No one is coming to help you. Let’s help each other.

In the past few year I have learned so much about what community means to me. When I started my PhD journey, I was so incredibly excited to be able to learn how to ask interesting questions that ultimately would reduce human suffering. I started out as a trained evolutionary biologist and ecologist, which perhaps lends me this perspective of community being vital to any individual success or failure. No particular community structure fits all sizes, but I have seen the reality of ecological impacts on geologically rapid evolution in lizards in White Sands, and I know humans can “co-evolve” to to work within the bounds of their ecosystem.

I believed that the bounds of the ecosystem, i.e. the biotic and abiotic factors of graduate school boiled down to hard work, sincere effort, a dash of talent and luck. I was sorely mistaken. This was an individualist outlook, but one that was easy to exploit.

Now, after many years, and many iterations of trying to find the resources available to me as a graduate student, I’ve learned how important it is to know how to maneuver through a world of politics, cruelty, viciousness and bitterness that has entrenched some of the brightest minds in science. I have learned title and status are really meaningless unless they have actions which back them up.

I have learned that my peers are the next generation of scientists who have a responsibility to the world based on our privileges provided by academia, the status, the relative security, the ability to act without consequence as you “level up”. I have learned that I cannot determine what that responsibility is without engaging with people both in and outside of academia to discuss value systems. Science has failed us in this period of crisis.

No one is coming to help you. Let’s help each other.