Why I Left Harvard
This isn’t a story about how I failed.
Quite the contrary. It’s more a story about how I refused to fail.
All my life, I’ve been good at one thing: school. It’s such a classic smart kid thing to say, but I’d be lying if I said otherwise. From the fourth grade onward, I became known as A Smart Kid.
As a second language learner, it did take me a few years to win the title of Ultimate Smart Kid, also known as Super Nerd (no seriously, someone called me that). But by the time I reached the top, there was no dethroning me. Until I graduated high school and stopped being in a small ass pond.
At Stanford, I was no longer A Smart Kid. I was perfectly average. Not top of my class, but not bottom either. I didn’t have all that much going for me. I was one of many students like me, or at least that’s how it felt at the time.
For awhile, I felt like I didn’t have a place. And like many children of immigrants, I did my best to fit in. Somehow that led me to a prestigious lab and later I found myself setting up a lab at Harvard as a sophomore all because I answered one email.
But whatever series of events led me there, I was good at that too.
Just a smiling 22 year old with no clue what’s next
By the time I was about to graduate from college, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, but I was so determined to be successful, I wanted to do what I knew I was good at. So I applied to graduate school. Told myself I’d go if I got in. And if I got in and hated it, I’d leave after attaining my Masters.
I’ve often wondered if I loved it more or if I were a white man instead, if I might have made it to the end. But I don’t love it and I’m not a white man, so it simply is not worth the energy it takes to be a Latina in STEM at a place like Harvard.
Leaving was on my mind from the start, to be quite honest.
My summer at Harvard in 2016 was not…great. I talked about it incessantly mostly because it felt like the one thing that validated my existence at Stanford. I didn’t have the best grades in chemistry, but I had to be good if I kept doing well in research. I got on two papers by the end of my sophomore year, but also got dismal grades (by my standards). Looking back, I can’t decide if I self-sabotaged my grades or if I sacrificed them for lab. All I know is that I was asked to follow my mentor to Harvard and that had to mean something, right?
So I went and it was terrible.
I worked long hours every week. I didn’t have any friends. I lived with two strangers five years older than me who probably thought I was some wiz kid when really I was an exploited twenty year old.
I was working 60 to 80 hour weeks but getting paid to work forty by a grant I had to acquire independently. Maybe that’s normal and how this world works. Or maybe I should have said something because it’s not normal and I shouldn’t have said yes. But again, it had to mean something that she trusted me of all people with this task, right?
But by the end of the summer, I was depressed and desperate for a break. I’m not sure what would have happened if I didn’t study abroad the following quarter. If I had gone right back to Stanford, I might have burned out irreparably.
I almost turned away from Chemistry then.
My summer at Harvard had left me sad and exhausted. When I was in Spain, I realized how much I enjoyed not doing research and how good I was in non-STEM classes. I wasn’t perfectly average. I was genuinely good and liked what I was learning. I got really close to changing majors then. Really close to turning around and starting fresh.
When I showed up on campus after my quarter abroad, I was sure I’d apply to summer jobs or internships and do something that made me genuinely happy, not something that I thought I was supposed to do because I was good at it.
But I had no clue where to fucking start.
Everyone around me knew what they were doing, but all I had known up this point was academia. I didn’t know how to shift life paths and my parents couldn’t help me, nor did I want them to know I was struggling. I worked really hard to convince them I was happy, when really, I was breaking .
In the end, I went back to research. I couldn’t handle the uncertainty. I knew I was good, so why bother risking with something else that might not pan out? My parents had sacrificed too damn much for me to take any chances.
Which meant that when I got into Harvard, I had no choice but to go.
I could practically hear the sound of people cheering if I failed in any way. But the thing is, I never failed. I was good graduate student. I had a prestigious fellowship. I had an amazing project in a fantastic lab with wonderful people and considerate female professor.
I should have been happy.
And I was. For a little while. Those first three months were pretty great. I was 22, living in a new city, meeting new people, falling in love. I actually thought at one point, that maybe it really was for me.
Until it wasn’t.
Almost immediately after joining a lab, I was diagnosed with mono. I spent the following months struggling to do basically anything, and it wasn’t until that summer I felt back to normal. I was ready to hit my pre-mono levels of productivity, because at that point, the toxic mentality had begun to set in. The one I’d had, three summers ago, the last summer I’d worked at Harvard.
Next thing I knew, I was back there, even lower than I’d been in 2016. I’d battled anxiety and depression my whole life, but it had never been debilitating. I’d always considered myself “high functioning”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. But this time, I alternated between being unable to get out of bed and having anxiety so high I didn’t sleep for days at a time.
Finally, I decided to get on medication. Not for my own good, but because I needed to be able to work. My lack of sleep was affecting my productivity. I was constantly tired and had almost daily migraines. I wasn’t working as hard as I knew I could and it destroyed me. I was convinced that once I was working normal hours and less tired, I’d feel that burst of excitement my friends felt. I just needed some positive results.
I was fortunate enough to have a professor who was very understanding during my adjustment period. The first few weeks of my anxiety meds were awful. But once they were over, I felt like…myself.
Then I thought finally, this was it.
But once the meds were working, I realized I had no excuse anymore. I was no longer depressed…so why did I still have a hard time getting out of bed? And why was it only when I was going to lab? I loved my boss and my co-workers. I loved my cohort. I had so much going for me again, so why wasn’t I springing out of bed every morning, excited to get my first experiment going?
I almost quit then.
I got so close. I began looking into what that might look like. I started connecting with people to talk about what my options were. I tried to envision my life if I left then, what people would say and what it would look like. If I would be okay with it. Back then, I wasn’t. I’d already forgotten a promise I’d made myself.
In November 2019, I met with someone who convinced me to stay until the spring, when I was supposed to take my qualifying exam and either pass to become a Ph.D. Candidate or fail and have to Master out. I agreed, mostly because I didn’t want to waste the year+ I’d already spent there, and because May wasn’t that far.
I didn’t tell my professor that I was considering leaving then. As much as I trusted her, at the end of the day, she was a professor at Harvard. I didn’t want to risk any retaliation, as is more common than in should be in academia. But through some serendipity, my professor had decided I should lead a pioneer project that could potentially be revolutionary.
I admit, I was excited.
I even managed to believe again that this was for me. It was just a matter of finding the right project. For a a few months, I worked in lab, pushing myself like I had before, excited at the thought of being special again. Of being the one to figure this particular thing out.
And then March 2020 happened.
My program pushed back my exam until further notice and left all the second years in a lurch. My plan to leave that spring would no longer be possible, because I had no idea when my exam take place. And even then, I couldn’t leave a stable paycheck and health insurance in the middle of a global pandemic.
So I stayed.
Maybe if things hadn’t happened the way they did, I wouldn’t have gotten so depressed again I was desperate for anything that might help. But got no reassurance whatsoever that the lost months wouldn’t be held against us. No one reached out to see how we were doing. For over 2 months, we were constantly left to wonder when we’d be back in lab, what we should we be doing, whether we would lose our income if we weren’t able to get into lab that summer. The first Zoom town hall was disheartening to say the least.
And then I found myself flung back into lab, with days notice on shift schedules that abided by social distance ordinances. Shift schedules meant to maximize lab productivity and data output, not our well-being.
Around the time we were going back, George Floyd was murdered and that was quite possibly handled even worse than COVID was by my department. If the first Zoom Town Hall was disheartening, the second was infuriating.
All summer, we worked on schedules that made us change our entire lives. There was a period of time when I didn’t interact with my roommates or boyfriend for more than an hour a day because my shift ended right when they needed to go to bed and they got home just as I was starting my shift.
And then when the summer ended, and restrictions were slowly loosened as testing became widely available, the second years were informed our qualifying exams would be in less than two months. Qualifying exams that needed weeks of preparation and were data based. Data I didn’t have because we were in a pandemic.
For the next two months, I scrambled.
I worked harder than I remember doing. All thoughts of leaving were pushed far back in my mind. By the end of it, I presented a great qualifying oral exam and passed with flying colors. I had once again been validated. Despite it all, I’d done well. I’d impressed my committee. I had so much promise. Finally, I’d be happy. But first, I treated myself to NaNoWriMo, as anyone who read my first post may already know. And something woke up in me.
I was happy. So. Fucking. Happy.
The words were coming out of me at a speed I couldn’t remember. Even when I went back to lab, I found time between experiments and late at night to write. After years of not writing, I wrote over 50,000 words in 3 weeks and they weren’t even bad.
And that’s when it finally clicked.
Science could never make me happy like writing could. It might sometimes be exciting to me, but it would never fill me. During those 3 weeks, I was talking to my friends about writing the way they spoke about science.
Even then, I still thought I’d stay.
Until the holidays came around and with it, my depression. Cases of COVID were skyrocketing and it was my first Christmas away from home. I was a shell of myself those weeks, constantly wondering what would have happened if I had stayed in California. At least that way I could have found a way to safely see my parents. I hated myself, for being so desperate to succeed I’d ended up so far away from the people who mattered most to me.
I was incredibly fortunate to have been able to receive a vaccine early and the second I was fully vaxxed, I was on a plane home to see my family. It was there that I realized I couldn’t do this anymore. I’d lost an entire year with my family to a pandemic, but two more to my ambition.
It was the hardest goodbye.
The weeks after my return from home, I was a mix of emotions. On the one hand, I could stay, finish the Ph.D, and become a science writer and a YA writer on the side. It was the practical, safe option. I knew I was good. But that also meant three more years away from my family. The thought of that wrecked me. I’d already missed so much, and no one was getting younger. I couldn’t miss more.
And then AMM came along.
When I got in, it gave me the confidence I needed to call myself a writer again and a bunch of new friends. It was even more than I could have asked for. But I got even more than that—a mentor who understood. One conversation with my mentor was all I needed to decide.
I was going to graduate with a Masters and leave Harvard.
In the subsequent months, I balanced my AMM revisions, querying, and getting an agent offer, all while preparing to graduate. It was quite honestly, brutal and again, do not recommend. But now that it’s over, I feel so light and so myself. I was worried I might regret it, but I know I won’t.
Just a 25 year old who scammed an elite institution into paying her for a master’s
I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing next, but for now, I’m gonna write some books and spend time with the people I love the most. If the last two years have taught me anything it’s that I can lose them at any moment, so I refuse to lose more moments.
Maybe if COVID hadn’t happened and my program hadn’t let me down and if I hadn’t gotten into AMM, I might have actually finished the Ph.D. Maybe I was always supposed to leave and it was just a matter of when. I’m not sure and I never will be.
But about three things, I am absolutely positive of:
I fucking love writing and it IS my main job, no matter what I end up doing next.
My family is the most important thing to me and every minute I get with them is precious.
I don’t regret any of it.