The Pieces We Leave Behind: A Reflection on My PhD Journey

Our newly (August 2026) minted Dr. Aseel Alatoom's reflections on her time at LIBRA

"When I began my PhD, I had very ambitious ideas about what it meant to do meaningful research.

I was entering the field of #immunomechanobiology, and somewhere between enthusiasm, naïveté, and the excitement of beginning something new, I imagined that I might discover the answer, the one that could somehow change everything. The possibilities seemed endless.

For a while, it felt as though the world was my oyster.

And then, as happens in research, things became considerably less straightforward.

Experiments failed. Results raised more questions than they answered. Ideas that seemed perfectly clear on paper became much less convincing in practice. The picture I had imagined at the beginning of my PhD became increasingly blurry, and at times I was no longer sure what direction I was trying to take.

This coincided with COVID-19 pandemic, a period that disrupted the way we worked and interacted, while my personal life was changing considerably as I adjusted to marriage and, later, children. Research continued somewhere in the middle of all of it.

I think that was when I began to understand how different doing science was from the version of science I had imagined when I started.

Over time, however, something shifted.

Not necessarily the experiments themselves, those continued to fail, surprise me, and occasionally work, but the way I looked at them. I stopped expecting every experiment to fit neatly into the grand picture I had imagined at the beginning. Instead, I began paying closer attention to what the work in front of me was actually telling me.

Slowly, the picture became clearer again, although it looked very different from the one I had originally imagined.

Looking back now, I think that change in perspective was one of the most important things I gained from my PhD.

I no longer believe that the purpose of a doctorate is to solve the enormous problem that first inspired us to enter the field. Most of us will not finish a PhD having cured cancer or answered the defining question of our field.

And perhaps that was never supposed to be the goal.

Science moves forward because thousands of researchers contribute pieces to problems that are much larger than any one researcher. A PhD gives us the opportunity to find one of those pieces, understand it, develop a tool that did not exist, or simply ask a question that allows someone else to ask a better one.

Our piece may be small. But small does not mean insignificant.

I sometimes think about this in a very literal way when I remember all the reagents, cells, protocols, and carefully labelled aliquots I left behind in the lab. During my PhD, they were simply things I needed for the next experiment. Now, some of them are being used by students who came after me.

There is something quietly meaningful about that.

A tube sitting in a freezer is hardly the legacy one imagines when beginning a PhD. Yet someone may use that aliquot to run an experiment I will never see. They may modify a protocol I spent months troubleshooting. Something I learned through failure may save them several weeks of their own. And perhaps something from their work will eventually help another student who has not even joined the lab yet.

The same is true of science itself.

My dissertation is not the conclusion of the questions I worked on. It is simply a record of how far I was able to take them. Someone else may eventually pick up one of those threads and take it somewhere I never imagined.

I began my PhD thinking that making an impact meant finding a very big answer.

I leave it with almost the opposite view.

Perhaps our responsibility as scientists is to find our piece carefully, understand it as well as we can, and leave it somewhere useful for the next person. And maybe, somewhere between the papers, experiments, failed attempts, protocols, forgotten aliquots, and people who pass through a laboratory, that is how the larger picture is eventually assembled."

~ Dr. Aseel Alatoom