Ellie Kim is a crier — but when she starts her PhD, she promises herself she’ll never cry in front of her colleagues.
Ellie Kim is a third-year PhD student at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute where she focusses on the role of the immune system in Alzheimer’s disease. She uses stem cells to understand how genetic mutations can affect the functions of microglia, a vital immune cell in the brain. As well as being fascinated and constantly amazed by the biology of the brain, Ellie is also passionate about science communication and loves any opportunity to talk about the wonderful world of microglia!
Part 2: After graduating with his PhD, Shane Hanlon struggles to find balance in his science career.
Shane M Hanlon is a scientist turned communicator who masquerades as a storyteller. He got a PhD studying frogs and turtles, tried his hand in government, and is now a scientist who teaches scientists how to talk to non-scientists. Shane is also DC's oldest (but not bestest) Story Collider co-host & producer. He happily lives in Virginia (but still loves DC), tries to get outside with his partner and dog as much as possible, and is medicore at writing witty biographies. Find him @ecologyofshane.
Ellie Kim
: I’m a crier. I cry at anything and everything. Any extreme emotion has me sobbing. In fact, there are two things I do that I know make me cry and I refuse to give them up. Number one, when I have the flat to myself, the first thing I do is put on my pajamas, put on Grey’s Anatomy and prepare to sob.
Number two, my car. I’m all for saving the environment and really want to participate in my work’s eco-friendly car-sharing scheme, but I can’t. There's nothing I like more than, after a hard day of work, getting in my car, putting on those power ballads and sobbing through my twenty-minute drive home. It’s essentially my therapy.
So yeah, I love to cry. I find it cathartic. So when I started my PhD I knew I was going to spend four years crying.
And I didn’t make it easy on myself. I am doing a PhD in an area I don’t have a background in. I work with stem cells, which are notoriously fiddly and frustrating to work with. And I thought it would be fun to learn how to code while I was doing this at the same time. So yeah, I expected to feel overwhelmed and frustrated and to be in tears for four years.
But when I started, I promised myself one thing. I would always cry in private. Not just those kind of small tears where a few teardrops roll down your cheeks and then you man up and move on. Not just those. The full-on meltdowns. I would always make it back to my car or the ladies’ loo if times got really, really desperate.
You see, I started my PhD not that long after the whole Tim Hunt thing happened. For those of you who don’t know, Tim Hunt is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who in the 2000s won the prize for his work on cell division. So he's pretty famous. He caused a little stir when in 2015 he was giving a speech to female journalists and scientists. And, to cut a long story short, he was quoted as saying, “Three things happen when girls are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”
I never really thought of myself as a woman in science before. My undergrad was pretty mixed, my PhD cohort is almost fifty-fifty, and at the institute I work at there are plenty of badass female scientists to look up to. But unsurprisingly, something about that comment about crying really struck a chord with me. Suddenly I felt this fear. I was so aware of my ability to cry. And while many other women took to Twitter to hit back at Tim Hunt and prove him wrong, I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, my God. I’m that stereotype. Criticism definitely makes me cry.”
