Hello fellow grad students! A couple months into the 2nd year of my PhD in Cognitive and Behavioural Ecology here, in many ways it feels like I’ve just started. The global pandemic may not have struck Newfoundland quite as intensely as it has elsewhere in the world, but it’s definitely disrupted productivity here as well. During the many months of working from home, I fell back into some hobbies that I tended to neglect when I was in the midst of working on my thesis – and chief among those was baking.
I’m hardly the only person to get into baking, sourdough or otherwise, during quarantine. But it was a good way to separate my working and relaxing time when I was confined to my 240ft2 apartment. Throughout the process of making baked goods for all my friends, I heard from more than one person “I like cooking, but baking is just so precise and you need to measure so carefully…”
As someone who measures basically nothing while baking and ends up with something tasty at least 90% of the time, it strikes me that there are a few parallels between grad school and baking, and maybe it’s a useful way to think about progress and success.
In general, I think most baking advice can be summed up as: if you’re given a recipe, follow the instructions precisely and do everything to the letter, you will successfully achieve the final result every time. Spontaneity and substitutions are generally discouraged.
Does that sound familiar to anyone else? Theses and other research projects are so clearly delineated in the beginning. The steps to follow to get from A, to B, to C, are clearly outlined and if you do everything your advisory committee says, you’re golden. As long as you run this experiment, read these papers, write this article, you can be assured that by the end you’ll have a completed thesis. It’s just that simple, right?
… Yeah, obviously that isn’t how life works, in the kitchen or in higher education. In the immortal words of Robert Burns, “the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.” Whether that’s an ingredient that’s gone stale and doesn’t work as it should, or your study species not cooperating with your proposed study, there are innumerable external forces that will disrupt your plan. Even if you measure perfectly and put your muffins into the oven for the correct amount of time, your oven thermostat could be off by a few degrees so you end up burning them. Maybe you’ve got a totally manageable reading list to get through before your comprehensive exam, but a family emergency arises, and you have to go home to care for a parent. Plans and guidelines are useful, but you can’t just be beholden to them and have complete faith it’ll all work out.
After this realization hit me, I started applying some of my baking philosophy to the rest of my life. In contrast to my work and schooling, where I try to be quite regimented and orderly, I’m pretty laissez-faire about the details while baking. Measurements are usually splashes or handfuls, not millilitres or grams. And sometimes it doesn’t turn out like I expected, but I’ve learned to accept what happens and, however cliché it may be, enjoy the journey. Maybe those cookies didn’t turn out like you’d anticipated, but now you’ve got some delicious biscotti! Or brownies! Fundamentally, if you put sugar, flour, and butter together, you will end up with something at least edible.
And even if the product ends up being inedible – or unpublishable – that doesn’t make the time spent working on it useless. No matter the outcome, it’s always a learning opportunity that you can use in future endeavours. To generate new knowledge, we have to go beyond the boundaries of what is known, and there’s always risk in uncertainty. For example, having experimented with peanut butter-black liquorice cookies, I can confidently say that while I love both those flavours individually, that is not a line of research that needs to be pursued any further.
In the interest of assuaging my anxiety and stress, I’ve started trying to appreciate the unexpected successes. Maybe my first chapter won’t look like I had originally thought it would last year. But that doesn’t mean its current shape is inferior or a failure. Sometimes, you’ve got to trust in your abilities and let the oven do what it will. And if that means your banana bread actually ends up being pudding? Well, it’s delicious either way.
~Jack