Reflections of 24

I realized that I've been somewhat quiet on my blog lately, and with my 25th birthday coming tomorrow I thought, what better time to reflect on my journey so far than today? The reason that I haven't shared much lately is because, well, there hasn't been many exciting updates to share! When I first came to Cape Town, there was so much to see and to do, so many new people to meet, etc. And I was excited to share it all! Even academically, there was so much to get used to - the research-based Master's program was much more independent than my previous undergrad studies, and UCT was a lot different than USF. Slowly but surely (and with many mistakes along the way!) I got used to life in Cape Town.

There's so many things I could say about what I've experienced in the past 2.5 years here in South Africa, but what I want to reflect on today is the 'quiet times' that I've been experiencing these past few months as I've entered my PhD. During undergrad studies (and even Master's at times), there are a lot of 'checkpoints' that you reach - taking final exams, submitting an end-of-semester report, finishing your proposal - and they all happen within a (relatively) quick time period. But the PhD has been different. The 'checkpoints' transition from those that are applied externally (by professors, supervisors, administrators) to those that are applied internally (by yourself). While there are still external checkpoints that exist, I've also found that these tend to bring less satisfaction when achieved than many of these internal checkpoints. I'll give an example now to show you what I mean.

In February of this year, I presented my research proposal to my biomedical engineering colleagues (staff and students). Getting your proposal approved is considered a big step - it means that your proposed ideas for your project were approved by others and you get the 'green light' to go ahead to actually start your research project. When my proposal was approved, I was grateful that I could move forward and work on my research, and that my hard work had been recognized. Everyone congratulated me. I started to move forward with my research work. A lot of that work consists of programming (coding). Recently, I've been working on building a video calling application for my project (something similar Zoom or Facetime). Finally, one late night, after many hours of working, I tested my application and BOOM. Instead of one lone video feed of myself, the application had now worked and I connected two devices successfully on a video call (see below). And I promise, in that moment I was both more excited and more proud than the moment I presented my proposal and it got approved (as you can see by the happy face).

I think this example speaks to two things I've learned throughout my journey at UCT. One is that when you work on a project for so long, and you know the ins and outs of the topic, then you become the one benchmarking success on that topic. Sure, there are other people who can take the time to fully understand every inch of your project and set up milestones and be proud of you when you achieve those - but that doesn't happen because people don't have the time to do that, and that's ok. So then the responsibility is on you to make those milestones for yourself and be proud of yourself when you achieve them, because you know the long hours it took to get to there. Which brings me to the second point, which is that you should also stand tall in those achievements and know that you did a lot of hard work to get to where you are. When you achieve something like the video call in the above example, people may have no idea what it takes to get to that point - maybe they assume it can be done easily, or it's more difficult. And while people may also be proud of you for achieving these milestones, they may or may not really see the background of what happened to get there. Hence the "quiet times", where you hunker down and do a lot of work, which doesn't always result in having many flashy or fun things to share with others. And while you can (and should) be grateful for those that support you and are proud of you, you must also make sure that you are proud of yourself. Just because you are the one to set a milestone for yourself and achieve it, doesn't mean that it's any less valuable or exciting than the milestones that others have set up for you to achieve.

So in final reflections on this post (if you've made it this far at least), I encourage you to do that for yourself today - reflect on the goals that you've set for yourself, no matter how 'small' you think they may be, and celebrate yourself for working toward and/or achieving those goals. You've earned it!