Achieving work/life balance comes hand-in-hand with understanding yourself and your identity as a researcher, says Justin Chen.

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Contributor Justin Chen 

During my third year at MIT, I began playing basketball with a small group of graduate students. The weekly games, casual and sloppy, were a chance to talk and catch up. During a break, a friend confessed that he felt guilty for spending a few hours away from lab. “But then I tell myself exercise is good for my research,” he said. “It clears my mind and helps me focus.” I had heard similar justifications for having hobbies and found them puzzling. “What about saying that exercise is good for you?” I asked. To what extent can we separate our personal identity (or a comprehensive view of who we are) from our research? I joked, “soon you’ll be saying eating is good for my productivity or breathing is good for my research.”

The question of identity is linked to the issue of work-life balance. Most of us have a broad identity consisting of several things like mother, runner, writer, wife, daughter, baker, musician etc., but researchers usually have one identity: their job as a scientist.  Among professions, science is unique in that some researchers choose their projects.  As an undergraduate in a developmental biology lab, I was captivated by embryos. They were not much more than three layers of tissues flattened together in the pellucid shape of an animal.  While looking under the microscope I began to wonder how a single cell becomes a complete animal and eventually applied to graduate school to find out. This decision, in one sense, freed me to follow a passion but in another way my research became a shadow or alter ego constantly trailing me. Continue reading →