When you’re in love with science, it can be as messy and complex as any type of romantic relationship. In this week’s episode both our storytellers grapple with their complicated feelings for their discipline. Oh also, Happy Valentine’s Day!
Part 1: Gregory Gedman wonders if he made the right choice in pursuing a career in research.
Gregory Gedman studies the genetics of vocal imitation in songbirds and humans to provide insights on the evolution of spoken language. He received his Ph.D. from The Rockefeller University last year, and is continuing his research as a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, where he strives to be an inclusive mentor and educator. Greg hopes that by sharing his story he can help empower students to rise above their feelings of imposter syndrome and be successful in academia and beyond.
Part 2: After selling all of her old math books, Gioia De Cari vows to never look back.
The multifaceted Gioia De Cari is a transformative artist and "recovering mathematician" who has made significant contributions in theater and classical music through her focus on the synergy between science and the arts. She is creator of the critically-acclaimed award-winning play "Truth Values," which has been embraced as a conversation catalyst on important issues of unconscious bias in science, technology, engineering and mathematics throughout the United States.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
I'm a scientist and it's kind of what I always wanted to be. I remember sitting on Saturday mornings watching Bill Nye The Science Guy and those NOVA PBS documentaries and just amazed at what science could tell us about the world. I have to admit I've gone as a scientist for more than one Halloween, to give you a level of my nerdiness. They were just the coolest.
So I worked hard, went to college and pursued research as my full-time career.
But my place in academia hasn't always been easy. I'm a first-generation college student, so I didn't exactly have the roadmaps that many other students have. My parents, very supportive my whole life. My mom would always say, “Greg, do what you love. Follow your interest. Do what makes you happy.”
And my dad who's a little hard of hearing would say, “What? No. Don't listen to her. Follow your interests. Do what makes you happy.”
But what made me happy? I mean, that's kind of a crazy question.
But two things came to mind. Science, of course, but music, and not just listening to music. That never really did it for me. Singing. I would look for every excuse to hop in the car for a long drive to sing my favorite song, full blast, in a socially acceptable setting.
But I eventually traded in the car for the stage because I wanted to share my love of singing with others. See, science and music allowed me to express myself in ways I never thought possible. You can try new things, keep what works, retool what doesn't, and, at the end of the day, you're left with something honest and exciting.
Gregory Gedman shares his story with an audience at The Caveat in New York City in December, 2018. Photo by Zhen Qin.
So I followed my parents’ advice and I pursued a PhD in neuroscience at Duke University. There I studied imitation behavior, which is the basis for our ability to speak and sing. And I studied songbirds, because they learn songs just like we do, through imitation. In particular, these little finches.
If you’ve never heard a little finch song, it sounds something like this. Like, “Me-me-meep”. So not the pretty thing you hear in the park when you're walking but we use them because they were reliable and we would know when or what part of the song went wrong after an experiment.
I watched this little bird, who had never heard anything like this before, listen to his dad, practice, and produce a song that was just like his. I was brought right back to the car with my dad singing AC/DC full blast. I just had to know how we were able to do this.
My co-workers certainly made me feel welcome as well, no more so than Matt. Matt's an older graduate student in my lab with a fondness for practical jokes. My first few weeks in the lab, he printed out several poorly photoshopped images of me and hid them all over the lab, even numbering the backs of them so I knew how long this game would last. The first image I found was number 210. We became fast friends and every day was really exciting.
After the first year of graduate school, I had to meet with my departmental head where we would discuss my progress and how things were going. This guy was kind of a hero of mine. He was a fantastic musician and an even better scientist, and really one of the reasons I came to Duke University, so I was really excited to hear his feedback.
I had all my experiments plotted out, what I was planning to do, and he ushers me in. I pass this long hall of accolades and awards and I was more than a little intimidated, but I kept my head on.
We got right into it. He says, “Greg, how was your first year of graduate school going?”
And I just blanked. All my carefully planned points just kind of flew away from me. Instead, my emotions took hold. You see, I had my doubts about graduate school.
I told him that while I loved science, I felt lost in this environment. Like when I would take one step forward, I would look at my other students and feel like I was two steps back.
In undergrad, we get these nice syllabus, this very clear plan for success. But in graduate school, it was much more open-ended and I constantly wondered if I was making the right decisions.
Man, this had been weighing on me for a while so it felt so good to get this out there to someone who I respected. I really just wanted to hear some words of support.
But instead, he just looks over his wire-rimmed glasses at me and he says, “Well then, maybe it's time to reconsider. Maybe this lab and this program is not right for you.”
What? It felt like Floyd Mayweather just came in the room and knocked the wind out of me and, with it, my confidence. Here was a guy who I respected who recruited me to this university confirming my worst fears, that it was all a mistake.
He said he wanted to meet again in two weeks or so, but a little voice in my head had already called it.
Now, as I left that meeting, I saw Matt entering in for his. And maybe it was how I hurried past him or the tears in my eyes but he knew something was wrong. He found me after to let me know don't take it personally, but the damage was done.
My damage had a name. I was suffering from imposter syndrome. Every day I would find a new excuse to avoid going into lab. I would duck out from hanging out with my friends to avoid their excited conversations about lab because I couldn't join in.
Even my friends from New Jersey drove all the way down to North Carolina to see me and that didn't get through. They were like, “How's everything going?” And I was, “Oh, it's all good, bro.” I was anything but.
Gregory Gedman shares his story with an audience at The Caveat in New York City in December, 2018. Photo by Zhen Qin.
The thought of leaving and going home crossed my mind more than once, but I kept thinking about how my mom was so excited to tell all my cousins, “We're going to have a doctor in the family.” And the only thing I feared more of failing myself was failing them.
I was stuck in this cycle of negative thinking. I just kept saying over and over to myself, “Is he right? Do I not belong here?”
A few weeks later, I go back to the things that are reliable, my bird songs. And I'm recording from one of my favorites. I named him Simon. He was great. He gave me a little “Me-me-meep,” and it was just exactly what I wanted to hear.
As I'm moving him from one cage to another, my mind was wandering and he escapes. Now, I'm in this tiny little room, this bird flying around my head, I'm like, “All right. How hard could this be, right? Just catch the bird.”
Famous last words.
First, I try the nonchalant, you know, just the quick grab. But Simon was my favorite for a reason. He was too smart for that. He's flying around.
So then I'm like “Okay, let's try nets.”
Now, for a bird the size of an apple, I tried everything from those like little fish tank nets that you use to scoop out dead fish to these like comically large dog catcher nets from the ‘40s, which I don't even know why we had, but everything failed.
I feel this familiar panic start to creep in again. I'm paralyzed. I'm afraid everyone's going to find out now. Everyone's going to see the failure that I see. I mean, how could you do research if you can't catch your subjects, right?
I was giving up all hope when I heard the door close behind me. Standing there with that ridiculous grin on his face is Matt.
But my own frustrations, with my own perceived inadequacies fueled my anger when I told them, “Look, there's a bird out. I'm not in the mood for you today. Just get the hell out of here.”
But his smile just widens. And as he turns to leave, he slowly shuts off the lights, plunging me into complete darkness. I'm like are you kidding me? This guy has to kick me while I'm down.
But that anger was met with relief as I saw Simon slowly flutter to the ground. You see, birds are slaves to their visual system. If it's dark out, they think it's nighttime and they stop flying. I was able to easily scoop him up and throw him in the cage.
Matt knew this but I didn't. And he helped me even when I pushed him away. You see, Simon was just a bird getting out of a cage, but it meant so much more to me. My fog of self-doubt acted like a microscope. It just blew up these tiny little moments into paralyzing ones.
I still suffer with self-doubt, and maybe I always will, but I no longer let it cripple me. I'm proud to say, with the support of my friends and family, I'm on track to graduate with my PhD from Rockefeller next year, and that's an amazing feeling.
And it took Matt, a guy who recently this year shaved his facial hair, cut his hair to go as me for Halloween. It took that for me to realize something. My department head was wrong. I can do this, but I can't do it alone.
Thank you.
Part 2
It was a beautiful spring morning and I was headed out to Berkeley to have lunch with my old friend and teacher in math. I remember having my tote bag over my shoulder and I passed my math bookshelf, tall and thin, stuffed top to toe with math books and I thought, “Maybe today is the day I can finally let these go. After all, there are a lot of used bookstores in Berkeley. It's a long drive through a tangle of freeways. I might as well make the trip do double duty.”
So I piled the math books, heavy, musty dusty into the trunk of my little red Toyota and took off.
Lunch at the faculty club was bittersweet. On the one hand, it was a joy to see my old friend again and he hadn't changed a bit. He still had this quirky way of attaching a number to just about everything. “He was my number two son.” “She was my number one student that year.” “It was our number three choice of where to take a vacation.”
After lunch, he walked me to my car. And as was my habit, I took my tote bag off my shoulder and tossed it in the trunk and he saw the giant pile of math books. He was visibly taken aback as if he had just seen a dead body in there.
He looked at me quizzically.
“I'm selling them,” I admitted.
He nodded, sadly, and then bid me a very formal farewell, as was his style, and left.
Gioia De Cari shares her story with an audience at The Caveat in New York City in September, 2018. Photo by Zhen Qin.
I unloaded the books a few blocks down the street at a used bookstore. I remember at the end of the transaction I thought, “I'd better check inside these books and make sure there's nothing tucked in between the pages.”
Sure enough, I found an inscription in one from my PhD advisor at MIT beloved to me and recently deceased. I saved that one out and asked how much for the rest.
I walked out of the shop with a couple hundred dollars cash and a feeling of relief because I was just sure that by releasing those math books I could also release all the confusion and guilt and heartbreak I felt around the demise of my math career.
It was at that time in my life I also made a commitment to myself about the arts. Maybe it was because I sold the math books but the arts had always been a passionate advocation of mine since childhood that I just as passionately was not willing to take seriously. And then I realized that the one common denominator of my life, to use a math term, had always been the arts. So maybe it was time to embrace the idea of calling myself an artist.
Also at that time, I promised myself I would never talk about math again. To be honest, this was largely because whenever I was at a party and anyone would ever get a whiff of my math background, it would become this barrage of questions, like a thesis defense. “Oh, my God, you're an actor and a singer and a mathematician!”
“Oh, no, no, no. I don't do math anymore at all.”
“How did that happen? Were there any women at MIT? Is it different at other universities? Do you know the statistics on that? Why did you leave?”
And I'd be tongue-tied because there wasn't any one good, respectable reason for why I left. There were just a million small, partial, ridiculous reasons. So I just listened politely and then changed the subject.
I spent a good many years after that bringing other people's words to life on stage and then I got this notion I wanted to bring my own words to life. I wanted to be a writer.
So I bought this big blank book journal covered in gerbera daisies, my favorite, and began to fill it with stories. Autobiographical stories, fantasy stories and the math stories. These took on a life of their own. It made such a fine knot for a newbie writer to untangle. Why is it that an honors math undergrad student goes to MIT to get her PhD in math, passes her qualifying exam with flying colors and then leaves?
I considered this exercise to be something for my eyes only until, at one point, I was taking this playwriting workshop and our assignment for the week was to write an autobiographical monologue. I was really busy at the time. I had no time to write something from scratch so I pulled out some of the math stories.
My compatriots in the workshop said, “Oh, my God, you have to turn that into a play. Have you seen the news?”
I said, “What news?”
They said, “About the Harvard president.”
So I went home and I Googled it and I found the Larry Summers controversy. When he was president of Harvard he gave a talk in which he suggested that there were fewer women than men in math and science because the women were just inherently not as good at it as the men.
And then I found the story about Dr. Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT, a member of the National Academy of Sciences who was in the room during his talk and got up in the middle and left saying if she hadn't, she would have either blacked out or thrown up.
Gioia De Cari shares her story with an audience at The Caveat in New York City in September, 2018. Photo by Zhen Qin.
And then I found article after article eviscerating her for having said that. It was then that I realized what it really meant to be an artist. I had something very fresh and humorous and unusual to contribute to this conversation in the form of my stories.
So, I did fashion them into a play. I called it Truth Values partly because it was a true story but also because when I was in math, I was just fascinated by this idea of what happens if in between the values of true and false, we add something in the middle, say, maybe, or even a whole continuum. It made a great metaphor too for me as a playwright to use it to tease out all those million small struggles that drove me out of math that I could never articulate.
The play was selected for the New York Fringe Festival. I was terrified. I was sure that MIT would sue me.
I ran to one of the volunteer lawyers for the arts who said, “MIT suing you that would be the very best thing that could happen to you. It will exponentialize your publicity.”
Then the Central Square Theater a few minutes up the road from MIT booked me right after for two weeks.
The Fringe Festival Paper interviewed me about that calling it a ‘return to the scene of the crime’. I was extra terrified.
I ran to a psychologist to talk about it. She turned out to be also a jazz musician by night. She smiled at me in this cool jazz cat way and said, “You're on the right path. It's your job as an artist to stir things up.”
I remember on opening night sitting backstage with my hand on my heart, wondering how it could beat that fast while I was just sitting in a chair. A few moments after stepping on stage, I calmed down. I could tell the audience was with me and it turned out the Fringe turned out to be a wonderful experience all in all.
Imagine my amazement one night after the show when I walked out into the lobby and who was there but Nancy Hopkins, the biologist from MIT who walked out on Larry Summer's talk. She had, unbeknownst to me, come to the show and she stayed for the whole thing. And she stayed to greet me.
And then I was often touring to over 50 different theaters across the United States, some of them so storied I never dared dream I would set foot on them, like the La Jolla Playhouse.
Little by little, I came to realize that in leaving math I had joined a very significant group of women who get to a certain point in the STEM field, science, technology, engineering and math, and then disappear or stay and struggle. Woman after woman would come up to me after the show with tears in her eyes saying, “You're telling my story.”
Even recently, I won a grant from the Sloan Foundation to offer a companion mentoring program for women students in STEM to offer the kind of support I always wished for when I was a student.
So by talking about math when I said I would never do it again, I somehow managed to take my life in a whole new unimaginable direction. Thank you.