Perseverance and Personality Tests

In this inaugural episode of SciChronicles, we feature two amazing storytellers who tell us of their journeys in accepting and understanding their identities in science and how their experiences have impacted their work and personal lives. 

Our first storyteller, Olivia Davis, recently graduated from ASU with her PhD in Biology and Society and is now working as a postdoc studying mental health in graduate school. Olivia shares her own mental health journey in graduate school and how her struggles have inspired her postdoctoral research. 

The second story is from Arvind Varsani, a molecular virologist and professor at the ASU School of Life Sciences whose work spans multiple ecosystems and species. Arvind tells us how his identity has shaped his experiences living and working all around the world and how these experiences have taught him resilience. 

If you have not already, please consider subscribing so you do not miss future episodes. Also, be sure to check out ASU's Ask a Biologist and its companion podcast, as well.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:48 Dr. Olivia Davis
• 10:56 Dr. Arvind Varsani
• 21:20 Outro

Transcript

Risa Aria Schnebly: 00:00 

Welcome to SciChronicles. My name is Risa Aria Schnebly, and this is a podcast where scientists share stories about why they do science. From the outside, becoming a scientist might seem straightforward, right? You go to school for a long time, then start to work in a lab or the field. But as you listen to these stories from scientists at different stages of their careers, it becomes clear that pursuing this path is anything but straightforward. Our storytellers reveal pivotal moments in their lives that changed the course of their career. So whether you're considering pursuing science yourself or just curious about who scientists are, take a listen. You might be surprised by what you discover. 

 Our first storyteller is Olivia Davis, a recent graduate of the Biology and Society PhD program who worked with conservationists to create tools to assess the endangered status of protected species. For the next step in her science journey, Olivia is pursuing a postdoc with a lab studying graduate students' experiences with mental health. In this story, she's not afraid to get vulnerable and shares how her own mental health journey brought her to where she is now. 

 Olivia Davis: 01:16 

Raise your hand if you've ever taken some kind of personality test, whether it be Myers Briggs, Enneagram –– okay, great. Me too. I love personality tests, so you can imagine how excited I was when my advisor had us take one that I had never heard of before in my first graduate school course that I took with her, called the Herman Brain Dominance instrument. The goal of this particular test is to classify thinking styles, which were represented by a deck of cards my advisor sprawled out on our lab table. Our task was to choose five of the cards with personality traits from the deck that we felt most reflected ourselves. Unbeknownst to us, the cards were color coded in four categories: blue, yellow, green and red. Once we were satisfied with the words on our cards, we all went to a corner of the room that corresponded with the color we had the most cards for. My advisor then proceeded to tell us the meaning of the colors. She started with, the blues, or the “rational”  cards, the category where she scored the highest. Blues, she said, have qualities typically associated with scientists or engineers, like valuing numbers and statistics. Yellow or “experimental” thinkers relate to creativity and big ideas. Then there was green, the safekeeping thinkers who thrive under structure. And finally, my category: red, the feelers. 

 Reds, my advisor explained, are more emotional and sensitive doing well in teaching and supportive roles like facilitation. Now, as those of you who have taken personality tests may know, some are more accurate at describing yourself than others. But I actually felt Red was pretty true to me. The cards I chose, with words like empathetic, cooperative, passionate, were spot on in capturing my thinking style, my desire to help others and be part of a larger group, it made me feel seen. But right after going over our colors, my advisor shared that when she first took the test, she was almost all blue, and used to think, in regards to science, why do we even need red? And at this point, whatever feeling of elation from getting another personality test result that I had shifted into anxiety. I experienced some of the classic physiological responses. I could feel my throat closing up, stabs of pain in my stomach like daggers. My brain telling me I did not belong here. But my advisor quickly followed up with how she didn't agree with this anymore, and my body started to calm down a little bit. 

 But my brain was still stuck on this comment and the idea of what kind of thinking is “best” in science. My advisor in admitting that she, too in the past, held more of these binary beliefs that the best way of thinking in science should typically be blue rather than anything else, shows the pervasiveness of this challenge in the STEM field, how deeply entrenched folks are in thinking that rational means objective, right and good, while feelings means subjective, wrong and bad. 

 I was raised with that idea too, that I had to hide my emotions to be smart, that facts and feelings couldn't coexist for science to be right. But I've always had so many feelings. And instead of being encouraged to feel them, I was often told the equivalent of “calm down” or “stop crying,” which made me approach any space I found myself in always worrying about what I could share, trying to make myself into what I thought people wanted to see. As a kid, I was always on the quiet and cautious side, though my formal anxiety, OCD, and social phobia diagnoses would not be official until much later. My mom likes to tell this story about how when I was little, when it was time for all the kids to go on the playground at preschool, everyone would run over to the jungle gym right away. Everyone except for me. I would wait and see what the other kids did before determining that I, too, was safe to join them. And in a way, that's how I've always approached many aspects of life, including my science. Since I thought I couldn't trust my emotions, I would observe what was going on around me and act accordingly to keep the peace and belong. 

 For the longest time, I ignored my feelings and my mental health needs, even when I had breakdowns in high school over editing papers or stayed up extra late needing to read my notes a certain number of times. It didn't matter, because I was “gifted” and “high functioning,” everyone thought I was fine. I just had high standards for myself. Was a perfectionist. On the regular, even the people who cared about me would tell me to stop worrying or take more breaks, while others would characterize their own organizational tendencies as OCD, even though they didn't know just how awful compulsions could be. 

 As I continued pursuing a biology PhD, I very quickly learned that if I wanted to do the best science I could do, I needed to take care of my mental health. Even with this early revelation in graduate school that I was primarily driven by my “feeling self” or red, I continued to pursue science through the lens of the “rational self,” or blue, the lens that my advisor and many other academics tended to use. This seemed to be the culture in science, in academia, that made so many people successful. But something still didn't feel right. My emotions kept surfacing, no matter how hard I tried to push them away, and then I realized and decided that I needed to seek some help. 

 I ended up going to ASU counseling services within my first couple weeks of grad school, I was so nervous as I sat in the warmly lit room the no cell phone sign glaring at me. When I got called back to see a counselor, I was greeted by a warm, friendly young woman who immediately made me feel at ease. I thought I would be able to be strong and composed, but instead, I basically started to break down the moment she asked me to tell her what was going on. I was in grad school because I was smart, praised for my brain. I should be good at this, should be adapting well. Why wasn't it working right? Why couldn't I just shut my feelings off? Surely it couldn't be that hard. So many people seemed to have no problem with it. I had just never been able to cut the feelings part out of me, no matter how logical I tried to be. 

 As I began my journey with therapy and later with medication, I started to allow myself to see other ways I could exist in the science space where I didn't have to censor myself or hide who I really was. And then I met Katie Cooper, who runs a biology education research lab here at ASU, focusing on studying how mental health affects grad students. She was the first scientist I met who was really open about mental health struggles, and she didn't just succeed in the academic space, but excelled. Her identity wasn't something she had to hide in her research, it actually made the science better. 

 I started talking with Katie about simple things, like qualitative coding and post grad career options. But I got more and more interested in her mental health research. She helped me realize that bringing your whole self to research was an asset, not a detriment, and I started to think about how I could maybe make a difference by studying mental health too, a difference that would make other people like me feel like they belong and have a place in science. 

 In applying for an NSF postdoc with her, it was the first time I had ever been so open on such a public forum about identifying as struggling with a mental health disability. It felt vulnerable, but it also felt right. My anxiety and OCD are a part of how I think, how I see the world. Whether it's “right” or “rational” or not, doesn't erase the fact that it is inevitably affecting the way I do my science. I don't want to keep seeing scientists override their struggles or hide themselves just to fit a certain mold. My NSF program officer wants to fund me for who I am, not just in spite of my diagnoses, but in some ways because of them. Because with my background, I could help make science better for people like me. Now, after passing my defense and weeks away from officially being able to call myself a doctor, I feel more authentically myself than I ever have, and I get to spend the next two years working on a project to help other graduate students know that they are not alone either. That reds, the feelers, and all other thinking styles belong in science too. 

 Risa Aria Schnebly: 10:59 

Our next storyteller is Arvind Varsani, a professor and molecular virologist whose Lab works to discover and understand viruses that exist across species like seals, ducks and bees. One of his favorite research subjects are the penguins that live in the Antarctic. Before winding up in Arizona. Dr Varsani lived and worked all over the world. In this story, he shares how his identity has shaped his experiences in different spaces, and how those experiences have taught him resilience. 

 Arvind Varsani: 11:26 

Hi everyone. I'm Arvind Varsani. I'm a professor in the School of Life Sciences and the Biodesign Institute. Let me set the scene: I was born and raised in Kenya, just south of the Equator, and this was about 12 years after the independence from the British. I have an identity crisis. Certainly, my parents are of Indian origin, but I was born and raised in Kenya. So one of the things that is challenging when you live in that kind of an environment speaking a hybrid of languages –– English, Gujarati, Swahili ––none of which you master at all, you end up speaking something like a Creole of languages, and it took me a long time to master one language, leave alone, master all three of those. So, one of the things that is very important to think about these things is your identity. And I've always grappled with my identity for a long time. Who am I? Am I an Indian? Am I a Kenyan? Am I a Kenyan Asian? And this is a challenge that a lot of people living in intersectionality have. 

 So let me tell you a little bit about my upbringing. I was born in a very conservative Indian family, and a lot of the conservatism also came in from the history of the Asian diaspora in East Africa. Certainly prior to me being born, a large Indian community in Uganda was expelled from Uganda and had to leave the country overnight. So certainly with that, all Indians across East Africa were at edge, even though a lot of them had roots dating back to about late 1800. They were brought there by the British to build a railway line, and also as skilled laborers in a variety of different environments. So with this comes certain challenges that people are really on edge: will they be expelled from those countries, or what is going on? And with that, integration is a major problem, and that manifests into your identity crisis as well. 

 So one of the things that my parents, both my parents are, my dad is semi educated in the sense that he had to drop out of high school because he couldn't afford the fees and had to take some sort of employment to kind of subsist. My mother is uneducated. She learned to write way later in her life, at possibly the age of 40, Indian script where she could just sign her name. And prior to that, the biggest challenge I found as a child, growing up and going to school where my parents had to sign reports, and my mother had to also sign a report, and she did not know how to sign, and she would put in a thumbprint on my reports. And obviously kids could mock me, and they did. And so this kind of challenges that you face in these kind of societies. 

 But nonetheless, one of the things that my dad always said to us, his four children, was that education is the way out of poverty, and he did everything he could to make sure all four of us had a decent education. And so certainly that meant there were no luxuries in our lives. Toys were limited. If we wanted books, they were more than happy to buy books for us. So this kind of manifested in a variety of different things, and that means outdoor activities or any extracurricular activities were not a high priority. Priority was always studies. So during my childhood, perhaps more in my teenage years, I would say, somehow I discovered the outdoors, and I have no idea how I did that, but I did. And during this period, my parents weren't very supportive of my outdoor activities, which was going out into the bush for the weekend with a map and a compass. And that again came back to historical issues with Asians in certain parts of the country, primarily to what had happened in Uganda, and obviously there was a wealth disparity in Kenya between the Asian community and the local African community. So certainly that would kind of come out when you're out in the bush, indirectly as well. But nonetheless, like I spent a lot of time in the bush or my school holidays that I could, my weekends, I could, but my dad was not very supportive of it. Neither was my mom. So at times I had to lie to them that I was actually going to a friend's place for a sleepover. Well, in fact, I was out in the bush, walking amongst herds of zebras, giraffes and antelopes. 

 So with this, I kind of built a very, very strong sense of the environment, and it basically helped me find a part of my identity. And my part of that identity was that actually I loved the outdoors, and I needed to do something in that context. But to find my true identity took me a long time. At the age of 18, I left Kenya to go to study in the UK, in a completely foreign community. Within a week of arriving in the UK, I was head butted in a pub because the locals claimed that I was part of a gang that had beaten one of their friends up, and when I tried to report that to the police outdoors, the police just asked me to walk away and leave. And certainly there was tension between the townies and the university students. And so that was kind of an entertaining first exposure to England. But while in England, I kind of pursued my outdoor activities, and I slowly started finding my identity. As a child, I absolutely loved African music, but whenever I talked about African music with my peers, they always frowned upon me, because for them, Western rock and pop music was the thing. And in England, I started finding a niche for myself, but not the proper niche, because I was in a small university town. 

 And once I left England after doing my undergraduate, I went to South Africa to do my PhD, and this is where I found my identity in the rainbow nation, a country that had just come out of its Apartheid Era. Four years in, I arrived in South Africa in 1998. The community was vibrant that embraced that they were all African, and it was great to see this at the University of Cape Town where I was based, and I found friends who had a very, very similar sense of music, art, or activities, and just life in general. And this is where, for the first time, I began to realize that I'm actually an African, but I'm also an Indian, and with that, I should actually embrace both those identities and make them part of me. And so that became my proud moment when I realized who I am and I could exercise whatever I needed to be. 

 But other things that really helped me was my outdoor activities early on, and they gave me a lot of foresight. I could think in the future or look further, and they also made me resilient to all the challenges I had faced across in different parts of the world. And then from South Africa, I moved to New Zealand, where I was there for eight years. And certainly, New Zealand has its own challenges, and as you move to different environments, you have to make new friends, new challenges. And certainly, your identity carries with you, and your identity that you're an African, or you have studied in Africa, carries with you, and there is predisposed certain level of objection, in a way, if I may put it, or resentment in some cases about where you studied, or even that your education might be substandard in some instances. So certainly, I was privileged, in a way. As a kid, I walked amongst herds of giraffes and zebras and antelopes. Who would have the opportunity to do that? But on the flip side, I also studied in Africa, and that was seen as a negative by a lot of Western nations and Western education system, and it was seen as inferior education to where they were. So constantly throughout my life, I've had to face these barriers, but yet recognize that I'm privileged as well at the same time, and that makes you a lot more resilient. And through these kind of scenarios, you go through barriers, and you actually learn. You also appreciate multiculturalism and take in aspects of your identity from intersectionality, and embed them in your daily lives to make everyone's lives a little more better. 

 And as an educator, I think this is one of my bigger priorities. It’s not only to educate students, but also to educate students beyond core curriculum, and that is life skills, and to actually tell and get students to embrace their identity. So in any kind of journey, certainly there are champions, and those champions are very important. The champions are those individuals who support you, who tell you that what you're doing is great. And actually those are the people who help you navigate through this landscape, which is littered with all sorts of obstacles to get you where you are. And I have a lot of champions, and I am very grateful for those individuals who have made a huge impact in my life, and certainly some of those are within our my family, my brother's wife has made a major impact in my early life, as well as people in Cape Town, certain close friends and mentors who have seen what I can achieve and made sure they support me and push me in the right direction. 

 Risa Aria Schnebly: 21:20 

These SciChronicle stories were originally developed for a live audience as part of the School of Life Sciences Storyslam at Arizona State University. We would like to thank the School of Life Sciences, as well as the Center for Biology and Society, for funding the Storyslam, and Ask a Biologist for helping us make these stories into a podcast. In case you're new to Ask a Biologist, it is an amazing website for all types of learners, young and young at heart. And best of all, it is free, including its companion podcast, which we recommend checking out. We'll make sure to put links to the website and podcasts in the Episode Notes. This podcast was developed by Kayla Burgher, Risa Aria Schnebly, and Charles Kazilek. Thank you for listening, and if you haven't already, please subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss out on future episodes.