Today is my wife Marian's birthday, and also her first birthday after she got her PhD in public health from Johns Hopkins University. I thought I'd use this chance to write something about her PhD journey, as seen from my ringside seat.
Marian has been interested in the topic of welfare and wellbeing of elder adults since she was an undergrad in social work. In college, she interned at the Catholic Foundation of Alzheimer’s disease and Related Dementia, that helped her realize that there are needs for a permanent care system to respond to the growing needs of elders.
Our graduation from college
We came to the US to pursue our graduate degrees and were fortunate enough to get admitted to schools in the same geographical area - I at Stanford, and she at UC Berkeley. Her focus in her MSW degree is in gerontology, and she has interned at various long term care facilities and county-level social work organizations.
After her master degree, we stayed put in San Francisco bay area she I can finish my PhD, and we put down our roots here. She worked at Stanford Geriatric Education Center (SGEC) for 7 years with a wonderful group of people who have coined the term and advanced the field of ethno-geriatrics. This line of work examines the influence of culture, race and ethnicity on the health and well-being of older adults. She has been the only full time employee at SGEC for majority of this time, so her work at the SGEC involved a wide array of research/program development activities, grant writing (several were successfully funded), manuscript preparation, as well as program/curriculum development and evaluations.
Given her research interest, going back to school to get her PhD has always been on her mind, but our lives intervened. We had two kids during her time at Stanford, and having a full time job & two young kids at home kinda force the plan to get PhD onto the back burner. Finally, in 2014, she decided to give the PhD application a try.
(This photo was taken around the same time period that Marian is preparing for her PhD program admission interview. I think very few people would look at these two young kids and think "it's time that I get my PhD" :)
It was a happy day when she opened her email inbox and found an acceptance letter from her dream school!
After the PhD application season came and went, We were fortunate that she got admitted to the school of her dreams - Johns Hopkins University. So in 2015, we packed our belongings, and moved across the country to Maryland where she started a new chapter in her academic career. While she was very excited about this opportunity, the course load in her first two years turns out to be much heavier than her expected, for a host of reasons:
1. Unlike PhD programs for STEM fields, where the funding is more guaranteed (Among my personal cirlce, I don't know of a STEM PhD who would have to pay for his / her tuition out of pocket - most students can get tuition support and stipends through a combination of RA, TA, or fellowships), her field actually have cases where the funding is not guaranteed, and you would have to pay tuition for your PhD program.
2. In applying for fellowships or other funding opportunities, your grades in PhD program actually matter quite a bit.
3. Courses in public school are popular among students who have aspirations for medical schools, and these students _really_ care about their grades, which make the academic competition more stressful than classes in, say, materials sciences departments.
4. She changed field from social work in her undergraduate and masters, to public health in her PhD. Therefore she needs to take several neuro- and biological-focused courses that she did not have exposure to at all.
The confluence of these factors make her first few years of PhD program fairly stressful and sleep-deprived. The joke that we made during this time was that "she was misled by relaxing my PhD journey to think that PhD will be easy", but there's truth to that joke - my PhD program was not without difficulties, but definitely not to her extent. She routinely continue to work after kids go to sleep, or during the weekends, or had to skip Christmas holiday with family in order to prepare for her qualifier exam...
(If you think preparing midterm at a PhD program was tough, try preparing the said midterm with a wriggly toddler on your lap, constantly fighting to take your pencil away.)
Nevertheless, she persisted. After finishing her required courses and qualifier exams, she is kicking her research into high gear, and has had a string of successes in her research career. She wrote a research proposal that was awarded a highly competitive Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award to support her dissertation research. this is super impressive - the proposal she wrote was longer than my PhD Thesis! She has also coauthored two peer-reviewed publications and several in progress. She has won numerous awards at departmental, school-wide and national level for her research.
In addition to all her professional achievements, she has also been a wonderful mom, wife, and friend. Our kids have been doing well both academically and in extracurricular activities (soccer, piano, Chinese schools, etc), and overall turned out to be wonderful human beings, thanks to her love, support and persistence (she prevailed over my kids no matter how many times they complain about doing homework...)
Our birthday cake when we live in Maryland:
The mother's card she got over the years.
Like many families, our lives were turned upside-down when the COVID19 pandemic hit in Spring 2020 - I have just started at a new job then, and she was getting close to the finish line at her PhD program. In the midst of all this, she is also actively job hunting during a pandemic-induced recession. On top of all these, both of us also have to take on responsibilities as elementary-school teachers for our kids, because pandemic caught everyone by surprise and our kids' school district only offered 15 min of live instruction every other day. Needless to say, it has been a stressful 7 months.
Our last month in Maryland (July 2020) felt like a blur - she signed her offer at UCSF a few days before her PhD defense over zoom, and after her successful PhD defense, we were frantically packing under 1am in the morning because our mover are coming the very next day, and we have had lived in hotels for three weeks before finally flying across the country and moving into our residences in California. There is never a dull moment!
Happy birthday Marian, and congratulations on getting your PhD and landing job you found interesting and meaningful!
