Health Science Reviews

by Jae Eun Park

For me, playing piano was more about the destination than the journey. A successful talent show performance, a fruitful piano exam, delighted applause from my grandparents. It was never about the many hours of practice, whether productive or frustrating. Writing was similar. It was never about the perfect MeSH terms, the endless downloads to EndNote, or the literature review matrices. It was more for the self-satisfaction when I read my perfect essay – albeit perfect only in my own terms – and the feeling of ecstasy when reading a past assignment – wow, I really did that!

My love for writing started in high school. Essays, poems, speeches, practical reports, pieces of my own novels – you name it – I loved writing them all (or rather, it was the end-product that I loved). Ever since I set foot in university, writing became more complex, with reading multiple articles to back my work and filling in matrices to track my ideas, but the destination was the same: a satisfied reader – me.

However, Honours writing was a new journey. Writing my proposal was the first time I spent so much time on one assignment. Even academic essays during my MBChB degree took, at most, a month to write and submit. My proposal took two. The constant revisions especially brought on a lot of stress. My introduction section went through so many changes that, if you compared the first and final draft side by side, you would think they were two totally different research proposals. The words ‘first drafts will never be perfect’ hit hard. The feeling of completing my introduction and reading it with a satisfied smile, only to trash that version the next week, took a toll on my morale.

Thankfully, I had supportive supervisors by my side, and I learnt that this was part of the process. If I did not get used to this tumultuous journey, I thought, I did not have a place in academia. Thus, I learnt to embrace the process, treating it not like a walk down the wrong path, but a different path, on my journey to finding the destination.

However, the focus was still on the destination. There is nothing wrong with that – in fact, setting your eyes on the goal is imperative in a long-distance journey – but the difficult aspect of academia is that this destination can change. You may be thinking you wanted to go to the Indian Ocean, but on the way to Durban, realise the Atlantic was the way to go, then turn to come back to Cape Town. In another drastic instance, you could find yourself on a plane to Hawai’i to pursue the Pacific Ocean, only to realise the answer could be found back home. I am grateful I have not experienced that severity of dejection as of yet, but if I was in that situation, I do not know how I would cope (I guess I would order myself pizza and weep for a day, then put myself back on track – what else can I do?).

But what if I learned to love the process truly? The prospect of my destination would still keep me going, but what if I was more present in the moment? To date, I only love the process in retrospect, when I am patting myself on the back for having 30-odd references at submission. But if I learned to look out the airplane window and admire the sky, perhaps the feeling of dejection would be less once I realise that I was not supposed to be on a flight at all. If I make some new friends in the airport, and come across perspectives I would not have encountered otherwise, perhaps that would make my wait for my flight back home worthwhile. I am still to be as mindful as this. I imagine it will become easier with experience.

As of now, the destination is still the most important to me. Producing the finest research proposal, blog post, literature review, and at the end, submitting the best version of my thesis and presenting it confidently – that is what keeps me going at 10 pm on a Friday. But perhaps in due time – maybe even decades down the line – I will enjoy the process for what it is instead of obsessing over the goal. I would love reading articles and bathe in the new knowledge, not just read to tick one more item off my to-do list. I would awe at how some papers could be so contradictory, and curiously wonder why. I would draw a deep breath when my first draft turns out to be far from my final destination, but delight in the fact that I have some foundation to work on.

Perhaps the greatest treasure of all is, indeed, the friends we make along the way, the flowers we sniff on the side of the road, the heavenly view from the airplane. I am yet to learn to fully appreciate such things, and I am excited to see how I will grow. You know what? Perhaps this journey of growth is also one to be cherished, not just in retrospect, but as it unfolds.