This is a love story. The type of story where the star-crossed find each other, and intertwined they bend with the wind, bouncing back to stand stronger and taller.
This is a happy story. When things bend, they become beautiful and interesting.
This is a sad story. Materials can only bend so far before they snap.
It is the story of my love of science and knowledge, and how we have bent together through the years, supporting each other and fixing roots that hold firm as the wind pulls at us.
We are taught to classify everything. In biology, we label things and allocate them a place in a hierarchy. We quantify. We qualify. We see things not as individuals but as part of a greater whole, their role defined by genetic patterns laid down millennia before, elegantly visualised on phylogenetic trees. There is no space for something to defy classification.
And yet, I did.
I wish I could say that my love of science started at school. That the system bent around me. I wish education was fluid. Instead, it was a rigid lattice that tried to bend me to fit. It treated me like a solid that needed to be shaped and carved into acceptability. It understood me through the lens of particle theory, demanding I use energy to conform to the requirements of the shape it expected to see.
Looking back now, I was better explained by fluid dynamics. My flow was turbulent, eddies rising and falling in an apparently random pattern. From the perspective of the education system, I wasn’t tractable enough to be valuable. I was like a non-Newtonian fluid – I didn’t follow the standard laws of schooling and when they applied pressure, I solidified.
I didn’t snap.
I learned to find my own flow pattern and moved away from the inflexible classifications our education system forces students into. I carried a love of knowledge and the mechanics of learning with me. As a student who joined a private girls’ school from the state sector at 13, the assisted place scheme that still existed then provided a way to avoid the only local upper school available at the time, known to be a failing school. I sat the exam at the last minute with no preparation. I wonder how different my life would have been if I hadn’t. How much of my achievement as an adult was driven by pure spite in the face of a brutal, unkind private system that had no interest in understanding and fostering the potential for learning in someone who didn’t conform to their understanding of being.
Teachers classified you quickly in those days. One-by-one, teachers told me what I wasn’t … good at science … a high achiever … someone they were interested in. Every ‘not’ bent closed the bars of the cage I created to separate me from them. An easy story would be to tell you that each assumption they made bent me in ways that meant I ended up resembling the design they made for me.
I am not an easy story.
I found refuge in my own learning, spending hours in the central library reading the books I was interested in. I did just enough to pass some exams. I knew before I sat my O-levels that I wasn’t interested in going to university straight from school. The school tried to bend me back towards them but it was driven by their desire to have statistics which looked good on sales brochures, not because they had any interest in engaging with what best served their young students. Unless the young students fitted their mould. I loved English Language and creating. It wasn’t until years later that I could see the creativity in sciences. So, I left school with 2 stunningly mediocre A-level grades and a sense of relief that I never had to return.
Light bends when it crosses a barrier between materials of different densities. It follows a new course. I crossed the barrier between school education and new adult life, bending away from formal education and towards independent learning. I worked and travelled, learning new languages and reading books from all disciplines just because I loved to learn. Freed from school, I knew that I could teach myself anything, as long as it was written down somewhere.
I knew that school had failed to snap me.
My love affair with science hadn’t started yet. Instead, I sank into literature and language. It was the old friend that everyone thought I would end up with. We were made for each other and we knew each other so well that we finished each other’s sentences. It was a love grown from familiarity. We travelled the well-worn backpacker-paths that bent and wound through South East Asia and when I came home, it seemed only right to formalise our relationship so I went to university as a mature student to study English Language and Literature. We had the engagement party and moved in together. Somewhere in between though, we got tired of each other. Familiarity breeding inertia. We still respected each other, clinging on for two years of a degree, but in the end we parted as friends.
I came back to the UK. Unsure of what I wanted to do, I picked up some undergraduate science books and started learning. Just because I could. I was flirting with science. I wish I could say that I was immediately besotted with Biology or carried away by Chemistry, but it was complicated. Really, I was just driven by a stubborn desire to teach myself everything that my schoolteachers thought I couldn’t learn. I knew that my aptitude in a subject didn’t correlate with their ability to recognise it. If it was in a book, I could learn it. Why not do a degree in Natural Sciences?
So, I bent again and flexed into a different discipline. Science and I started dating. At first, I was carried away with the novelty of it but the longer I studied, the more I realised that there was a great elegance in studying a concept deeply and a great creativity in filling in the gaps of our understanding about how life works.
It wasn’t until later that I realised I was less in love with science and more in love with knowledge. Studying for a PhD clarified that for me. So many peers had concrete career goals and structured plans. I just revelled in the opportunity of digging deeply into a concept. I was prospecting for knowledge, panning for nuggets, clues to why we age and what makes a fly work.
It was the last time I was able to solely focus on thinking and knowing. When I accepted my PhD place, an academic told me that I would never ‘go far’ in academia because I had come to it later and my path had been a meandering one. I told them it didn’t matter to me and I meant it but I look back now with the satisfaction that they were wrong.
My great love affair with academia started then.
At its best, academia is the most joyful of partners. When I first started working at universities, I sank into knowledge acquisition, surrounding myself with study and learning, making connections between disciplines and interests. Bending many bright coloured strands together to make a shimmering web of ideas. I believed the iridescent silk was enough. I thought everyone could see it shine.
It wasn’t until later that I realised that while I had been watching the web, the mechanism of higher education had been subtly bending me further and further away from the core strands that underpinned it. I was so busy being in love with academia that I didn’t notice our relationship was unbalanced. One day, I looked up from my books and realised that academia wasn’t a very nice partner. It didn’t love me back.
Being female in STEM has its challenges. They aren’t always from men. Institutionalised sexism and misogyny are still rife and often it is delivered through female voices. I made a mixtape to give academia, the label handwritten, the track-list personal.
Women are better at technical jobs because they are good at organising small things. Men are better at research because they see the bigger picture.
Well, I guessed she was pregnant because her boobs were much bigger when she presented at the conference.
I’m just not going to teach because I have research to finish, but of course, I will keep my name on the course.
Let’s all find our confident voices. Well, except for you. You seem to have more than enough of a confident voice.
Work hard. Take notes. Share credit. Unless you are male. Then keep all the credit.
I wouldn’t hire a woman as a postdoc. The risk of pregnancy is too high. I can just find other reasons not to hire them. I don’t need to make it obvious.
These menopausal women will be the death of me.
Leadership. You need to show leadership. Just not that kind of leadership.
But not you. When I said that about women, I didn’t mean you.
Each comment bent me just a little bit further. Each administrative hurdle. I was still in love with my image of academia but I came to see that it had changed beyond recognition and I had to question whether the thing I had fallen in love with so long ago even existed anymore.
The business of academia is designed to apply force on individuals. It holds academics in a vice and tests their material strength. The further you progress, the further you drift away from knowledge acquisition as a pure endeavour. What is missing is a fail-safe mechanism. Academia bends its component parts with so much force that it damages the bonds that hold us together, individually and as a cohesive body. It takes all of those who love it for its essence and pits them against each other, against the system and often against the university itself. It robs you of the space to breathe and think.
Academia snaps everyone that loves it eventually. That’s the tragic love story. When the particles are separated and the bonds are broken, it dusts itself off and heads out to cruise the student bars for fresher material to play with.
Academia can’t snap me.
It can only apply pressure to material that it holds in the vice. When I realised that I was bent beyond recognition, I pushed back on the vice and the hard core I developed years before sprung the blocks that held me in place. That core is a love of knowledge and learning.
I am bent and some of my bonds have been changed irrevocably. My new shape is wonderfully contorted. I have chosen not to ‘correct’ it. I don’t need to fit into the structure my destructive lover has made for me. Instead, I can follow the twists and find new connections. I don’t need a partner that doesn’t recognise my right to grow and change in a myriad of ways.
I have fallen out of love with STEM. The acronym has taken on a persona of its own. I used to think it was a love that would last forever but I know it’s more complicated now. I still love science, the personal academic practice of science, but I don’t see science and STEM as synonymous anymore. STEM is a creature of academia. It’s a beast controlled by governments and money. STEM craves recognition. STEM repeatedly asks you to justify your place in it, whether because of your gender, your ethnicity, your disability, your neurodiversity, your individuality. STEM asks you to adopt positions of weakness that only exist in its own eyes whilst simultaneously congratulating itself for educating you on the syndromes you didn’t even know you were supposed to have. STEM is a lazy master. It is still a master though and not a mistress. STEM demands conformity.
This is a love story. I am just not in love with the jewelled box that STEM has built. Instead, I embrace all of us who are beautiful contortions.