Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes.
Seasons of Love (Rent), Jonathan Larson
How do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife, in five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes.
How do you measure, a year in the life?
Well, I would say I could measure the past year in how many times life has hit me — probably more than it did during all my four years at Northwestern combined. But just like what Khalid said to me winter quarter of my freshman year, “Pain makes you strong.” — with each hit, life has indeed made me grow stronger and taught me to appreciate things around me more.
The first blow happened the very next day I arrived at home after commencement. It was a bolt from the blue — I had just graduated happily from Northwestern, being rewarded for all my hard work in the past four years, bidding farewell to my dearest friends and getting excited to see my family — everything seemed cheerful and positive, yet when I finally got home, life revealed a cruel truth to me, and I found out the real reason why my family could not make it to my commencement. That was the first time I cried so hard — with my heart completely shattered, the first time I saw how corrupted our legal system is, and the first time I realized how the society can do absolutely no justice to a good, honest person.
At the beginning I was in denial, hoping that I would wake up the next morning and found myself still in Evanston and nothing had happened, but after the first moment of shock and heartbreak, I managed to dry my tear and take the hit. I had no idea how my family handled it in the few months before I got home, but I knew we were all in this together, and we would support each other until the very end. The summer turned out to be a little different from what I was expecting. We couldn’t go on family trips or do many other things that I was hoping to do together. Instead of having a relaxing summer, I focused all my energy on learning and working, partially because this has always helped me recover from wounds faster in the past. I picked up Python, read many books, and learned to make many new dishes. I became aware of my lifestyle and started to develop better and healthier habits (detoxifying from my bad eating and sleeping habits in college). Thinking back, I am really grateful that I took the time to do this — after I arrived at Stanford, no matter how stressed out I was or how little time I had, I can proudly say that there are three things that I never compromised on: eat healthy (well, I am still working on cutting back on chocolate), exercise, and keep my living space clean — I might not be making a lot of money, but I know I am maintaining a good quality of life, and this makes me feel absolutely amazing.
Over the summer, I spent most of my time with Mom — we worked side by side during the day and maintained our household together. We have always been close, and by the end of the summer, we became best friends. (Now she is pretty much the only person that understands every single one of my Facebook posts, and my parents are the main reason that I am still actively updating Facebook.) Most importantly, my family had grown stronger together. Life has hit me hard — it has hit all of us hard, but I know from now on we will be able to support each other and brave through any storm as a whole in the future. My love for my family has grown stronger than ever, and I have learned to cherish them even more. Yes, it was extremely painful at the beginning, but now that the storm is over, I am grateful that we were able to go through everything together.
I started at Stanford in September with mixed feelings. On one hand, I was excited to begin a new stage of my life in such a great institute. On the other hand, I missed Northwestern, Evanston, Chicago, and all my friends there. (As most of my friends here probably know, I still do. The default weather channel on my phone is still set to Evanston, so the first thing I see every morning is whether Evanston is sunny, raining, or snowing. Perhaps I should change the title of this article into “526,500 Minutes that I Didn’t Leave Northwestern.”) It was the first time that I came to America and not landed in ORD and took Pace Bus 250 to Evanston. Everything was unfamiliar again and I was nervous, but my SGSI course started right away, and then TA training started, and then Fall Quarter started. One thing after another, there was no break, but it helped me adapt to Stanford as I move along.
During all my time at Stanford, I have thought about Northwestern a lot, especially when I encountered difficulties. Whenever I was having a hard time, either in school or in life in general, I thought about the people at Northwestern who brought light into my life, and I asked myself what they would have said to me if they had been around. If I messed up an experiment in my lab, Dan Feld would probably have told me not to stress out and plan more carefully ahead next time. If I had trouble confronting people, Tiffany would have told me to be assertive and show them who is the boss. If I got myself into a dead end, Will would have asked me to relax and don’t put myself through unnecessary mental struggles. If I felt a lot of pressure from the people around me, Nat would have reassured me that I am smart and that I should continue to have faith in myself. These memories have fueled me in various occasions and given me the courage to take risks and continuously challenge myself. Northwestern made me who I am today, and it gave me many strengths and abilities that I did not have when I first arrived — this is why I am so obsessed with my alma mater, and I believe the best way to return the favor is to never stop trying to be a stronger and better person, in both the professional world and the personal world. I hope eventually, Northwestern will be proud of me just like how I am so proud of her now.
Joining a lab is probably the most important decision one has to make in graduate school. I committed to the Wender group in October, and I surprised a lot of people, including myself. It was a lot earlier than I expected, and my strengths are in inorganic and analytical chemistry, not in synthetic organic or methodology. The decision was probably made under the synergy of many different things: I have always valued Tom and Dan’s advice, I really liked the people I met in the Wender group, and I was excited about the opportunity to learn something completely new, even though it turned out to be much more difficult than I expected.
When I graduated from Northwestern, I was told that if I ever wanted to try something completely different, the beginning of graduate school is the best time to do so because I could just join a group that does nothing similar to my undergraduate lab — it would allow me to learn different skillsets and broaden my horizons. I was excited about the perspective of such opportunities, but what I wasn’t fully aware back then was the challenges and struggles that would come with it. Switching field means all the time and effort I spent taking higher-level inorganic classes at Northwestern pretty much gone to waste (well, I hope they will eventually serve some purposes at one point, but for now they seem kind of useless); it means that I am falling way behind my classmates who have been taking organic chemistry or doing organic research since college; it means I have to spend more time and work harder to fill up the gap. I don’t remember when was the last time I put myself in this kind of difficult situation, but this is a decision I made on my own, and I am responsible for it. The only solution I could think of is to deal with it and work hard to get better at what I am doing — hopefully, this will turn out to be a good solution.
Another thing worth mentioning is ChemWipes. It was something I couldn’t see myself getting involved in at the beginning, but it turned out to be one of my favorite experiences at Stanford. I got to know all my classmates as well as a lot of others in the Chemistry Department very well, and I was truly amazed at how talented and creative my classmates are. I had a lot of fun brainstorming with them, writing skits, filming, and learning how to edit videos. Most importantly, I have found a group of very smart, reliable and capable friends that I love to spend time with (and of course, several individuals that I never ever wanted to talk to again, and I have been pretty good at sticking with it), and they have helped me out and supported me in various occasions throughout the year. Graduate school is a long journey and there will be a lot of struggling, but I know whenever I see them around, I will be reminded of the wonderful time that we spent with each other putting ChemWipes together, how I have appreciated the talents, creativity, and awesomeness they have brought to the world, and how much I have learned from them — this will be enough to keep me going. Before I came to grad school, I never thought I would get involved in, or even emceeing, a comedy show because it was so “not my thing,” but I guess we all have to try something very different once in a while, and ChemWipes turned out to be one of my favorite experience of all time.
I think the most important personal growth for me in the past year happened during Winter quarter. In the past, I have been extremely focused on work. There are definitely characteristics I want to have and things that I want to pursue outside of work, but they have always been pushed to the back of my mind and I never explicitly thought about them. Perhaps because I have been so busy with work, or because subconsciously I think as long as I continue to perform well professionally, everything will fall into its place eventually. This winter, thanks to some books and articles I read and some of the people that I spent a decent amount of time with, I started to ask myself the important questions that have previously been shoveled to the back of my mind. I finally got to think through them and try to answer them. What kind of person do I want to be eventually? How do I get there? How can I improve my level and become more mature — not only as a chemist but as a person overall? What are some characteristics that I want to possess but don’t have yet? How to train myself so that I can have them? What are the things that are important to me outside of work? If I don’t have them yet, when and how do I want to pursue them? I probably don’t have a complete answer to all of the questions yet, and things might change as I continue to move on in life, but I am really glad that I took the time to go through this thinking process. It allowed me to pull myself out of work and think about my life and my happiness in a more comprehensive manner. I set goals for myself that are not related to work and adjusted my lifestyle so that I can achieve these goals. This made me happy because I feel like I have been making progress in different aspects of life. Further, I have realized that empathy is probably one of the greatest gifts that life has given me. When things don’t go the way I want them to, being able to think from other people’s perspectives at least helps me understand why things are the way they are. Even if I cannot change them to be the way I want, my mind will at least be in peace if I understand why things happen.
I have also learned to get along with myself better — something I have been working on since I learned everything about introversion and highly sensitive people during my senior year. As we grow older, the distances between people are only going to get further and further. The only one that would stay (perhaps except for family) is myself, so it is important to know how to spend time with myself — I have increasingly enjoyed doing things on my own: reading, cooking, exercising (especially running — the best time for me to have conversations with myself and think about things and people that came into my life), traveling, and watching movies, and I know as long as I continue to do so, I will never be lonely no matter where I go. By the end of the winter, I had some farewells to bid, and I must say, some of them were way more difficult than others. The way I ended up thinking about it is (this only came after I spent hours and hours reflecting and finally believing it), life doesn’t separate friends and family because it is cruel, but because it wants to give us time and space to thrive so that the next time we see each other again, we will become better and stronger. Five years ago, I said goodbye to my family when I embarked on my journey to Northwestern. Every year when I went home and see them again, I felt that we had all advanced in our lives respectively. What made me believe this even more was that, fortunately, by the end of the winter, I was offered an amazing learning opportunity that I have been wanting since my first week at Stanford. All I could say is, goodbye is not an end — it turns those who I love and care about into a motivation to drive myself harder, and it gives me things to look forward to in the future.
Meanwhile, I have been trying to adapt to an organic chemistry lab. The entire process has not been easy. The first two quarters were me feeling inadequate in lab because of my lack of techniques and vocabulary. Dan was no longer around to guide me and tell me to be tough (although there is someone in my lab who is also from Wisconsin and equally obsessed with the Green Bay Packers), but people were generally kind and helpful enough so that I could get around by (shamelessly) asking lots of questions. The real strike came when I took Paul’s class in the spring. It was the first time I felt that organic chemists actually spoke a different language. I have never really understood organic mechanisms since undergrad. I studied and memorized things well enough to ace my exams at Northwestern, but I don’t think I ever got the gist of it, and unfortunately, I never appreciated it as an accurate “science” as much as I should have. Skipping the first two classes of the sequence didn’t help either. I think I have been pretty lucky in the past: no matter what subject I took, things either came relatively naturally, or became durable after I worked hard enough towards it. However, in the past quarter, there have been numerous times that I asked what I was doing with myself and doubted whether I made a mistake joining my current lab. I didn’t understand mechanisms, and I still don’t know why. I knew this class is probably not all that helpful to me and I wasn’t that into the contents, but I still had to take it, and this thought made me unhappy.
My Skype chat with Nat in the middle of the quarter was perhaps the most therapeutic thing I did all quarter. It was the very first time in my life that I needed someone else to tell me that I am not stupid, because I almost didn’t believe it anymore. We also talked a lot about life and people. Our conversation echoed with a lot of the questions that I have been asking myself since the winter, and I was able to remind myself of my personal and professional goals I have set for myself. By the end, I was able to regain faith in myself and continue to do what I have been doing. Even though I knew I probably still wouldn’t be able to catch up to all my classmates by the end of the quarter, I wanted to at least know that I tried my best. I’d rather accept the results even though they might not do my efforts justice, than regret because I should have tried harder. This past quarter was three months of non-stop struggling, and now that it’s over, I found it extremely difficult to write down all my thoughts back then because I didn’t want to put myself through it again. I must admit that up until the very end of this class, I still didn’t understand organic mechanisms, and for me, acknowledging defeat like this is almost shameful. But at least I didn’t give up. There were definitely points that I almost went on Axess to drop this class, or at least switched it to pass/fail, but that was giving up by myself even before the class actually defeated me, and I would probably have never forgiven myself if I had actually done so. I guess one of the most important things I got out from this experience is trying to be better than who I was will make me happier than trying to be perfect. Mikhail Baryshnikov said this during my commencement speech last year. I have always remembered it but didn’t fully appreciate it until now. If being perfect had been my goal, I would have been extremely upset for not doing well in this class, but comparing where my knowledge is now with where I was before I took the class, I have definitely made progress and now I could understand more things during group meetings. I might not have gone as far as I wanted to, and probably spent way more efforts than everyone else while not getting out as much, but I am better at organic chemistry than I was three months ago, and I know I will not stop trying, and for now that’s all that matters to me.
Now that the summer is here, I am done with my classes and teaching in graduate school. My life at Stanford has been very different from what I was envisioning a year ago — I have made different decisions, met unexpected people, and changed priorities of various things, but I cannot imagine it gone any better. Right now in terms of work, there are only two things left, both of which I love wholeheartedly, so I am really excited about being able to focus (and I’ll just do all the other random stuff that I got involved in before I go to bed every day). It has only been a week or so into the summer, and I am already loving how I get to control my time to work during the day, work more on fun things after I leave the lab, and fall right asleep exhausted but fulfilled. I look forward to what I get to do in the coming few months — the beginning of another 525,600 minutes.
The longer you have to wait for something, the more you will appreciate it when it finally arrives. The harder you have to fight for something, the more priceless it will become once you achieve it. And the more pain you have to endure on your journey, the sweeter the arrival at your destination. All good things are worth waiting for and fighting for.
Susan Gale