BeDo

I started graduate school 5 years after completing my Biology undergraduate degree. In those 5 years, I became accustomed to the steady pay, routine, and social engagements that came with having a job outside of academia. Returning to school was fraught with anxieties and fears of the unknown. How would I adjust? Was I making the right decision leaving a good job behind? 

I’m a birder (‘birdwatcher’), and have watched birds in both a personal and professional capacity. If you have ever gone out with a serious birder, you will notice it’s more than simply walking through the forest. A birder has binoculars, they usually have some sort of pocket big enough to fit a field guide. And it’s practical, not fashionable. They take a step, stop, look around, listen, and then take one more step forward putting their foot down softly so as to not make noise. It’s a quiet crawl with intense focus.

The first time I went birding, I accompanied a couple of serious birders in a mahogany forest in south Florida. It was a 1.5 km loop enroute to a field station. Expecting to finish up this loop in no more than 20 minutes, I was astounded when I checked the time and found that after an hour, we were little more than half way through the route! But I can recall that walk vividly. I can see the texture of the bark of the ancient mahogany giants, the way they twisted and turned and most of all I remember the elation when my friends laid eyes on a new species; a white-crowned pigeon. I nearly laughed out loud when I saw what they were staring at—a bird maybe slightly more handsome than a common street pigeon. But when they described it to me, showing me the field guide, the range of its migration, how we were on the very outer margin at just the right time of the year to encounter it, I began to catch the joy. I took out my new field guide, clean and unmarked, and penned in the date and location of this new find with pride.

It might seem like a strange analogy, but just as walking through the forest with a field guide transformed my bird-watching experience, having a suitable ‘guide’ during the academic process is equally as transformative. Being prepared and having resources—be it a trustworthy colleague, or words of wisdom and encouragement from a blog or podcast—before you embark on your academic journey is crucial. I encountered a wide range of emotions along the way, not all of them positive. “Ah yes! Loneliness/exhaustion/burn-out. I recall having a conversation with so-and-so about this and how they dealt with it”.

Secondly, just like birders jot down their observations in field books, we can write down our “field observations” from our everyday experiences in academia. Recognizing what we are feeling- both our ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions, we can be better prepared for them next time and get a better handle on why we’re feeling them in the first place. We can shine bright lights on them with our curiosity, and we can walk alongside others with well-worn, ear-marked field guides. We can let them describe and paint the picture of things once unseen against a backdrop of noise and colour in the wild forest of academia.