Dispatch from a Baylor Summer Fellow | Dhishi Kumarandurai

My first week in the lab this summer, I kept waiting for someone to tell me I was ready. I postponed my independent project three times, always for the same reason: I wanted someone more experienced beside me, someone who could catch my mistakes before I made them. I convinced myself this was diligence, but I know now it was fear. My lab mates had years of experience, and the new tasks that took me agonizingly long were muscle memory to them. I had none of that. I had a list of protocols I had read and reread, a cohort of rats, and the growing suspicion that I had talked my way into a project I wasn't actually prepared for.

I know now that what I was really waiting for was proof, some form of external confirmation that I belonged there before I let myself believe it. But both life and research don't work that way, and eventually, no one was left to hold my hand. While lab mates could provide guidance, an independent project was meant to be run alone. The training wheels needed to come off at long last. After many days of flip-flopping between pushing the project back again, I ran my first day of the project alone. I followed every instruction to the letter, hit a few minor snags, but got through it. Afterward, I remember sitting down for a moment, not because I was tired, but because I hadn't believed I could do it by myself until I had already finished doing it.

That was the moment I started asking a different question than the one I had been asking all summer. I had spent weeks assuming my lab mates saw me as inexperienced, unready, maybe even out of place. But sitting there after that first day, I realized the truth was that they could only ever see what I showed them. If I walked around insecure and unsure of myself, that insecurity was the only thing available for them to read. I had spent an entire summer being my own harshest critic and then assuming everyone else shared the verdict. Confidence built off of external validation is weak and quick to crumble, and I realized I was seeking the wrong things. The first person I actually needed to convince that I belonged in that lab, that I could be a strong PhD applicant, a capable scientist, was never my PI or my lab mates. It was myself. I used to think confidence was something you either had walking in the door or didn't, a trait some people are lucky enough to be born with. This summer taught me it is closer to evidence, something accumulated one completed task at a time, built the same slow way muscle memory is built, except this time the muscle being trained was my belief in my own capability.

I keep returning to a question because of it: how does anyone accept a leader who has not yet learned to accept themselves? I don't think leadership starts with a title or a plan for changing the world. I think it starts exactly where mine did this summer, finishing something I wasn't sure I could finish, and discovering on the other side that I could. Finding this confidence within myself would not be possible without the B-TRUE program and my PI, Dr. Jacques Nguyen, who saw something within me that even I was slow to see. It was through their investment in me that I was able to grow into a better researcher and person, one that leads not by having all the answers, but by trusting themselves enough to find them. If worldwide leadership and service begin anywhere, I believe they begin here, in the quiet, unglamorous work of learning to believe in yourself before anyone else does.

Dhishi Kumarandurai: Senior Neuroscience major