As I reflect on the years I spent pursuing my Ph.D., I’ve adopted a bird’s eye view that’s prompted some deeper thoughts. Doing a doctorate is often a solitary process marked by sacrifice, compromise and delayed gratification. Staying the course takes grit, especially when life throws its usual curveballs. I was lucky to have a strong team whose support proved essential. When morale waned, their encouragement and contagious enthusiasm carried me through. I’m especially grateful to the mentors who guided me with patience, trusted my instincts and gave me space to grow. My research project became such an integral part of my identity that completing it left me with something like phantom pain. Even after I defended, I’d still catch myself thinking about experiments I hadn’t done or papers I hadn’t yet written, as if the project was still waiting for me in the lab. I missed having something so clear to focus on, even when it felt overwhelming. The relief of being done was real — but so was the strange emptiness that followed. Letting go meant learning how to stop returning to a version of myself that no longer needed to finish the work.

A central motivation throughout my academic path has always been the desire to contribute — to use science as a way to serve. Born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, I eventually found myself in Saskatchewan, Canada, working in the agricultural heartland with a team tackling aster yellows, a disease affecting canola and other crops. That’s how I ended up in the land of living skies and endless winters, immersed in fieldwork, diagnostics and disease epidemiology.

Now, a year after defending my thesis, I’m thousands of kilometers away — in every sense of the word. I’ve started a postdoc at Stanford, in a lab I deeply admire, surrounded by palm trees, hummingbirds and a community that pulses with energy. Coming here was a dream, and being part of the research culture in California still feels a little surreal. After so many years in the frozen prairies, this chapter feels like a rebirth, one where I’m learning to see my Ph.D. not as something to hold onto but something to grow from.

During the final stretch of my Ph.D. — when I was buried in writing, data analysis and the quiet exhaustion that comes with long-term work — I came across an episode of The Huberman Lab podcast, “How to Shape Your Identity and Goals,” where Stanford professor Andrew Huberman interviewed cognitive scientist Maya Shankar. Their conversation offered a framing I didn’t know I needed. They discussed the idea of scientific closure — a sense of completion that comes from doing meaningful work and being content with what it’s achieved. That concept helped me reframe how I thought about my research. My thesis had been about solving real-world problems, and some of the tools I developed are already being used to help with pathogen detection and disease monitoring. That gave me closure: not because the work was perfect but because it was useful.

In that same episode, they also spoke about being open to feedback and the value of reframing. Both lessons became essential in my last year, especially as I submitted parts of my research for peer review. Letting go of the fear of criticism and learning to treat it as part of the process changed everything for me. The vulnerability was hard, but it was also what pushed me to grow.

At one point, I came across an article in Science by Jeffrey Brainard titled “Uncertainty Is Uncertain,” which explored how scientific writing has changed over time. Curious, I did a small linguistic experiment of my own: I went through my thesis and tallied every hedging word — might, could, possibly, likely. Not surprisingly, the more exploratory the section, the more caution I employed. That informal analysis reminded me that the way we write reveals a lot about how confident — or uncertain — we feel about our results. And that uncertainty isn’t a weakness. It’s an honest reflection of the complexity of research.

Now, I’m in a new phase: I’m excited to share my past work more broadly while building the next chapter of my scientific life. Letting go of something that defined me for so long hasn’t been easy. But with some distance, I’ve come to see that closure isn’t about cutting ties: it’s about honoring what the experience gave you and allowing it to fuel what comes next.

And what comes next, for me, is here — on the Stanford campus, among the red-tiled rooftops and eucalyptus trees. I carry my prairie years with me. But it’s here that I’ve learned to breathe differently, to think more expansively and to feel just a little more at peace with uncertainty.