Defending my PhD at Stanford from my bedroom

I’m writing this exactly a month after defending my PhD in Bioengineering at Stanford. I wanted to spend some time reflecting on the experience and record memories while they’re still fresh.

Instead of the typical thesis defense that takes place in a crowded room with palpable tension and energy, I held it from the comfort of my own bedroom, COVID style.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time getting this setup just right. I wanted the perfect balance of professionalism and personality.

Fun points:

I bought my plants at a nursery back in 2019 and have surprisingly not killed them (yet, knock on wood). The colorful one on the left is a croton. The bushy one on the right is a dracaena (bought because it translates to dragon).
The shark peeking over my shoulder has been in frame for every meeting I’ve taken the past year and a half.
Framed pictures are of my friends and family.

Here’s a quick peek of what the set up looked like behind the scenes:

I graduated from my PhD program in four years. This was definitely faster than originally anticipated, but my timeline was accelerated because a) I wanted to go full time with the company I co-founded and b) my PI was incredibly supportive and understanding. Here is another shot of the private session with just my committee as they decided if I should be able to graduate or not. My PI (Justin Sonnenburg) is in the top right corner.

Blazer came off as soon as the public session was over. I was just a *tad* sweaty.

The defense itself was around 50 minutes long and I was very happy with how it went. It was one of the rare experiences where I met the expectations I held for myself. The recording is uploaded here.

I think it’s valuable to reflect both on the process leading up to those 50 minutes and what I’ve learned in the adrenaline crash afterwards.

Creative Process

While preparing for the presentation for my defense, I had three uncompromising principals I knew I wanted to stand by:

All (non-data) figures needed to be hand-drawn with a style that was clear, clean, and concise.
1. I am not very good at drawing. I worked this limitation to my advantage by forcing myself to keep the message simple. If I couldn’t draw the figure, it was too complicated.
The main audience members I would appeal to were my parents.
1. This was also extremely helpful in finding the big impacts of the work I’ve done and communicating them in a way that was universally clear and relatable.
EVERYTHING IS ABOUT STORYTELLING

To the first point…figures

Here are few screenshots of figures I am particularly proud of. There’s a fine line between making things “stylistic” and “messy.” I drew all figures on my iPad with the procreate app and played around a lot with different brushes and color pallets before settling on a hard, tapered line with layered, softbrush color.

Title slide – the lil’ microbe is talking to an immune cell through a paper cup. I actually drew this for my qualifying exams back in 2014 and keep finding excuses to use it because I think it’s cute.

I originally hand wrote the words that are typed at the bottom, but it crossed the “too-messy” threshold. I think the negative space and subtle coloring of this slide add to the impact.

Something I did to save time was reuse the same icons and just color them differently. Here are the same silhouettes of people from the slide above, but shaded in grey. The hands pipetting in the middle are one of my favorite images because the angle captures what you see in first person when working at the bench.

My friend called me around 10pm the night before my defense and asked what I was doing. I said, “drawing a glass of milk.” One of my favorite beats during my defense was giving a heavily impassioned and imprecise definition of fermented foods. Check out my defense talk to hear it!

To the second point…audience

One of the biggest challenges of a defense talk is determining appropriate depth to appeal to a wide audience. The most important people in the audience to me were my parents. I wanted them to understand everything I had worked on in graduate school and feel excited about it.

The FaceTime call to my parents right after I passed and became the first in my family to receive a PhD had an indescribable happiness.

To the third point…storytelling

It always comes back to storytelling.

For both work and personal reasons, the month leading up to my defense was amongst one of the most stressful in my life. It’s easy to sit on the outside of it now and say, “of course it was stressful, you had to defend the work you’ve spent the past four years living and breathing to an audience of your closest family and friends. Also a set of world experts whose sole job is to judge you.”

Thank god you only defend a PhD once. The amount of anxiety I felt leading up to the presentation was nearly debilitating and almost all of it was internally derived. I knew in my mind what I wanted my presentation to look and feel like, but the amount of distance I needed to get there not only felt impossibly far away, I also didn’t know how I was going to get there.

In particular, the introduction was the most important part and I just could not get it to sit right. Every iteration of a compelling introduction to why we should care about the microbiome and how it interacts with the immune system felt fragmented, confusing, and lacking in finesse. I spent 12 hours every day for a week and half trying storyboard the different pieces and fit them together in a thread of logic that was compelling and impactful. After a painful week of banging my head against the wall, I finally had something that I was proud of.

Or so I thought. I had a practice defense in front of my lab the week before my actual presentation and received an overwhelming amount of feedback. This was probably the most difficult phase of my defense prep. I like to pride myself on thriving under constructive criticism and feedback, but given the amount of pressure I was already under, hearing that my narrative was rough and choppy after I had just obsessively toiled over it for almost two weeks straight made the heat rise to my ears.

At the same time, I knew that this was exactly what I needed. I needed to hear hard truths about how I could improve.

It still stung.

After a few hours of moping around and a weekend of not looking at my computer at all, I gathered myself up Monday morning and printed every slide in my presentation and arranged them on my desk. I realized the order of the slides was not the problem, it was the context by which I was sharing them that broke the logic.

Instead of sharing the research work as an objective narration, I needed to share the science as a creative process. It might seem like grad school is about the science, but in reality it’s about personal development as a scientist. The realization that I needed to communicate my journey as a graduate student (and not a master class on the importance of the microbiome and immune system) changed everything for me. I was able to wrangle the feedback I received with direction and purpose.

One by one, I integrated each piece of advice to fit into my narrative structure until the story had morphed into something much greater than anything I would have been able to make alone. I am so grateful for my time in the innovation ecosystem that is the Sonnenburg Lab.

What I’ve learned

All in all, a thesis defense is an artificial pressure that in most cases, grad students put on themselves. Except in very rare circumstances, if someone goes up for a defense, they are going to pass. The thesis committee would not let someone go up for a defense if they didn’t think the student completed enough work to graduate.

The main pressure for me was living up to my own expectations of wanting to showcase the absolute best version of myself as a scientist, creative, and future CEO of a biotech company. I was hyper-focusing on what this defense would represent for my future, when in reality, it was about showcasing what I had already done in the past. My future was never riding on this presentation because success isn’t the product of one 50 minute powerpoint. It’s the product of consistently working hard and doing your best day in and day out.

Advice

If you’re in graduate school now and looking to defend soon, god speed. The key pieces of advice that kept me afloat and what I would tell to others:

A defense is much more about how you thought about the science and less about the science itself. Take us on a journey through your brain.
This is a celebration of the hard work you’ve done for the past x number of years and an opportunity to share it with the people you love. Everyone is there to cheer you on.
Passion and excitement is universally communicated, even if people don’t understand everything you’re saying. Let yourself publicly gush over the questions that keep you awake at night.