Slow Science
Better Late Than Never
My first day in a research lab happened to coincide with the team’s weekly lab meeting. I knew within mitutes of sitting down and listening to the grad students who were presenting that day, I was in my professional ‘home’. With every day, week and month that passed I felt like I was being pulled more and more in the direction of becoming a researcher until one day I just decided to stop being pulled and push for it instead.
The US doesn’t have a term for an older student. They’re just another student. But in Australia, anyone who’s not considered ‘typical’ university age is a ‘mature age’ student. The sterotype of the mature age student is someone who sits at the front of the class, asking too many questions while the majority of the undergraduate class descretely sigh and roll their eyes. Suffice it to say, it’s not a positive stereotype. But sometimes life necessitates a change and for many this means going back to university later in life.
When I say later, speaking from my own experience, I’m not talking that much later in terms of chronology. I started my masters at the age of twenty-seven and my PhD at thirty-one. So not that old. But I was right in the screws of some major life events. I was in the middle of my masters when I moved to the US. And then moved back to Australia barely three years later to start work on my PhD. During that time I got married and had a child. This meant that my wife had to be on board with moving to the other side of the world with a three month old. It’s easy then to look at what I’m doing now and think, “if only I’d done this sooner.”
It’s challenging being a new dad and trying to do a PhD at the best of times. Not to mention the fact that my wife is not Australian and so when we arrived in early 2024, it was going to be some time before she was able to start work. As it turned out, it took a year. A PhD stipend is not especially generous, but it was our sole source of income. Thankfully we had some good luck along the way and got through that first year fine. That said, there were, and continue to be, many moments in which I think to myself, “if only I’d done this sooner.”
But then there’s the other side of the coin. What if I hadn’t done it at all? I really enjoyed my old job. It would have been easy to stay there so an extended period of time. But as I become more enamoured with the idea of becoming a researcher, I knew that I want to conduct my own research and design my own projects. I also knew that despite the challenges the decision to come back to Australia would pose for my family, not doing it, would have been something I’d have likely regretted for the rest of my life. My wife too. This hasn’t all been about me. In addition to being able to return home to Melbourne for an extended period of time, my PhD is a joint program with the University of Copenhagen. So our family will get to live in Denmark for about ten months in 2026.
By the time I finish my PhD, about three and a half years will have passed from the time I accepted my offer. This is a blink of an eye across a lifespan. It’s been a monumental effort to navigate the challenges of two people from different countries trying to live and maintain residencies in each other’s home countries. But during that time we’re going to get to see and do things that we might other wise have put off to retirement - closer to the end of our lives.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and I still continue to think, “if only I’d done this sooner.” But I don’t get hung up thinking about much “further along I could be.” My life circumstances just took me in a different trajectory. At the end of the day, I’m very happy with how things sit at the moment. In ten or twenty years it will matter much less ‘when’ I made the career change and be far important that I just did it. Because in ten or twenty years, had I not made the change, what would I be telling myself then?