This Is Not My Home: Embracing the Nomadic Life of Grad School
By Krystal Maughan
“We have begun our initial descent; please ensure your safety belts are on,” said the familiar voice of the pilot. I peered out the window and saw a sheet of white snow and a grey sky where, just a few hours ago, I had overlooked warm, turquoise waters and whipped past fluffy, white clouds. Immediately it broke me; I could feel the hot tears streaming down my cheeks. A single thought rang through my being: this is not my home.
For many of us, we uprooted our lives to exist in this space that promises to open a door to a dream: the privilege of being able to spend our lives working on problems we love, mentoring students, and teaching. This decision often resulted in our having to be accommodating on so many levels, moving to predominantly white institutions where there weren’t a lot of people who looked like us, waiting for months on end for financial reimbursement after having presented work at workshops, watching friends from high school post on social media, photos with their families on exotic vacations (or time off) for weeks on end. We exist in a space where we feel devalued day after day, while a tiny voice rises up within a constant state of self-doubt and reminds us that “you are enough”.
Literature from the Caribbean, for example the works of Samuel Selvon’s “The Lonely Londoners,” talks about this experience of living in a community in a constant state of transience in a foreign space. In effect, it echoes much of the region’s fascination with memory, the effects of postcolonialism, social mobility, and identity. How do we achieve our dreams without alienation from the country from which we came, without the constant feeling of loneliness that comes from perpetually feeling like an outsider, a nomad?
I live in a cozy town of Burlington, Vermont, where the leaves change colors once a year to a beautiful, fiery red. I have lived here for some time, but is it really permanent? For international PhD students, we also know the feeling all too well. “It can’t be permanent, because I am not a citizen; without this student visa, I would not be allowed to have an address in this country. I do not have the freedom to work any job, nor do I vote, but I do pay taxes.”
From summer school to workshops to conferences, to securing a postdoc, we move from place to place on a whim. Will there ever be a place we can call home?
So we try to create spaces that might be pseudo-versions of the concept of home; a working lab, a shared living space with fellow graduate students, a shared hotel room with another PhD student with whom we are randomly matched. How do we wrestle with the idea of this impermanence and simultaneous uncertainty about the future? How do we shape a space that we can call home within a system that was not even built to accommodate us, that never had us in mind?
These days, I find myself at intersections: I have lived in America long enough that some people in my home country would consider me to be American, but I am not. I have existed within academia long enough that my friends who are unfamiliar with that path believe that I should have a career within it (aren’t you tired of being in school and when will you do adult things?), but yet, I do not have one with any permanence. I exist within research communities in mathematics, but sometimes my own self-doubt about whether I belong makes the idea of my having a long-term sense of permanence in this space slip through my fingers. Still, there are moments, glimpses that give me the illusion that this could be home. Most recently, it was making a new friend at a cryptography workshop, who joined me for a two-hour long walk to a Caribbean restaurant, or attending the Arizona Winter School on Abelian Varieties, where I reconnected with so many people I knew. Those moments made me feel less like an outsider.
A mentor within a group of Black Doctoral Scholars once told me about the concept of ambiguous loss, the sense that one has lost an emotional connection even when a person’s physical presence remains, or one where an emotional connection remains but a physical connection is lost. It is the feeling that has rung true to me every time I visit my home country, a space that, when I have the privilege of being able to visit, I know feels familiar, but is changing every minute that I am here in the United States, working towards an uncertain dream in a foreign space. As a consequence of ambiguous loss, there is a sense of a lack of closure, a sense of unresolved grief. Am I making the right choice? What happens if nothing pans out?
Years before I started graduate school, a mentor told me that graduate school would change me; the process metamorphoses you. Who we are at the start is very different from who we will be at the end, and the world we live in, and our suitcase full of dreams will be like a Pandora’s box. Still, I am hopeful. Within the time I have been in graduate school, I have experienced an advisor leaving, gained an advisor, been told I could not do things and achieved those very things in spite of these admonitions, found joy in mathematics I never knew I could find, and friendship in the most unexpected places. Perhaps the place I currently live is not my home, but the journey for me has felt like coming home.
Krystal Maughan is originally from Trinidad and Tobago. She is a PhD student at the University of Vermont working on post-quantum cryptography, specifically isogeny-based cryptography. She would describe her interests as somewhere between Number Theory, Algebraic Graph Theory and Computation.