Unrelenting discomfort

It has been roughly one year since I started to work on my PhD thesis and I have to admit that I do not have much to show for it: on the one hand, science expects you to take some risks, because there is never enough time/manpower/money to investigate all possible options so one always ends up choosing one line of investigation in the hope that it is the right one, but also giving up on other which might look almost equally promising. In my case, the pretense that it should be possible to model the spread of the virus runs into the complexities of the reality, where sheer amount of individual circumstances that people face make the modelling incredibly hard.

On the other hand, my personal circumstance do not make the progress any easier, because I am simply far, far, far: I am far in the content of the thesis, because that is what the professor suggested and I had little choice to agree, but it is certainly not my field of expertise; it is far in context, because my thesis has nothing to do with the theses of my fellow PhD students, so I have a hard time finding inspiration in their work for my own; finally, I am physically far because, due to the pandemic, it has been months since I saw them face-to-face, so the whole dynamic of reading papers, compare them, analyze and present turns out to be a bit remote to me. However, I have decided not to take this too seriously, because it is not a matter of life or death: if I manage to do something profitable, all the best; if not, at least I will have tried and I will certainly have learnt something along the way. The important aspect to give it a serious try.

Photo: JamesDeMers on Pixabay

Yesterday one of the Teaching Assistants in the department, who is in charge of organizing the talks that we present to the group has asked me (again) to give a presentation. It has been almost three months since I gave the last one, so it is fully justified that I am asked to do it and yet, the moment I read about it, I could not avoid feeling a cramping sensation in the pit of my stomach. I am usually not afraid of giving talks and I can usually prepare a decent one in a day or two, but this case is a whole different beast because the average level of the talks is pretty high and, even if I my presentation skill are quite robust compared to the rest of the students, putting together a set of slides that is on par with their game is much more difficult.

Luckily, this time I have found a very interesting paper that presents a result that I have anticipated from the very onset of this pandemic: with the long incubation period and the large fraction of asymptomatic or barely symptomatic and yet infectious patients, the spread was going to be largely dominated by all those undetected cases that never make it into the statistics. Apart from supporting an idea that I have had for a long time, it is a good starting point to like with the concept of how many PCR tests come out positive, because the fraction of positives is too high you are just confirming that the people who go to the hospital have COVID-19 and that does not help informing the decisions about the containment of the virus.

This week is going to be interesting looking for other papers on the subject but I hope I will be able to cope with the discomfort. In the end, the worst that can happen is that I end up without a PhD, and that is not different from where I already am. In the meantime, just keep trying, you too. Have a nice evening.