This week, we present two stories about the path to becoming a scientist and what makes a scientist a scientist.

Part 1: Andrea Jones-Rooy quits her job as a scientist in order to become a scientist.

Andrea Jones-Rooy is a scientist, comedian, and circus performer. She's a professor of data science at NYU, where she also directs their undergraduate program in data science. When she's not doing that, she's regaling audiences around NYC, the world, and the Internet with her Opinions in the form of standup comedy. When she's not doing either of those things, she's hanging from some kind of aerial apparatus (usually, but not exclusively, a trapeze) and/or holding something that is on fire. When she's not doing ANY of those things, she's either hosting her podcast Majoring in Everything, losing to her mother on Words with Friends, or eating Dr. Cow's raw vegan nut cheese.

Part 2: While studying flying foxes in Indonesia, Susan Tsang gets caught in a rainstorm that changes her relationship to field work.

Dr. Susan Tsang works as a private consultant through her company Biodiversitas Global LLC, and continues to conduct research through her Research Associate affiliations with the American Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the Philippines. She provides subject matter expertise on and creates programs and activities to address illegal wildlife trade, disease ecology, and other global sustainable development challenges. As a researcher, her primary interest is in the evolution and biogeography of Southeast Asian flying foxes, the world's largest bats, which has led her to working with some of the most threatened yet poorly known bat species in the world. Along with her Southeast Asian colleagues, she has carried out conservation work both at the community and transnational levels, with some of her ongoing projects in Indonesia focused on local empowerment for reducing bat hunting. She also serves on the steering committee of the Southeast Asian Bat Conservation Research Unit and the Global Union of Bat Diversity Networks to address larger capacity building and assessment/policy needs and has been appointed as a member of the IUCN Bat Specialist Group and the Global Bat Taxonomy Working Group.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Andrea Jones-Rooy

I'll be performing a rap to Chicka Chicka Boom Boom for the next ten minutes.

My name is Andrea Jones Roy and I became a scientist when I quit my full-time job as a scientist. I became a scientist by accident.

In undergraduate, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. It was the early 2000s and people who didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives in a liberal arts school did one thing, they majored in International Relations. Got some some IR folks in the crowd. Happy to see it, right?

What does International Relations mean? Nobody knows, but I had this vague idea I was eventually going to be very important and walking in international terminals in airports around the world. This is what my vision was.

But because I didn't quite know how to get to that, I thought when I graduated, well, I guess I'll just go to grad school. What a great way to figure out what you want to do. Suffering, all right?

I told my undergraduate advisor I was looking into a master's program to continue with International Relations and she said, “Oh, rather than a master's program, you should apply to a PhD program and then they'll pay you, not very much, but they'll pay you and you can leave after the master’s.”

Aha. And I thought, wow, this is amazing. But I didn't know at the time that telling someone who's like, “Maybe I'll go to grad school,” that they should try a PhD is like telling someone who says, “Maybe I'll get into scotch,” that they should try heroin. All right? You don't just dabble in heroin and you don't just go to a PhD program to figure out your life.

Andrea Jones-Rooy shares her story with our audience at The Tank Theater in New York City in October 2021. Photo by Zhen Qin.

I went to a Political Science PhD program at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. I ignored the word science in the name of the degree. I just wanted to write essays about War and Peace. My undergraduate thesis used the word juxtaposition in vertical print on the cover page. I was not ready for science so I figured the science was like decoration. It's like I'm here for politics and discourse.

And when I got there, it turned out everyone else was there for matrix algebra. We did so much matrix algebra. I had not seen a matrix since I saw The Matrix, you understand? I did not know what was going on.

Everyone in my program was there on purpose. They were talking about how they wanted to eventually study the effect of door-to-door campaigning on turning out to vote and use empirical methods and data science and all this stuff. And they wanted to all go to be full-time professors, tenured professors at R1 universities, which is a fancy way of saying important universities. Whatever. High ranking. You know.

I took a while to get my head around the fact that Ann Arbor was not actually Anne Harbor, which is what I had thought it was when I went there. I would say to people, “Oh, I'm going to the University of Michigan Anne Harbor.”

And they'd say, “Aren't you worried about moving to the Midwest? That's going to be an adjustment.”

And I said, “No. At least it's on the water.”

There's a river, to be fair, in Ann Arbor but it's very small and it's not a harbor. So that's where I was.

For two years, I struggled with this math and the statistics and maximum likelihood estimators and I learned how to program in R, which is a programming language with a weird name, and I hated it. And I thought, “Okay. I'm just going to get through these two years and I'm going to get the master's degree and I'm going to get out.”

In the second semester of my second year in graduate school, I was taking a course called Foundations of Institutional Analysis, which I highly recommend. Not the broader program. The program's fine, but you get it, right?

Foundations of Institutional Analysis with Jenna Bednar and we had to read a paper about partway through and I was sitting in a study room. There was a fire going. It was all very Hogwarts. I opened the paper, kind of rolling my eyes. Sick of reading all these things. Can't wait to get out of grad school.

And I read a paper from the ‘90s by someone named Robert Axelrod. The paper was called The Dissemination of Culture, colon - we like colons in science – colon, A Model with Local Convergence and Global Polarization. And it began with the question, “If we all become more similar as we interact more, why don't we all eventually become the same?”

This is both a kind of silly question and an incredibly deep one. The going wisdom in social science was that the more you and I interact, or you and I interact, the more likely it is that we are going to become more similar over time rather than different. Obviously, we can think of Twitter, where that's not the case, but in real life.

And this model that he built explained everything from high school cliques and mean girls to why countries would form an alliance or join the EU. He did it all by using computer science, simple programs, matrices, and I couldn't believe you were able to go from these boring old numbers to really deep, profound questions.

So at that moment I was like, “I am all in.” I was like, “Give me the Kool-Aid.” I'm guzzling the Kool-Aid. I'm the cult leader. This is we're all on the academia train. There's no other path.

And for years I was like, “This is all I've ever wanted to do.” Not true. I didn't know it existed. But this is all I ever want out of life.

That went on for a little while, but the shine started to fade. Some of it was my own imposter syndrome, my feeling that I'm not a science person. I'm not a math person. I wasn't interested in that growing up. But a bigger part of it was like, you know, I've spent my whole life in academia. I was in school and then I was in college and then I was in graduate school. By that point I was like in my 30s and I'd never not had a summer vacation. I was like, “I might need to do something else.”

But once you're on the academic train, and this is what all my advisors told me, once you get on that train, if you get off, you cannot get back on. That's just the way the field works, because we set that aside.

So I said, “All right. Here's what I'll do. I will go down this career path as long as they'll let me.” It's hard to get jobs in academia so I'll just wait until the field kicks me out.

I got a postdoc and I got another postdoc and I eventually got a tenure track job, which is the Holy Grail in academia because you're one, pretty big, but one step away from a job for life. It's what everyone aspires to. It's like second place in the Olympics and another chance to go back to the Olympics. It's a big deal.

When I got that job and I was doing that job, I kept waiting to be more excited about it. I was like, “Ah, this is fine. This is fine. I love the stuff I'm studying but the life and this and that, it's fine.”

I felt like if I was in that position and I wasn't loving it then maybe I was in the wrong path.

The Holy Grail of research in science is the controlled experiment, where you have a treatment and a control. In order to understand the effect of one thing on a thing that we might care about, we need to divide our subjects in our research project into a treatment and a control.

Does the pill cure this disease? Half of you are going to take the pill and half of you will take a placebo. Does this policy intervention reduce poverty? Half of the city is going to get the policy intervention, half of the city isn't. It's not quite ethical but that's the idea.

I decided I was living in the treatment world of my own life, the treatment of academia. And I thought I might need the control. The control where I did what I wanted to do and wasn't just on this train that I was told I couldn't get off.

So I hemmed and I hawed and I've tortured myself and my parents and my friends and anyone who would ask. I would say, “Should I quit? I don't know.”

The thing that finally made me quit my job is, I wish it was more profound than this. I was on a flight from Shanghai to Los Angeles and I watched a few episodes of the TV show Fargo. If you've seen Fargo you know that Fargo is a television show about people in the Midwest who are bored with their comfortable lives. If you've seen Fargo, you know that there's a few other plot points that are pretty key. But the fact that all of the gruesome stuff that happened later wasn't as chilling to me as the boring people who were complacent was telling.

So I don't know if it was that or if it was the several plastic cups of Delta's finest boxed red wine or the delirium that just comes from a 12-hour flight with a million thousand people around you. But I vowed that when I landed in LAX I would quit my job.

And because I'm a real academic, I quit via email. I just emailed the provost and I said, “I'm out.” There was more of a sentence, but it was pretty short for me. It was pretty good.

It was raining outside of LAX and the guy next to me, just as I clicked Send, turned to me and he said, “Ah, is it raining out there?”

And in my mind I was like, “Are you crazy? We can't think about rain. I just ruined my whole life.” But I'm a professional and so I said, “It might be.”

I went into LAX shaking, terrified, not at all convinced I'd done the right thing. If you're ever in LAX, questioning your entire life choices, here's what I don't recommend. Have a crappy margarita in a windowless food hall. That's what I don't recommend. But that's how I dealt with my decision.

I stayed out of academia for three years. I lived in New York City and I did all kinds of weird stuff. Many of the things Paula named when she introduced me. I ended up mostly landing in the consulting space. It turns out that political science and statistics and all of that is pretty useful in the consulting world as long as you're willing to call it analytics.

Now, I don't believe analytics is a real word, but I will say it for money. I said, “I do analytics. Let me in.”

After I'd been a consultant for a few years, I was doing a panel discussion for a group of lawyers, very exciting, at Yankee Stadium. They had this big event and it was at Yankee Stadium and I was on the panel.

They were asking the panelists questions. They turned to me and said, “So Andrea, what do you like most about your life as a consultant?”

And I said without even thinking about it, I leaned into the microphone and said, “Actually, I'm a scientist.” And in that moment I was like (A), “What a jerk I am. That sucks.” (B), “I have the results of my study.”

I started to think, “Oh, no. I left the train. I shouldn't have left the train. Maybe I can get a job at a community college or I can teach online or I can do this, I can do that.”

And then out of nowhere, this is the deus ex machina part, I got a one-line email from NYU that said, “Andrea, is there any chance you would consider coming back? Yes or no?” And I said yes, because I knew then that I was clinically proven to be a scientist. Thank you.

Part 2: Susan Tsang

When most people look at me, they don't really think that girl is a field biologist. you know my upbringing was in two of the most hyper-metropolitan cities in the world. I was born in Hong Kong and I grew up in New York City.

And I'm from that part of Hong Kong where all the ‘90s John Woo gangster movies are based on. Like my uncle used to say, “Hey, we can't watch this gangster movie in the theater near us because if it's about them and they lose and there's a gang war, we're stuck in the theater. So let's go somewhere where the rich people watch it.”

And then I immigrated to New York and I had to commute four hours a day to go to school. I was just studying all the time and I just didn't see sunlight in the winter. And I play videogames on the weekends. I'm not exactly the picture of an outside person to most people.

Susan Tsang shares her story with the Story Collider audience in the outdoor patio at Smitty’s Bar in Washington DC in October 2021. Photo by Lisa Helfert.

A lot of times when I tell my friends, even now when they know what I do, they still are like, “Ehh, you don't really seem like a field biologist.”

But I remember when I was a kid, the part that awakened for me, the part that fits with this theme also, was when we went to the American Museum of Natural History, my first time there, and we saw the most amazing things. We saw the dinosaur fossils, the African savannah. Oh, my God, The Lion King is real.

So all these feelings just came up in me where I'm like this is awesome and I would love to go and be in these places and do things there. It was just every kid's dream kind of to like you know go out there and explore.

This dream really became a reality when I started my PhD. When I was a PhD student, I got to do my first hardcore month-long field expedition and it was going to be in Indonesia. My advisor was going to go with me but he was completely unhelpful on this trip, because he's a butterfly biologist and I'm a bat biologist.

And his idea of catching butterflies is, “Well, it fits in this net, so it'll be fine, right?”

I'm like, “Oh, geez.”

So I was kind of nervous. First time catching wild bats. But I felt pretty okay just because I got a little bit of training before I went out and my collaborator in Indonesia, Sigit, had worked on bats for five years already, more than five years, and he knows what he's doing.

So I said, “Okay. Well, I trust you. We're going to get out there and we're going to handle any bat that we get.” And so we do get out there.

Our first day in the field, it seemed like it was going perfectly well. We were just going around the forest, looking for the right spots to put up our nets to catch these bats, and we had found the perfect spot. It was this canopy open nearby and then there was this clearing where you could put the net, and it kind of sloped downwards so that there was a waterfall nearby and there were some trees at the bottom and there was a river. And, oh, my God, we were catching so many bats.

And we were just so excited. We're like, “Okay. Let's set this up.”

So the way that bat biologists that study flying foxes, which is what I study, catch them is we have mist nets. And a mist net is kind of like if you had a volleyball net but like stack five of them on top of each other for that middle part.

Not only did I have to have this giant net that was 12 meters long, but it had to go in the sky, because these bats fly above the canopy and they do not make it easy for you to catch them. So we're thinking, “Okay. Well, we need to get this sky net.” That means we have to make a double‑pulley system to put it against the poles and then just kind of roll them up. I was really excited to do this.

But when we were looking, when we were finishing up tying the last rope, we're near the sapling and there was just like a stick innocuously falling over. On top of it, there was this bamboo. It's about maybe like an inch, inch-and-a-half in diameter, and there was water pouring out of it. And we didn't really think very much of it.

But as we were tying the rope again, we were like, “Wait a minute. That looks like it's coming from the top of the mountain, where the spring is, going to the bottom of the mountain at base camp where we're staying tonight. We probably should fix that, huh? Because that's probably freshwater that everyone needs to drink.”

So I go, “Okay. We're going to be good Samaritans. We're going to fix this thing right now.”

Little did we know that this means there is a bamboo that is hollow, that basically has the force of a river in it, and I'm trying to hold this thing up. It turns out, the only way you could fix it, and why the stick had fallen over, was that it had aligned perfectly with the next bamboo and the stick was propping it up at exactly the right height in exactly the right position. Somehow, it got screwed up and we had to go and fix it now.

The other problem, though, is when you try to fix it and align them, this water would just splash everywhere. So you're trying to hold this, wrangling practically like an alligator, and there's water splashing all over your face. We were just like, “Ah, I can't see anything.”

I was yelling at Sigit, like, “Oh, my God. We need to get another stick and just prop this back up, because this other one is just completely useless now.”

And he's like, “We're in a clearing,” and he has a runoff back to where the forest is and find the stick.

Finding sticks is not as easy as you think it is, you know. It had to be easy enough to cut but still thick enough to hold up this thing. The right shape, the right height. And he didn't know how high it was, really. We saw this for five seconds.

Somehow, he found a large enough stick where he just started cutting the machete in front of me and I'm like, “Hurry up. I can't hold this river very long.”

He finally gets it to fit and we just are like, “Okay. Well, that's our good deed of the day.” We're just we're by now.

But at the time when we were fixing it, the other problem was that the sky had started to darken a lot earlier in the day than we thought, because there had been a thunderstorm that was rolling in. It was now torrential downpour and neither of us could see anything very well because we didn't have headlamps out. And now it's night time instead of dusk, because we had to spend a lot of time trying to fix this.

So we're thinking, “Well, we need to take the net down,” and we can't see anything. Also, there's mud everywhere now and also we're getting rained on. I guess we shouldn't even take our ponchos out now because what's the point, right?

We just roll everything up and I have this giant mess of a net that, hopefully, isn't muddy so we can still use it tomorrow.

And we're like dejectedly walking back to base camp. It's like a 45-minute walk. So we're making jokes about our bad luck. If we failed in biology, we always have jobs as civil engineers, so that's always a good backup plan.

We're thinking, “Okay. Well, maybe we can go back inside and just dry off.” We knock on the window of the house and my advisor is just absorbed in pinning butterflies, so he's completely unhelpful again.

And I had got the field assistant, who was with us, to dig through our bags and find our towels, and so we started drying off. But then, we got vetoed from being able to go in the house even after we dried ourselves off because we were so wet that we were still dripping with water. And so we were exiled from the house and we were just kind of sitting on the porch, like, “Well, this is our life now. We're porch people.”

So we just talked for hours and hours and hours until we were completely dried off and we knew each other like best friends for ten years, right?

And Sigit and I still work together now, for ten years now, actually, and we understand each other really well because of this incident that happened in the field. It was such a traumatizing experience in some ways that it really makes you be like, “We survived that. That's an important part of field work.”

Sometimes I tell people like, “You have to go to the field. And I know it's very expensive but we're going to get you some funds.”

And I'm going to bring my students also. Not only my American students but also my Southeast Asian students. It's because that experience is really important. Being out in the field and really seeing the animals in person, making observations that other people haven't made and making your hypothesis from that is something that you can't necessarily do just from what you know in textbooks because we are studying things that are not in textbooks.

You can also experience things like this. And I have another story about Komodo dragons that you can ask me about later at the bar.

We just need to make sure that we still have that as part of our scientific process because that's actually a very important first step before you can do anything else.

Even though I've been doing this for ten years, I do sometimes have a lot of doubt about if I can do it and I'm like the best person to do it. Those kinds of times, even if they're fleeting, my PhD advisor used to say to me, “You know, I remember that first day you came back and you were like completely drenched, and you guys were still all smiles and really happy. And the next day you just went right back out anyway. I knew that this is where you belong.” That I'm a field biologist.

Thank you.