My son just turned one year old last week. Instead of cake, we made steamed bread with carrot juice. Since he was born in the Year of Dog according to the Chinese zodiac, I even tried to shape the bread into a dog. It turned out, however, that being able to do experiments in molecular biology may not help at all in shaping the bread. Luckily, the birthday boy didn’t care about this, and still ate lots of the carrot bread happily.

Last year was an adventure to not only my son, but also myself. In the same week that we were discharged from the hospital, I took the midterm exam. During the three weeks when I was far away from the lab bench, I was still reading research articles, doing homework, thinking about my research project, and struggling to breastfeed my son as well. After the maternity leave, I tried to push research progress to what I was expecting, but schedules had become more complicated with the presence of a baby.

Since I became a mother, thousands of questions had been thrown at me, especially from those who are also graduate students and considering having a baby: Are you busier? Are you tired? Can you still focus on research?

I am busier, sometimes tired. And to be honest, lack of sleep does affect my ability to focus on research sometimes. But there are also great parts. The baby's smile always sets a fire and makes me feel so blessed, and even so fulfilled that whenever I got some negative results from the experiments, instead of feeling very frustrated as I used to be, now I would easily accept it and move on to think about any potential improvement or solutions.

Moreover, seeing a baby trying his best to do all kinds of little things is extremely impressing. No matter how many times he has failed, he would not give up, and would continue practicing. I actually hated programming when I was an undergraduate, but for my research project, I need to learn new techniques and pick up programming again. Whenever I had the desire to give up, I would think of my son who had been practicing so much just to stand up, and I got courage immediately.

Kind of weird that I feel I was still pregnant just two weeks ago, but right now the kid is already running and crawling around. As Gretchen Rubin said, “The days are long, but the years are short.” With the one-year-old kid, I will try to become a better mom, and a better graduate student too...and let’s hoping that this quote could be used again when I finally get the PhD degree.

--- Lunda Shen
Lunda Shen is a Doctoral student in the College of Science