Fiona Calvert is a crier — but when she starts her PhD, she promises herself she’ll never cry in front of her colleagues.

Fiona Calvert 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, Fiona is also passionate about science communication and loves any opportunity to talk about the wonderful world of microglia!   

This story originally aired on September 28, 2018 in an episode titled “Overwhelmed: Stories about being in over our heads.”

Story Transcript

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.” 

So suddenly I felt this pressure, pressure upon myself and this pressure to not let women in science down.  And I promised myself I would always cry in private. 

I managed for a while.  You know, I worked really hard to fight back those tears in the moments where I would normally well up.  And not just the little moments.  Even those really big moments.  Like when the cells that I spent three months engineering all died.  Or when our minus-80 freezer broke overnight and we came in in the morning to find a puddle of water, even then I made it to the toilet to cry. 

Then a year ago I broke my promise.  Like really broke my promise. 

I have my first year report due later that day and I’m feeling pretty good.  I have a draft submitted, my supervisor is reading it for one last time, and I’m just about to get in my car and I hear that ping of an email in my inbox.  I check it and my supervisor has left me an email to say, quite casually, that the analysis I've been learning to do for three months is probably wrong and we should remove it from the report and replace it with this new analysis that I have no idea how to do. 

Now, like I told you, I’m learning to code.  Me not having a clue what I’m doing is not unusual in this PhD, but in that moment I feel so overwhelmed that the tears start flooding.  Then I get in my car and, as per usual, I cry for that whole twenty-minute drive. 

But something is different.  When I pull into the car park and I start walking to the café, I can’t stop crying.  So now I’m in my work café crying my eyes out.  I really wish I could tell you it’s that crying you see in movies where tears silently and dramatically roll down my cheeks and no one notices, it’s not.  I am ugly crying.  That kind of crying where you're wailing out loud and you're sweating because you're crying so much.  I've got the snot too.  The snot is running out of my nose but I don't care because I’m crying. 

And you probably think, uh, she's crying in the café, at work, at peak morning coffee time.  It can’t get much worse, right?  Wrong.  Through the haze of my tears I spot my worst nightmare across the room.  My supervisor.  I try hurriedly to wipe away the snot so he might not notice but the panda eyes and the sobbing are a dead giveaway.  I’m upset and he knows it. 

He starts to approach and my heart sinks.  Now, he's at my table and he looks confused, concerned, maybe a little scared.  He looks at me and says, “Do you think we should go somewhere a bit more private to talk about this?” 

At that point I’m crushed, because his opinion of me must be an all-time low.  He thinks I can’t cope with this PhD.  Suddenly, all those comments from Tim Hunt flow through my mind and I feel like I’m crying for the original reason.  I’m crying because I’m embarrassed.  And now I’m crying because I’m letting women in science down. 

And I realize my PhD supervisor, he's never had a female PhD student before and I can’t imagine his previous male PhD students doing this. 

So we find a meeting room and now I’m at that hyperventilating stage of crying.  You know, the time when you're like, “I-just-can’t…  Uh-uh.”  I’m doing that.  I’m trying to explain what’s going on and, after a very long time, interrupted by many sobs, I get my words out. 

I tell him that I feel like I can’t do this.  I feel like I’m not learning this quick enough.  And this new analysis, I have no idea what it even means. 

And then there's this pause.  He looks at me and he's freaked out.  Then something amazing happens.  My supervisor responds in the best way possible.  He's kind.  He's calming.  He's reassuring.  He even musters up the courage to joke that of course I’m crying when my idiot supervisor emails me on the day of hand-in asking me to redo everything.  And he reminds me that what I’m doing is hard and it’s not something I’m going to learn to do overnight. 

He then takes time out of his busy schedule to sit with me and work through this analysis.  As we work through it together, and he's not getting frustrated when he has to tell me how to do things that he's told me a hundred times before, I realize there are little bits of it that I do know.  There are bits of it I can do.  It reminds me that I am learning, slowly, but I am learning. 

And I get my report in on time.  It is, by far, not the best piece of work I've ever written but I think it’s probably the one I’m most proud of because that’s the overwhelming feeling I have about this PhD, pride.  I have never had to work so hard or be pushed outside of my comfort zone or felt like I couldn’t do something more than during this PhD. 

And it’s small wins like handing that report in on time, or differentiating my stem cells for the first time, or getting that piece of code to run error-free.  Those small wins remind me that not only am I going to do this, I’m going to kick ass while I do it. 

Now, a year on from that very public crying experience, I’m pretty grateful that it happened.  As far as I know, my supervisor’s opinion of me hasn’t changed.  He still pushes me and wants me to learn and treats me the same as he does with everyone else. 

And although I had cried many times in private before, this first public experience taught me a lot.  It taught me that while there are men in science that are assholes, not all men believe what Tim Hunt said.  That is in no way the majority. 

It also showed me that while a PhD often feels like this giant solo expedition, it’s more than okay to ask for some help. 

Most importantly, it showed me that who cares if I cry at work.  If a man feels uncomfortable with my crying, that is his problem, not mine.  Being a woman in science comes with a lot of obstacles, challenges, and judgments but me crying does not make me a bad scientist and the weight of reputation of women in science does not rest solely on my shoulders. 

Now, I am proud that my PhD makes me cry.  I am proud that I do something that I love and feel is worthwhile enough to cry about.