Pivoting Dreams: Rediscovering Myself in the Chaos of Graduate School

The adjustment to graduate school was loud and abrasive. I began my grad school journey in August 2021 with six classes and no clue of the storm heading my way. I was accepted as a Bioengineering student into the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, and I knew nothing about chemical engineering. I am a chemist by training, and I was now thrown into an unfamiliar environment trying to balance life, school, and research. For my first semester, I spent a lot of time isolated, trying to adjust to the new expectations and academic rigor of school. I spent many nights crying and wondering if things would get better. I held to my faith and trusted in God that all things would work together, and they did. I came out of isolation, leaned on my support system, and focused on making it through one day at a time. The next semester went better for me, and I chose to build a community for myself within Tech’s graduate students. I gained some great friends and connected more with my advisor leaning on him to assist with research difficulties.  

It only got better the following year as I began working on my independent project. I was so excited to start work that I had complete control over. I determined which experiments to complete to pursue my questions and developed protocols for completing a task. At first, there was lots of planning, execution, and consistent energy poured into my work but somewhere along the way, I began neglecting my mental health and well-being. I was completing experiments at midnight, two a.m., and coming home from work as late as five in the morning. My light dimmed as I began to isolate myself once more. I had completely lost myself to my work and it took the words “you no longer look carefree” to make me self-reflect on what was the most important thing to me. I discovered the most important thing to me is my well-being. I had to learn to separate my self-worth from my work and rediscover who I am in Christ; my worth stemmed from being His daughter. It took several months for me to be revived. One thing I gained from my situation was who I am and who I serve. I recycle this affirmation in my daily living and approach. 

Edited by Meik Lee