“Teaching is my healthy distraction, it provides me with a sense of personal fulfillment that ultimately recharges me and my passions for science.” 

It’s Wednesday evening, 5pm. There is a long list of things I should be doing right now. I should be in the lab lysing and running the frozen cell pellets I prepared earlier in the week. I should be working on writing a paper, actually two papers… three? I should be thinking about crafting a teaching statement for the next cycle of job applications. Yet, given all the things I should be doing, I find myself aliquoting out cups of candy in preparation for a 6th grade science class demonstration. You see, today my class and I are making DNA models out of candy and, if all goes well, I will introduce young minds to the concept of gene editing. Yes, my secret to a joyous life in academia is that I teach for fun on the side. 

I understand, it’s counter-intuitive… as a scientist (specifically a postdoc) I spend most of my waking hours in the lab doing experiments, writing papers, and applying for grants. Why waste my precious time teaching biology to kids? Short answer, teaching is my healthy distraction, it provides me with a sense of personal fulfillment that ultimately recharges me and my passions for science. 

I was a graduate student for seven long years. Seven years… that’s a majority of my twenties! I can sincerely say that I don’t blame anyone or anything for my very long graduate school stay. I entered graduate school with very little background in my chosen field of study (Neuroscience) and I just really struggled to get experiments to work in my first four years. As a result, scientifically speaking, my first four years of graduate school were quite depressing. It was during this time, blindly looking for the light at the end of a long science tunnel, I came to few key realizations that saved (and continue to preserve) my science sanity. 

First, I learned that it was important to find fulfillment outside of the lab -- coming to the realization that if my personal happiness was only dictated by the success of my experiments, this would result in long durations of frustration and sadness. Second, I realized that occasional breaks and healthy distractions from lab work can be good and perhaps even essential for surviving academia. In graduate school, one of the healthy distractions that I discovered was science demonstrations. As a part of the university’s outreach, grade school and high school students would be invited to visit labs on campus. In an effort to inspire a new generation of scientists, we would entertain these students with the best of what we had… mostly fluorescent cells and windowed eggs with a view of developing chicken embryos. Overall, it was a win-win situation. For the student visitors, they got a glimpse into what real scientific research looked like. For us graduate students, we had the opportunity to practice communicating our research to a non-scientific community.   

Energized by my experiences in graduate school, I continue to teach and do science outreach as a postdoc, because I find these healthy distractions fulfilling and energizing. Through a university sponsored pen pal program, I exchanged letters with high school students that aspire to major in science in college. Through the university’s grant writing academy, I participated in a grant writing workshop, to help my fellow postdocs and graduate students apply for NIH grants.  Lastly, and most recently, I taught neuroscience and gene editing to a class of 6th graders.  Obviously, you don’t want to commit too much time to distractions and risk extending your years as a graduate student or postdoc. However, I would highly recommend taking a break, even for just an hour or two, to do a science demonstration, or write a letter, or teach a class to share science with others. Just try it, once. For me, these experiences help me reconnect with the reason why I decided to go to graduate school -- because I love science. I love talking about science, I love doing science, and I love reading about science. That being said, science research is very hard and filled with failures. Being surrounded by science all day, it’s easy to get fixated on the many things that are not going right... cloning not working... mice not breeding… tissue not staining. Teaching and outreach help me to recharge my internal batteries, reminding me that science is cool and that the research I do is both meaningful and fun.