I finished my PhD in December 2011, which was immediately followed by a series of moves and a variety of positions. It started with a three-month internship with one of the major oil companies in Houston, TX (Move #1 – Riverside, CA to Houston, TX). I am thankful for this experience, because I realized that a job in the oil and gas industry was just not for me. After completing my internship, I began a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at Miami University at Ohio (Move #2 – Houston, TX to Oxford, OH). I started to learn new skills that complemented those I obtained throughout my grad experience. I bought a house (at the time it was cheaper for me to buy a house than rent one, so sounded like a good idea at the time…turns out it was one of the best decisions I ever made), mentored two students who went on to be successful as graduate students and land permanent positions in the field they wanted, and I started naively embarking on a personal journey that would be chock full some of the best and worst times of my life. It was also at this time that I became heavily involved and invested in early career issues.
As the postdoctoral contract was coming to an end, I was faced with being jobless, so I put my fellowship on hold while I taught two classes at one of my alma maters, California State University, Fullerton (Move #3 – Oxford, OH – Fullerton, CA). While I love to teach – I taught throughout graduate school – this was arguably one of the most difficult experiences I have ever had. In the nick of time, I was awarded a School of Earth and Space Exploration Fellowship, which would lead me back to a town I swore never to return (Move #4 – Fullerton, CA – Mesa, AZ). Between the traumatic experience teaching at CSUF and moving back to Phoenix AZ, my mental health continued a slow(ish) downward spiral to what would ultimately lead to my darkest days.
Mesa is where my family lives, and in effort to save money I decided to move in with my folks. From the beginning, I had reservations about this decision for reasons I will not get into here, and within a year my gut instinct was proven right - I had to find my own place. After a particularly difficult week, which also corresponded with my birthday, I moved into a hotel for a week, a friend’s house for a week, and then into my own place (Move #5 – Mesa, AZ to Phoenix, AZ). Eight months later, and again just in the nick of time, I was awarded a Moore Foundation Fellowship at Berkeley to serve as a liaison or bridge between science (universities and the federal government) and the State of California as they start the roll out of Earthquake Early Warning (Move #6 – Phoenix, AZ to Elk Grove, CA). Shortly after starting this position/project, one I was very excited to about and felt extremely lucky to be apart of, I suffered a tragic loss in my personal life. One of my closest friends, a colleague with whom I have collaborated and chaired sessions with, a fellow early career scientist, my “partner-in-crime” in this unstable academic world, committed suicide (on my birthday). Not only did this turned my world upside down, but it made me start to reevaluate what I was doing with my life. While he also struggled with mental health issues, he was not proactive about seeking help, no matter how much I begged him to seek help. I was devastated, and not just because of how close we were or because I loved him so deeply, but because many of his struggles were related to the pressures of academics (e.g., imposter syndrome, publish or perish, self-worth, loneliness, frustration about not find a job even though we had “done all the right things”, etc.), which I TOO had to deal with minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day. Not only did I lose my best friend, the person who was supposed to be my life partner, but I lost him to a disease that (1) I struggle with on a daily basis; and (2) was, at least in part, amplified by the lifestyle we had been living (academics) for the last 13+ years. Needless to say, I was not in a good place following his death. And to top it all off, the job that I had been so excited about started to take a turn for the worse. I will not bore you with the details, but within 5 months it had become, arguably, one of the most toxic work environments I have been part of.
Mesa is where my family lives, and in effort to save money I decided to move in with my folks. From the beginning, I had reservations about this decision for reasons I will not get into here, and within a year my gut instinct was proven right - I had to find my own place. After a particularly difficult week, which also corresponded with my birthday, I moved into a hotel for a week, a friend’s house for a week, and then into my own place (Move #5 – Mesa, AZ to Phoenix, AZ). Eight months later, and again just in the nick of time, I was awarded a Moore Foundation Fellowship at Berkeley to serve as a liaison or bridge between science (universities and the federal government) and the State of California as they start the roll out of Earthquake Early Warning (Move #6 – Phoenix, AZ to Elk Grove, CA). Shortly after starting this position/project, one I was very excited to about and felt extremely lucky to be apart of, I suffered a tragic loss in my personal life. One of my closest friends, a colleague with whom I have collaborated and chaired sessions with, a fellow early career scientist, my “partner-in-crime” in this unstable academic world, committed suicide (on my birthday). Not only did this turned my world upside down, but it made me start to reevaluate what I was doing with my life. While he also struggled with mental health issues, he was not proactive about seeking help, no matter how much I begged him to seek help. I was devastated, and not just because of how close we were or because I loved him so deeply, but because many of his struggles were related to the pressures of academics (e.g., imposter syndrome, publish or perish, self-worth, loneliness, frustration about not find a job even though we had “done all the right things”, etc.), which I TOO had to deal with minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day. Not only did I lose my best friend, the person who was supposed to be my life partner, but I lost him to a disease that (1) I struggle with on a daily basis; and (2) was, at least in part, amplified by the lifestyle we had been living (academics) for the last 13+ years. Needless to say, I was not in a good place following his death. And to top it all off, the job that I had been so excited about started to take a turn for the worse. I will not bore you with the details, but within 5 months it had become, arguably, one of the most toxic work environments I have been part of.
As the end of my contract neared, I entered what I will hesitantly admit were the darkest days of my life. I had no idea what I was supposed to do next. In an act of desperation, or more likely a result of my propensity to default to a "flight response" when shit gets bad, I decided to take a road trip around the country. All I knew at the time was I needed time to myself, away from academics, I needed to find a way to clear my head. I had to find a respite from my otherwise dark existence.
