Getting out of the Valley of Shit (?)

​It’s been a long time since I posted updates on this page. And the reason is… things have not been going so great. The first 5 months of 2019 have been very challenging for me and I’ve almost reached the point where I wanted to quit my PhD. I was pretty deep into the “Valley of Shit”.

A couple of years ago, we had our weekly lab meeting and one of the post-docs was talking about how hard it can be to be trapped in the “Valley of Shit” during a PhD and she gave some advice on how to get out of it. This “Valley of Shit” is pretty self-explanatory. It is a period in a PhD where about everything goes wrong and things get completely stuck.

​It was the first time I’ve heard that expression and while I understood its meaning, at the time, I was really more amused by that funny-sounding expression than really worried about it. I was pretentious enough to think that because of my experience doing research, this would not happen to me and I would just cruise smoothly along the PhD road. Turns out I was wrong… so very wrong.

While I am working on my PhD, I am also working part-time for a consulting company in underwater acoustics. This arrangement has been working pretty well for me so far and I have usually been able to keep a fairly good balance between work and school. The key is to keep it “part-time”. Back in late 2018, I have naively agreed to lead a couple of big projects at work with very tight deadlines, and that part-time quickly turned in to a full-time. So, I was busy at work during the day, but I was still able to make some progress on my PhD at night. Overall, things were going OK. It was tiring obviously, but I knew it was temporary and I was happy to make progress on both fronts. I managed to fix the issues I had with my camera and also built a second smaller hydrophone array while the other one was getting fixed. So, in late January, I was ready to redeploy my instruments. We picked a new spot off Victoria where several species of rockfish like to hang out and I was excited to finally get my first set of data for my PhD. We deployed the array and came back a week later to pick it up. However, when we came back to the deployment site, we couldn’t find the surface buoy anymore. I searched the sea bottom with the Trident in case the buoy line broke off, but nothing... We even had divers go down, but no luck either. The instrument had either drifted away with strong currents or got picked up by someone… The result is: no instruments, no data… Needless to say, that the morale was pretty low. Not only these instruments are expensive but also rebuilding everything takes a lot of time. All these efforts working crazy hours at night for absolutely nothing... Things got even worst. My wife had a great opportunity to do research on grey whales in Mexico and left in the field for a month. While I was very happy for her, it meant that I had to take care of our two young kids by myself for a month on top of everything else. Kids got very sick (as kids do), work got crazier, my PhD was still going nowhere, and I was really exhausted. Now, I could really appreciate what the valley of shit was. I was definitely there… hands and knees. Ready to give up.

Through this, I have had an amazing support from my friends, family, colleagues and even the local community. Somehow, the fact that I lost my instruments made the local news and I received lots of emails from people trying to help me find my instrument. Even some divers looked for it on their recreational weekend dives. It was really heart warming. I really felt supported through this. Many colleagues also told me stories about how they lost expensive equipment during their PhD, so I wouldn’t feel so bad. All this support really helped.

Things are now slowly getting better. I’ve lost several months of my PhD, but things are starting to progress. I have rebuilt an improved camera system and have successfully deployed (…and recovered) my big hydrophone array. I am now starting to get the data I was hoping to collect many months ago. There are also new awesome people joining the team which is very exciting! More in this soon.

This post was kind of long and dramatic, but I promise, the next ones should be a bit lighter and with some cool videos 😉.