By Jordin Metz
Ph.D. Candidate
Rice University
2020 has been quite the year. Time seemed to stand still, drag on and go backward — yet here we are in December. This year, I have grown to appreciate the little things that go well amid the chaos and failure. This is not only true against the backdrop of a crazy 2020, but also as a graduate student getting my Ph.D. in chemistry, where failure in the lab is an everyday occurrence. Even though I realize this is a normal part of science, I grew frustrated with experiments and analytical methods failing time and time again, while the world seemed to burn outside. Nothing seemed to work; everything seemed to break. Yet, I am an optimist. I saw many pinpoints of light that slowly grew to change my perspective in a year that was full of unfortunate surprises.
I was able to go to campus to work in my lab, after a short break in March and April. I was even able to engage with the 12 members of my lab every day, including other graduate students, postdocs and visiting scholars. This social interaction, while socially distanced and limited, brightened my day. I am lucky and they are a wonderful group of people with whom I can bounce around ideas, grumble to, and socialize with.
I also learned to appreciate small actions I could do for myself, from taking a walk and admiring the sunlight filtering through the trees, to cleaning a beaker so nicely that it looked like new. I have paused to admire the graceful patterns of nanoparticles swirling around in the solution I used for an experiment, and rushed to take pictures of colorful solutions before the pigment changed. These small moments of beauty and promise peppered a year filled with doubt and frustration, both in and out of the lab. I hope to take this mindset forward into the future, to admire the little things and make small changes to subtly improve both my mood and the world around me.
Recently, I noticed that the clock on one of the lab computers was set to the year 1980, older than the computer itself. For decades, no one had thought to change the time. In a year where time seems to mean so little, each day seeming the same as the last, I was glad to move time forward and create a moment where I could take control and change once small thing for the better.
This blog post is part of the Baker Institute Science and Technology Policy Program’s “What I learned in 2020” series. The author is a Ph.D. candidate at Rice University’s Department of Chemistry and a graduate student from the 2020 Developing Civic Scientist Leaders project.