2020: Ten years since high school

What is your name?

Lydia Andreyevna Krasilnikova.

Where do you live now?

Cambridge, MA, USA.

What is your occupation or field that you work in?

I am a computational biologist. I study infectious disease and disease outbreaks. I also draw space cows and occasionally write articles about scientist culture.

What are some life events that have occurred? (marriage, children, education, achievements, etc.)

I got my SB and MEng and am currently working on my PhD. My partner Cory and I have been together for almost nine years now. We met in college (lived in the same dorm). He’s a mechanical engineer. No kids (yet).

What is one unusual experience you have had since graduating from State High?

Teaching was weird. One of my first times reserving a room for office hours I waited way too late and the room I got was a special room above the Museum. I got a message saying I would need to pick up a key. When I came by to pick up the key the person in charge was flustered and very confused, told me I wasn’t supposed to have been able to reserve that room at all, and finally said I could have the room just for this week but that I and my students were not to eat anything while in the room and that we were absolutely not allowed to touch anything. Anyway, it turned out to be the human specimens room. It was full of skeletons, human skeletons and skeletons of human-like primates, and skulls on shelves behind glass, and stacked little cardboard boxes that I can only assume contained more bones. (In addition, the lights were automatic and apparently I don’t move that much because they kept turning off.) No students showed up to office hours that week.

***

High school was a magical time. I was obsessed with the radio, and I carried around a little wind-up Grundig. I knew all the stations in our town, and in the neighboring towns, and I vividly remember the staticky morning talk show wake-ups and the smell of the wet morning air in the early autumn and the hope I had for every single day. I knew all the genres of stations, and I thought I knew all the genres of people. I dressed in mostly all black, with one non-black color at a time, ostensibly to show everyone I was hardcore but secretly because I had no idea how to match colors. I ruined all my textbooks by pressing leaves between the pages. I was always late, especially to first period, and I got a decent chunk of my best studying done in detention and Saturday school with my favorite math teacher. I learned that authority figures can let you down, and that other people, including some trustworthy adults, can open doors for you and make your dreams possible. I wasn’t yet grateful for nor understood the preciousness of their consistently showing up for me (even as I did not not consistently show up to, well, anything). I unquestioningly thought I could do anything I wanted to do—which to me meant, ultimately, getting into MIT, leading to some unknown secure future, the vision or meaning of which I hadn’t thought through at all (other than, of course, an MIT boyfriend). I hadn’t yet experienced or learned about sexism—or xenophobia, or racism, or imposter syndrome, or the sadder sides of immigration, or most bad things (and I don’t think I would have gotten as far as I have if I had). As far as I knew, I was smart and hardworking and if I decided to do something it got done.

Things that would surprise then me about current me:

• That radio plays much less of a part in my life.
• And kayaking, and camping and hiking.
• That, ten years out of high school, and having graduated from MIT, I live with roommates in a not-fancy apartment.
• That I still don’t usually feel that I belong, and that the weird awkwardness I felt in classrooms of older or cooler students never fully went away (and maybe was never about age).
• That I actually did pull it off, all of it.

If twelve-year-old me, lying on the carpet of her second-story bedroom at 11pm switching between homework and calling friends on the light tan corded phone (yes, actually) and obsessively refreshing the MIT Admissions blogs, could see me, I think, she would be beyond thrilled, floored, some kind of astonished. I achieved most of her dreams. I got into MIT. I blogged for MIT Admissions, which was my browser homepage and obsession (obsession) from ages 12 through 18. I don’t think I can overstate what a big deal that would have been to her. (People even read my writing! Sometimes a lot of people, and sometimes a lot.) I finished a double major that sounds like a triple major. I got an MEng. I got my MIT boyfriend.

Writing it out, it sounds ridiculous. I even got into Harvard for grad school after MIT, which I hadn’t even bothered to imagine. I even wrote for Technology Review, not once but multiple times, in print (my own name, in a byline, in print)—the same magazine a younger me was utterly entranced by at an alum family friend’s parents’ house, the very origin of the foundation for the future self that I spent the next half-decade carefully planning and imagining and singularly working toward. I was even on TV. I was even on the cover of a newspaper. It all happened.

I am not the person I think I thought I would be, nor am I anymore the person who imagined her. I’m steadier, I hope, and my risks are more measured, which may or may not be a good thing. I have thinner skin and a softer shell. I care deeply, far too deeply, about what people think of me—not just the clothes and the music, but my academic accomplishments and my mind and my career. I’m far less confident, even as I’ve progressed academically, even as I’ve gotten far more comfortable around people and inside my own body. I’ve disappointed a lot of people whose opinions I care about, including myself—something that just wasn’t possible back then. I’m more concerned about other people in general, and not just in a bad way. I’m kinder to my body. I’m more concerned about balance.

Sometimes I wonder what that younger me, the designer, the true me, as she seems to be in my head, would do with the opportunities and challenges I have. I wish I could transplant her into my mind for a week, either to take the lead on my work or to sit back and critique. What would she think of my PhD so far? She’d probably work far harder, or at least with more focus, with absolutely no self-doubt. She probably wouldn’t hesitate or wait for permission or approval. Would she be a better self-advocate? Would she be unshakable in pursuing her goals? Would she speak up more aggressively for her ideas, and do a better job of asking for resources to carry them out?

Clearly the thing I miss, really really miss, about the person I used to be is her assured, steady confidence, or at least what I remember as assured, steady confidence. Where did it come from? Supportive parents? A stable, comfortable home and academic life? Mostly supportive teachers, at least in the subjects that mattered? Easier, less open-ended day-to-day tasks with tangible goals and endpoints? Did it come from not having yet experienced a pileup of history of failure? a lack of exposure to criticism? not yet having experienced or named sexism and the various usual injustices? Was it just a quality of being a teenager, some level of blindness to failure or criticism—social skills sufficiently underdeveloped to not notice or care about anyone’s opinion of me or have my own real opinion or awareness of myself? Did I simply not have an awareness of the distance between myself and the person I wanted to be? Or was the person I wanted to be sufficiently vague or shrouded in distant adulthood to be beyond comparison? Did being a child make my shortcomings easier for me to accept? Or was it perhaps something more positive: a healthier attitude about failure, or something that gave me the perspective to not be wobbled by it? Was it the constant, hovering presence of a professional goal that reached beyond any one person or subgoal, large enough and far enough away that it could be reached by wiggling around any steps I missed? Was it my many, many hobbies, giving me something other than my career to invest my heart into? Was it the presence and support of family and friends who I felt truly knew me?—in which case, was it the ability to talk through setbacks or negative experiences or my perception of another person’s judgement, again and again and again, to several separate people? or was it the knowledge that here, in this place where I am safe, are people who love me, even knowing me? Perhaps knowing that there are people who consistently see me and consistently love me cause feeling otherwise unloved or unseen to become bearable, any other person’s opinion or moods not quite as important. Or is the problem with self-worth during a PhD the concentration of responsibility for evaluation into a far smaller number of people, sometimes just one, often for an entire six years? In that case, it should be important to de-densify that authority—introduce more mentors, more authority figures, preferably some of them supportive to balance out any overweighed trauma from the others.

One idea that has been causing me particular dissonance is that high school me seemed to have time for everything. She filled up the school day with nonstop classes, cramming more classes where there were supposed to be study halls or lunch periods, missing a few days a week of easier classes to cram even more classes in where they already literally couldn’t fit. But I don’t remember homework or classes being my whole life, or even most of it. My memories are mostly in between classes (gossiping, so much gossiping, holding hands, making out in the hallway—horrifyingly embarrassing to think of now) or, especially, before and after school. A lot of my social life was in Science Olympiad—more gossiping, learning to use power tools (and hot glue and gorilla glue and gorilla tape), building tiny cars and water clocks and wooden airplanes I was so proud of—, starting in eighth grade and ending in eleventh, when I left high school. I was obsessed (obsessed) with getting the team to Nationals (I didn’t—we didn’t, and I cried on the last bus ride home from States). I kayaked multiple days a week and most of the weekend many weekends, especially in the not-freezing seasons. On top of that my family went on near constant adventures, skiing and biking and hiking and weekend camping trips around Pennsylvania. I also remember long nights coding personal projects, working on my first attempt(s) at a blog, trying to learn to sew clothes, baking experiments like that handful of times I made phyllo dough from scratch. And then my obsession with photography, going on what I called photography expeditions, then spending hours and hours editing photos of butterflies or trees or sunsets or the moon and adding a color-coordinated border and uploading to deviantART and talking with strangers online about my photographs and their photographs and about photography in general. And, of course, constantly AIM-ing with my friends, dissecting and analyzing crushes and homework and teachers and goals—this not including the hour a day dedicated to phone calls with boyfriends or prospective boyfriends or the time spent vaguely hanging out/loitering on school property or playing hide-and-seek tag after dark on Fridays in the park on the way home from school (that and another form of tag on the actual playground equipment right when it got just dark enough for someone to get injured on playground equipment but yet not dark enough to make hide-and-seek extra spooky).

There definitely wasn’t actually enough time: I cut class or slept through class or got sick and missed class constantly, at least once a week, which must have been an awful rollercoaster for my parents and a ridiculous mess for my teachers to watch and try to grapple with year after year after year. I would pull all-nighters to get work done, only to fall asleep and miss class and not turn in the work I did anyway. Then turn work in late; then probably fall behind, though I don’t actually remember ever being behind. Then do it again. (The trick was to get into just enough trouble to get Saturday school, rather than several far less productive detentions, but not enough trouble to warrant an even less productive in-school suspension.)

And yet I remember this time, and my time at MIT right after it, as remarkably productive, even though I definitely spent far more time on things that are not my job than I do now. Which is too bad—it seems I am working harder, but far less effectively, perhaps because I am working harder.

So here are some action items, borrowed from a happy childhood, to cultivate well-earned self-confidence for a better, less traumatizing, perhaps even empowering PhD/current career stage experience—maybe even a better, less traumatizing career overall.

1. Choose your mentors carefully. Have several, meet with them regularly, and solicit feedback. If your current career stage is structured such that you get feedback from only one person, or only one person’s feedback matters to your career, acquire additional mentors and do your best to dilute that one person’s power over you (even if they are supportive and that power feels like a good thing).
2. Develop a larger goal that reaches far beyond your current career stage—far enough away that a failure now or loss of support from any one person could be wiggled around to still reach the larger goal through another path.
3. Have family and/or friends who you feel truly and consistently see you, and truly and consistently love you for exactly who you are. Talk with those people often, and do the same for them.
4. Have hobbies that are important to you and give you fulfillment that is completely separate from your primary career.
5. Make (substantial) time for your hobbies and family and friends. Don’t cut them out because you think you will get more work done. You won’t, apparently. Work less.
6. Make good friends at work/in your lab to make the whole thing more bearable and hopefully even fun, at least sometimes. Spend more time talking with people, and listening to people, and being friendly.
7. Remember your younger self, who would be so proud of who you are and how far you have come.

Update: my favorite math teacher, who presided over Saturday school, has informed me that apparently while I did have Saturday school sometimes, I mostly showed up voluntarily, just for fun, to sit and work and be focused. (What a nerd.)

***

2025: (a little over) ten years since undergrad, (a little under) ten years since MIT

What is your name?

Lydia Andreyevna (soon to be Robinson) Krasilnikova.

Where do you live now?

Malden, MA, USA.

What is your occupation or field that you work in?

Public health.

What are some life events that have occurred? (marriage, children, education, achievements, etc.)

PhD, house, engagement, new job, cat.

***

As I write this I am at home, in the living room. The living room is where I spend most of my waking hours. It’s small. It’s got a futon, a TV, shelves with Legos and books, a fancy coffee table we got off the street in Cambridge, and cute bar stools that look like burnt marshmallows facing the countertop that connects the living room and the kitchen. Almost a year later we’re still not completely unpacked, but the living room is the room we perfected first.

As I write this I am sitting on the Orange Line. I get on at the end of the line and I get off at the other end of the line, and then in the evenings I do the same thing in reverse. We’re nearing the end of the line, and the train is clearing out. From the outside the Orange Line train looks like a giant bug, something wormy and segmented.

As I write this I am sitting at my desk at work, during my union-mandated break. I work at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences. My chair is a comfortable spinny chair and my desk can set itself to any height (sometimes even a height I am interested in it setting itself to). There are no personal effects on my desk or pinned to the walls of my cubicle, but that’s because I’m new here and I take the train, and personal effects are hard to take on the train. I sit next to the arbovirus team, which I like because I get to hear about their adventures collecting ticks all over Massachusetts. I myself don’t go on adventures for work, but I like being around people who do. In grad school I was in a department for zoology and botany and evolution, which meant that most of my peers spent summers hunting down frogs or ferns or a specific species of flower.

My side of grad school was evolution: specifically, viral evolution, which can be used to trace a virus as it moves from person to person and mutates along the way. I study disease outbreaks using the genomes of the pathogens at fault. (You know how you can sequence the human genome? We sequence everything in you that isn’t human.) In my day-to-day I write code, I do statistics and make graphs, I organize and attend meetings, and I write and read papers. Today, I am working on a subtype classification system for the virus I’m currently focusing on (no spoilers!), but today is an unusual day. Most days I analyze outbreaks of that virus: I’m looking to learn how far it spread, whom it spread through, and how well contact tracing, vaccination, and other interventions worked. I’ve been analyzing outbreaks like this one for about a decade, starting during my MEng at MIT and then through my PhD. The job stays interesting: I get to jump around from pathogen to pathogen, and the things we can do with pathogen genomes get cooler every year.

I also write and draw. I am now, finally, writing fiction. I’m on the third draft of my first novel, which is a ghost story about mortgages set in Salem on Halloween. (It’s a weird combo. Wish me luck.) I wrote it largely on my phone on the train, which I’m pretty proud of.

Here’s a timeline of my career:

• 2006-2010: high school, the last year of which I spent at Penn State taking classes mostly in computer science and writing
• 2010-2016: MIT undergrad (6-7/18, or computational biology and math, with a minor in 21W, or writing) and master’s in engineering (6-7), during which time I lived in Random Hall, blogged, and met the love of my life
• 2016-2017: listless but pivotal gap year working in the same lab where I did my master’s (the iconic Sabeti Lab), during which time a guy I shared an office with decided to apply to grad school, in response to which, on the last day to register for the biology GRE, I followed our PI to the airport and pitched myself applying too
• 2017-2023: PhD at Harvard (same lab) in the department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
• 2023-2024: postdoc at the Broad Institute (same lab)
• 2024-present: Massachusetts Department of Public Health (now collaborating with that same lab)

And here’s a timeline of where I’ve lived:

• 2006-2010: an absolutely idyllic two-story house with a big yard (the room over the garage was my room) in State College, Pennsylvania, with my parents and my little brother Max
• 2010-2015: Random Hall, on BMF, with two windows looking out at a very precious tree
• 2015-2021: a fourth-floor, two-bedroom apartment between MIT and Harvard with a tiny kitchen, a shower that took ten minutes to heat up, an ever-rotating cast of roommates (all friends from MIT or friends of friends from MIT), and breathtaking views of Harvard rooftops (nice, pointy spires) silhouetted against the sunset
• 2021-2024: the third floor of our friend PJ’s house in Salem, PJ being one of our best friends since Random Hall and Salem being as much about the ocean as it is about witches, which surprised me
• 2024-present: our very own house, in Malden, a town north of Boston and south of Salem, with us on the second and third floors and one of Cory’s best friends since high school, Robert, in the first-floor apartment

The house was the best we could do in the circumstances, those circumstances being Boston housing costs and me tanking my earnings by going to grad school over and over again. (Highly recommend, but from what I’ve heard it’s unlikely I will ever catch up financially to my friends who did not go to grad school.) The house is very old and it has a lot of doors. (The first floor kitchen holds the record at five doors.) Cory is a mechanical engineer, so he fixes and builds things. I paint things and make phone calls. So far we have fixed up the first and third floors, and we are slowly working on the second floor as we live in it. But that is all small: sometime in the spring we are having the front porch rebuilt because it is falling off the house and we are having the structural beams that hold up the house swapped out for new ones for similarly good reasons. We have a plumbing and electrical loan, a maxed-out (temporarily interest-free) credit card, and a construction loan almost the size of another down payment. I like to brag about our debt, but this was our secret strategy: buy a huge house no one else will bid on at a price we can afford, then get it livable before the plan falls in on itself like a house of cards. I’ll let you know later if the gamble was good.

I don’t have a lot to complain about. I have a family that loves me whom I love back, I have good friends who have stuck with me through hard times, I have an entire house (which is technically two entire houses), I have four cities that feel like home (Boston, State College, Myrtle Beach, and Key Largo), I have a tuxedo kitten who thinks I’m his mother, I have a job that I love with people I like, I got to go to Harvard for grad school (a reach goal from undergrad), I got to go to MIT (my dream since I was 12), and I’m engaged (engaged!) (to the MIT engineer I dreamed of finding since probably about the same age). No dream has come close to my dream of going to MIT. Nothing has ever felt as bright as that. But I want to have kids, I want to be able to afford to fix up our house and get Cory a new (used) car, and I want to be a published fiction author. Someday, once everything is paid for, I’d like to buy and fix up more Malden two-families. (I’m learning way too much and having way too much fun with this one not to do it all again.)

I want to say that my hopes for my future today don’t feel as sparkly as my dreams felt in high school—specifically my dream of getting into MIT. Maybe it’s because I’m older, maybe it’s because I spent some time listless, maybe it’s because I’m content. But why would I say that? Getting engaged felt good, uniquely good. I think having kids would feel good in a unique way, too. I’ve wanted to write fiction for as long as I wanted to go to MIT (longer, even), so maybe getting a book deal would feel just as good. And I think really liking the state of my home and having a modern car and having everything paid off would feel like relief and stability.

I don’t know what I thought my post-MIT dreams would look like. Change the world for the better, first and foremost? An easy checkmark—I’m lucky that my day job does that. Get rich? A more challenging checkmark, given that day job, and with wealth defined as stability. (I think if you can stably afford a house and kids in the greater Boston area and go out to restaurants and buy expensive lattes at fancy local coffee shops and travel for vacations, you’re pretty rich.) Get famous? Never famous enough to be recognized, but as famous as seeing my name on some of the books at Hudson News when I fly (I’m terrified of flying, but I think if my name was on books sold at airports I’d like it quite a bit more.) and people seeing my name on a talk or a paper in public health, recognizing it, and thinking it’s probably a good talk or paper (and I’d also, in this fantasy world, like for that thought to be true).

It’s not MIT, but is it a dream? Do I need a dream?

I don’t have an answer to that question. My twenties have turned into my thirties and while I don’t have a guiding North Star, I do have goals and hopes. Here’s what I’m grappling with: without a defining dream, my work still has purpose and my life still has meaning. Is that enough? Is it enough to do good work and to be content? In high school, it was easy to find something big to reach for. Is there a parallel in adulthood, for me?

***

2015: Ten years ago today

As I write this I would have been in Random Hall, on BMF, at my desk with the door open to the long hallway joining the back stairwell and the two donut-shaped (if you look down from above, which few people do) buildings, which gave me an excellent view of anyone coming or going. In January 2015 I would have been halfway through the first year of my MEng. I would have been gearing up to TA my second semester of 6.005 (which later became 6.031), and I would have just joined the Sabeti Lab with no idea it would be my home for the next decade.

These were the beginnings of the listless years. A PhD was on the horizon, maybe. A job was on the horizon, maybe. I didn’t know where I was going and I certainly did not have a plan. My biggest dream thus far, MIT, was coming to a close, and I didn’t have a replacement. And ten years older, ten years more content, ten years happier, I still don’t have a replacement.

Things that would surprise then me about current me:

• That most of what I worked hardest and longest on didn’t end up mattering except as an educational exercise, while some of the things that mattered most came together in a matter of months.
• That every big career step since MIT has been something I stumbled into, not something I thought through deeply and worked toward over years.
• When it happened I don’t know, but in every place I go, I do feel, resoundingly, like I belong.
• That I never did figure it out, whatever it was I was hoping I would figure out.
• That I am happier every year.

And, based on that, some action items:

1. Nothing matters and everything matters—or rather, you have no idea what is going to end up mattering, so do your best at everything but don’t get hung up on anything.
2. Set yourself up to do good work that you are proud of.
3. Be open to the opportunities that come your way.
4. Be content to be content.
5. Remember your younger self, who would be so proud of who you are and how far you have come.

Back then, I couldn’t have known I would become dreamless—happy, busy, doing good things, but dreamless. An MEng is not technically supposed to be two years long, and a person isn’t supposed to spend 14 years mostly within a two-mile radius, but I wanted to stick around MIT for as long as I could. Who wouldn’t? I was exactly where I wanted to be. I was home.

***