When I worked at SRA International for the first nine months of my professional career, at what was once a small environmental consulting firm that had gotten swallowed up by a much bigger one which focused on defense but was looking to diversify their contract portfolio, the company had a competition whereby all the members of a team would wear pedometers (which measure steps taken) to get them to walk more and be more healthy. Teams were formed in different SRA offices, with a grand prize of two tickets per team member to some tropical destination, for the team with the greatest total number of steps taken. At the time I was struggling with being a recent graduate and feeling lost in the world, certain that SRA was not the right fit for someone with my interests, but not sure what was. SRA was located way the hell out in Virginia, from my very DC-centric vantage point, and on days in the summer after I hit the six month mark (afterwhich I’d decided I could begin looking for a new job), when I was more frustrated than I knew what to do with, I would walk all the way home, first from Clarendon and then after we’d moved offices, from Virginia Square, across Arlington and back up north through lower DC to Columbia Heights.
In hindsight, this was probably at least a six or seven mile walk, the way I went, and I was so frustrated in those days that I probably did it at least three times per week. I remember hearing about the SRA competition, meant to encourage physical activity on the part of their employees, and thinking that although I didn’t need to exercise more, I could probably win it if I was on a team with even remotely active people. One of the teams the year I was at SRA called themselves “INITTOWINIT”, which after five days I figured out was not some weird combination of vowels, but “in it to win it,” a catchphrase and approach I decided I liked a lot. Inittowinit did, in fact, win it, and was rewarded with the resultant trip to the tropics, while the phrase that was their namesake has remained stuck in my head, three years later.
When I get lazy, and frustrated, and kind of want to take a break, stare at the ceiling for awhile, and kick something, it occasionally pops back into my head, as a question. Are you inittowinit?
Today is such a day. Today, I am frustrated. Dherai, dherai frustrated, to borrow from the Nepali, but even as I am tempted to sit and mire in my frustration, or go off and hide somewhere with a pile of mangoes (mmm), I remind myself of the rules of this game, and that I am, in fact, in it to win it, as much as a field research project may be won.
I spent this morning at the District Forest Office here in Pokhara, where several very kind and very accommodating Forest Office staffers, akin to a blend of our National Park Rangers and our National Forest Service staff, talked through my project with me, and helped me see a long series of challenges which await my attention.
I had gone to the forest office in order to choose field sites, or so I euphemistically told myself (as if choosing field sites were as simple as picking the good fruit from among the bad and taking it home with you), and instead had a lengthy conversation with the DFO staff about the intrinsic problems in my sampling design.
Let me say here for the uninitiated – problems are okay. Problems are opportunities for learning, and for creative thinking, and brainstorming, and strategizing, and making one’s plans better. Identifying problems, especially before you get into the field, makes your research stronger, data easier to analyze, and saves you in some cases weeks of time. So this wasn’t totally a bad thing.
Except that I was hot, and overtired, and felt young-looking there in the DFO office, and understood too little of the conversation taking place around me, in Nepali. And this last was driving me crazy. Not because I wanted the DFO officers to speak in anything other than Nepali (it took me years of Spanish before I could have technical conversations about forest management or sustainable tourism with fluency), but because I myself have not come far enough fast enough to be able to competently understand what is being said. And so I need a translator, a role that one of the faculty was very kind to perform for me this morning, although he most certainly has better and more important things to do.
So I sat there and despite myself I mired in my failing, and in my lack of competence, even as I struggled to maintain my outwardly indomitable disposition, and to attend to every single Nepali word that issued forth, in case I might understand it. But because I could not speak adequate Nepali I could not myself explain my own research goals, and because I could not explain my research goals the DFO foresters and I spent an inordinate amount of time repeating one another and struggling to clarify our meaning. And I wished I could go back in time and work on my Nepali language abilities every.single.day of this past semester, except that I remember most of the days of the semester, and there wasn’t really an extra hour to be eeked out, anywhere.
As I sat somewhat disconsolately on the back of the professor’s motorcycle on the way back to campus, I thought a lot about what a sprint graduate school is, and how much faster the time passes than I would like. One of my friends from school likes to say that “fast and steady wins the race,” which I honestly thought was perhaps a little silly and obvious the first time he said it to me. As I sat on the back of the bike watching Pokhara fly by and enjoying the breeze the movement generated, however, it occurred to me that perhaps my friend’s saying is exactly right, at least for graduate school in the US. Fast and steady does win the race.
And by that I mean that you really can’t slow down, especially if you plan on doing field research, particularly if you plan on doing it abroad, and most definitely if you plan on doing it in a language you didn’t know at the time you began the program. We are all supposed to plow from school right into our summers, and it tires me to think of how quickly upon returning we will need to re-up for school, and dive right back in, to begin the charge through to the end. Whereas I in my few moments of self-pity thought about how good it would have been to take a break (and go the beach), I realized all at once that that’s just not how this game is played. In research, and in graduate school, we’re running a marathon at the pace of a sprint.
All this is to say, I will keep on keeping on. I took a short break upon returning to throw myself a pity party, eat some mangoes, and drink some water, and now I go back to it – I will figure out how to sample within a rotational cycle and find good field assistants by tomorrow, no matter what. Because I’m in it to win it. And because fast and steady wins the race.
-M-
