The important thing is that we put down the barriers and give people equal opportunities.

And I think the key notion that a lot of people don’t realize is that providing equal opportunities isn’t simply accomplished by disregarding gender information when admitting students into STEM classes in universities.

In my opinion, the equal opportunity idea also has to do with making sure both boys and girls are equally encouraged to pursue their careers in STEM. And how would women in STEM be able to encourage careers in STEM to the next generation of scientists if today’s social infrastructure (e.g., having female washrooms in every building) doesn’t properly understand or tailor to gender differences?

To give you my personal anecdotes here, I had nothing but support and encouragement from my parents to pursue engineering when I was growing up. Historically speaking, the Republic of Korea (yes, the South one) was a third-world country coming out of the Korean War. Within only a handful of decades, it bloomed into a first-world country through lots of hard labour, military services in foreign countries, and adoption and development of science and technologies – this is known as the Han River miracle. That’s the same period when companies like Samsung, LG, Hyundai and Kia came into being and grew up to be the international giants of today.

President Park Geun-Hye of South Korea

So my father’s generation grew up thinking that if you got an engineering degree, you are guaranteed a job and a prosperous life. The fact that South Korea’s new and first female president Park, daughter of a former president of Korea, has a degree in Electrical Engineering speaks to how pursuing engineering was encouraged in the country. That thinking was passed on to me and my sister, and no one discouraged me from wanting to pursue engineering even when I was the only borderline failing student in my elementary school math classes.

But after I had been in Canada for about four years and was applying to the University of Waterloo for their engineering undergrad program, one of my high school science teachers pulled me aside and asked me to reconsider my options.

She told me a story of her female childhood best friend who went to become a civil engineer, worked on sites with men most of the time, and came back a completely different person – much more masculine, blunt with swearwords in her speech, and overall not a very soft and tender kind of person my teacher remembered her to be. She was genuinely concerned that I would go through the same kind of phase as her friend and become a very manly and tough kind of person if I went to pursue engineering. I guess engineering was considered much more different in her mind than pure sciences, considering her occupation. Of course, I still went to get my degree in engineering anyway.

Engineering Female Error 404 by Engineer Memes

Surprisingly, when I went to KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology) and attended their mechanical engineering classes as an exchange student, the classroom was comprised of over 40% female students.

Believe it or not, the female students were just like typical Korean university female students in other programs. They wore heels, makeup, and proudly carried a feminine purse with equally feminine cell phones inside. And such classroom scene was accepted as a norm. That was really not the kind of lecture hall scene I was used to from UW. So I learned to wear heels and replaced backpacks with purses during my four months of gender balanced engineering experience in Korea.

Looking back, I think that my high school teacher really wanted what’s best for me, and that speaks to the problem.

I agree that after having been in Canadian engineering schools for almost a decade (holy cow!), I am different than I used to be. I think a lot of it came with some lessons I learned along the way in having to work in a male dominated environment. Would people who have known me or are getting to know me be dissuading their kids from becoming female engineers? Am I reinforcing a stereotype of female engineers in a particular direction? Maybe. I am not sure.

Yay~ I’m in a picture… lol. Creating Connections 2013, Photo by Dave Pelletier.

But I think it is clear that we need to break this cycle of gender stereotyping and to educate parents and teachers that girls pursuing STEM is something to be encouraged – at least as much as boys pursuing STEM. And in my opinion, that includes educating men in STEM about women in STEM issues so that I don’t get the default ‘holy cow’ look on men and women’s face when I say I am pursuing a PhD in robotics, and partially because that could have avoided diaper issues Dr. Bondar had when she went to space and realized that space suites were mainly designed with only male anatomy in mind.

PS. Actually, now that I think about it, I hope people continue to have ‘holy cow’ responses when I say I am pursuing a PhD in robotics, not because they’ve never imagined a female roboticist in their lives, but because they didn’t expect me to be so much older than I look 😉 lol!!!

The weather here.

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One of the dear readers of iMech asked me to comment on the weather in Vancouver. Hmmp! Let me start with a photo of the campus when it’s sunny and beautiful. Yup, right there. That’s beautiful. You see the ocean, the forest hugging the shoreline and the rest of the campus, and the nicely built buildings cozily tucked in it all. But that’s the summer, and odd parts of the spring in some odd years (such as this and last week — we were sunny all day everyday!! wow!!).

Here’s the reality.

If you want to be one of those people who really learn to wake up in the morning and appreciate the fact that sunshine is coming through your window, then Vancouver is the right place for you.

I’m not saying that Vancouver is sunshiny all the time. I’m saying that it isn’t.

Hence, any rays of sunshine or even just clearing of the sky really makes people happy and appreciative of the weather. It does rain lots here. It does snow sometimes in the winter (only a few days in a year max).

Because of the long periods of overcast skies, it does get to the point where people feel depressed during the Fall and Winter seasons.

If you want to take a peak at my state of mind during this season, my previous post will probably help. And of course, because the rain and the ever overcast weather can really get to people, there are different ways to remedy it. Mind you, I was way more affected by the rain last year than the year before that when I was attending a conference held in Vancouver and laughing at the number of umbrellas lying around the conference venue in a super cheerful way.

But the campus itself is awesome regardless of the weather I think. Of course, if you’re not the rain and overcast sky kind of person, planning to be in Vancouver for a long time (like doing a PhD) may not be the best for you. But if that’s not a big deal and you don’t mind tackling it as a challenge, then you’ll soon learn that quite a few people jog in the mornings at 6am even when it’s super dark and rainy outside. If you’re not one of them, like myself, and enjoy running in the mild and sunny weather, then UBC campus is amazing for that too — but in the spring/summer times. I went for a run this morning around 6am down the Main Mall, and it was as though the temperature indoors and outdoors didn’t have much of a difference. The newly paved roads on campus also make it really easy for you to plan your runs. Wherever you go, there are green stuff everywhere, or parks and museums you’re bound to pass by during your runs. If you’re more of a run on the beach kind of a person, there’s always the wreck beach on campus that you can run/walk down to. If you feel like switching things up a little bit from your morning beach run, then you are only minutes away from entering the woods.

But I gotta tell you about the summer though.

Contrast to the weather in the Fall/Winter, Vancouver in the Summer is really awesome. Like I mentioned, the abundance of the forests, gardens, parks, beaches, and the mountains make me feel like I am living in some sort of a tourist resort area, although I never end up enjoying all of it as much as I should. And did I mention the sun? Yes! The sun comes out in the summer! It’s never humid/sticky during the summer and the temperature rarely gets uncomfortably hot. Because of the fabulous weather and the surprising lack of bugs, Vancouver summers are definitely more than bearable to enjoy the outdoors while watching the snow capped mountains nearby.

And of course, Vancouver summers are awesome for gardening if you’re into that as well — my blueberry shrub is starting to bloom already, woot woot!!

I hope this solved some of the mysteries of Vancouver weathers for you.

Some people also had questions about using the U-pass, bicycling, or scooter to get to campus, and my answer to that question is you don’t really have an option out of U-Pass unless you qualify as one of the legitimate opt-out cases (check the U-Pass Opt Out form here — may not be up to date). But U-pass in general is useful to have. I live on campus and I use it to go grocery shopping, visit friends, go off campus on weekends etc. Since each ride is $2.75 these days, and people usually ride the bus on their way out and their way in, it will cost you $5.50 per trip. That means, if you plan to go somewhere via the transit more than about five times a month, you’re better off having a U-pass than not — a good deal, no?

U-pass is also definitely cheaper than paying for parking on campus — parking is super expensive on campus in my opinion, not to mention the high gas prices in Vancouver if you’ll be getting a scooter/car here. Biking to campus is not a bad option. A good way to get some of that mandatory daily exercise out of your task list. The campus is quite bike friendly in the sense that lots of buildings have showers you can use if you come biking to the lab stinky and need to wash up and change before you start working. The whole city is bike friendly and has bike paths all around the city. But then again, think about it this way. Are you the kind of person who wouldn’t mind biking in the rain everyday for many many months? I think it’s a valid question.

Anywho, I’m just glad that the weather has been super nice in Vancouver lately. Totally makes it easy to start your day happy and energetic.