what if...?

In light of my newly recanted burning desire to plot out every last detail of my future, my mind has wandered to questions about "What would have happened if you had chosen a different place for graduate school?" Two notes on that sentence: 1) The question isn't a "Oh, woe is me, I made a bad choice!" one; it's simply, "Hm... That would have been interesting." 2) I have absolutely no idea when the last time I read or used the word "recanted" was (excuse the grammar awfulness just there), but for some reason that word flowed nicely through my fingers onto the screen...!

So. What if...

What if I had chosen to attend University of North Carolina? I had a tough time picking between Chapel Hill and Pittsburgh. In many respects, Chapel Hill is just the type of location I would love to be in: a smallish college town, lovely weather, situated equidistant from the ocean and the mountains. I even had the pleasure of meeting someone from a sister church of my college church while I had my interview, and I then spent the next summer living just around the corner from that person (who happened to be an incredibly sweet, good-looking, tall young man). The research there isn't bad, and everyone was very friendly.

The interesting thing about UNC is that one of the motivations for strongly considering the school was the Research Triangle that, in addition to Chapel Hill, has vertexes in Durham and Raleigh. Back in 2002, it seemed like THE place to be. A job was guaranteed in the area. That seemed like a very wonderful thing to me at the time. The biotech industry in the Triangle was thriving and growing. To my fresh-out-of-undergrad mind, it sounded perfect and secure. However, here I am five years later, and I haven't heard a thing about the Triangle in ever so long. Yes, there's a lot of good research being done at UNC, North Carolina State University, and Duke University. However, it's a far cry from the picture that had been painted in my mind. A forecast is, after all, merely a forecast. I feel I would have been disappointed if I had selected UNC with the prospect of jumping into industry in the Triangle...only to find that it wasn't as up on the up and up as had been projected.

What if I had chosen to attend the University of Pennsylvania? Now that is an interesting question. To this day I believe that many people probably thought my choice to turn down Penn was incredibly stupid. In fact, the more I stay in research, the more I believe that. The program I was accepted into at Penn had an agreement with the National Institutes of Health where Penn students could select from not only the Penn researchers but also the researchers at the nearby NIH to pursue their doctoral degree. At the time I was incredibly naive about what that meant. I do recall that it was emphasized in pretty much every informational talk we interviewees sat through; it obviously was something Penn was extremely proud of and thought would impress all of their applicants. Well, call me ignorant, but I wasn't impressed because I had no idea what significance research at the NIH has in HIV and pretty much every other biomedical field. To give you an idea of how appealing the NIH would be to most anyone who knew what was going on in science, at the latest HIV meeting I attended, almost every speaker was from or working in close collaboration with someone at the NIH. The rest of the speakers all seemed to be from Penn.

There you have it...I blew a huge opportunity for getting to work with the best of the best in the field at what many would say is the most coveted biomedical research facility in the world. The NIH (seemingly) has it all - state-of-the-art machines to do the cutting edge research, internal funding so grad students don't have to worry so much that their boss is going to tell them "Oh, you can't do that experiment, it's too expensive," beautiful buildings, the smartest people in the world in the next lab over, access to an endless supply of volunteers for tissue and blood samples. Besides that, it's situated in a fairly wonderful area of the country (again, not too far from both a large body of water and a open, mountainous region - these two aspects pique my interest very much). Anyone who is interested in building a solid career in scientific research would jump at the chance to get an in. And I said no??? What was I thinking!?

Yet, I still am not convinced that I would have selected Penn, even if I had known then what I know now. After all...I don't want to build a snazzy career. I don't want to spend my life chained to my research or be cut-throat competitive. I want to work hard at what I love doing, sure, but not to the extent I gather is the norm at the NIH based on conversations with other students and researchers I have since met who are there. That's not where my heart is at. Perhaps if I had chosen to go to Penn, I would be headed in an entirely different direction from where I'm pointed now...and it's anyone's guess as to whether I would be happy or not.

What if I had chosen to attend University of California, Davis? This question intrigues me most. Over the years here in graduate school, I have achieved a deep appreciation for the HIV-related work going on at UC Davis. For some reason I never seriously considered their offer, and I can only assume it was because they accepted me and made an offer without flying me out for an interview so I thought it was a lousy, second-rate place to go. Today I very much disagree with that judgment; two of the top ten people I would like to work with if I stay in HIV research are there. Probably another thing that kept me from Davis was its distance from family in Michigan. Who would have guessed that by my third year of grad school my sister would be living only an hour and a half away, which is closer than any family member is currently?

There are so many "what if"s. In the end, I really don't know. Nobody ever knows! What I am confident of is that, had I chosen a different school, I would not know the people I know today; that would be sad. And it's slightly possible that I never would have fallen in love with mucosal immunology and the gut in particular. (You can determine whether or not that was a good thing to have happen to me here in Pittsburgh!) Maybe I also would not have learned to rock climb...or scuba dive...or knit! No knitting -- now that is an unusual concept to attempt to grasp!

It's good for me to look back and see how my choice panned out, especially as I approach the end of my graduate schooling and will eventually (but not now!) need to make a choice about where to step next. I realize that what I think will happen is not what does happen. And usually what does happen is a lot better than what I thought would happen, even if it is a little nerve-wracking to get through.

For, even in my selection of the University of Pittsburgh as the school for the pursuit of my PhD, what ended up happening was not at all what I had anticipated. I was exceedingly interested in one particular lab when I moved to Pittsburgh. The projects going on were directly related to my strongest interest in the HIV field. I rotated in the lab for 3 or 4 months, and I was very happy there and got some great work done. My rotation project was not really about the particular interest I had; it was about the gut as a reservoir for HIV during chronic infection and had to do a lot with T cells. When I finished that rotation and went on to the next lab, I picked up a project involving the gut, also, based entirely on my new-found interest in that organ. And six months later when I had to select the lab in which I would continue my education...it was not the one I had come to Pittsburgh for. I could certainly have gone there; there was an opening for a student, and I enjoyed the mentor and the people I would have worked with. But, as usual...something better had been revealed to me.

Funny how that works, eh?

...And I hadn't intended on writing this, and it sounds super, duper silly, but I just thought: D is a great guy. Wonderful. But apparently not for me. That's sad. And yet...if someone better in coming...wow, Someone Better is going to be AMAZING, because D is pretty darn good!

Hooray.