In the first term of my Ph.D., I audited the Quantum Information course taught by Dr. Ashwin Nayak, but did not take it for credit. This was partly because I was so distracted by my predicament, but also because I initially didn’t want the course to appear on my transcript, lest my parents should see it. I was originally just going to sit in on the lectures, but Dr. Nayak convinced me to audit the course, because I had been doing the assignments anyway. And so the course did, in fact, appear on my transcript after all.
During the next several terms, I took some courses to satisfy my degree requirements, while I searched for a way to do research into quantum computing without my parents’ interference. I started to become depressed, because, perhaps unsurprisingly, my parents had begun to attack me for studying bioinformatics. I suppose that the onset of my depression had always only been a matter of time — the miracle was that I had managed to cope with my parents’ abusive behaviours for so long.
Throughout high school, university, and graduate school, my parents had been criticising me for buying books which they believed I did not need. Whenever they came to visit, they would scan my shelves and complain about the presence of books which they insisted had nothing to do with my studies and served only to distract me. I allowed them to box some of these and take them away to their house, only to buy another copy of a book they had taken away when I needed it. So I ended up with two copies of some books they claimed I didn’t need. This is yet another example of their counterproductive behaviour — they forced me to waste money on books when they were ostensibly trying to prevent me from doing this.
But things were actually even more ridiculous than this — indeed, much, much more. When I ordered books online related to bioinformatics, I had them sent to my parents’ house instead of to my residence. This served several purposes. First, they were going to inspect and criticise my books anyway, so I might as well select which ones to show them. If they drew the conclusion from the books which had been sent to them that I was studying bioinformatics and nothing else, then so much the better. Second, I could schedule their visits by choosing the approximate dates of the shipments, and hence ensure that they would not be disrupting my concentration when I did not want to be disturbed. Because the only way for me to manage their visits was to send them books on bioinformatics and other approved subjects, I began to order books that I didn’t really need. I probably wasted hundreds or even thousands of dollars this way, but it gave me predictable periods of peace during which I could concentrate on my studies.
It was when my father began to criticise my bioinformatics research that I had finally had enough of the charade. He had been looking through the books I had ordered, and when my parents came to visit me to drop them off, he told me that he thought they were simplistic and unsuitable for use in graduate research, and that I should be reading about topics which were much more advanced. He was probably right, but he was the reason that I had ordered such introductory texts on bioinformatics to begin with. Most Ph.D. students start their programs having a lot of background in their topic areas already, whether from a previous graduate degree, or from their undergraduate (or even high school) years. The only reason I had changed topics from information retrieval in languages written in the Perso-Arabic script to bioinformatics was because he had prevented me from studying the former, and the only reason I had wanted to study that was to circumvent his criticism that my interest in the connection between physics and computation — which he had expressly forbidden me to study — was “frivolous” and “impractical”. I had some background in bioinformatics already from the research for my Master’s thesis, and so I probably didn’t really need any introductory texts on the subject; but if I had wanted to read them, it was because my background wasn’t as strong as it should have been, since it wasn’t what I had intended to study in the first place.
I had spent years fighting with my father in high school to be allowed to study the physics of computation, only to be forbidden to do so under the threat of being disowned, at a time when some of the most important discoveries in quantum computing were made. I then spent my undergraduate years preparing to study information retrieval in languages written in the Perso-Arabic script, because I expected the attention of the West to turn to the Muslim world, and in particular to Pakistan and Iran, and during this entire time my father mocked my prediction. And when my prediction did come true, not only did he not apologise to me, but he punished me for having been right, and forced me to change my research topic once again. If I was not as prepared for my Ph.D. research as I should have been, it was because he had continually deprived me of all the head starts and advantages I had earned through my hard work throughout my life.
I was simply too exhausted at this point to defend myself against my father’s allegation that I was unprepared for graduate research in bioinformatics. Every single time my parents began to criticise me for doing something, their criticisms would inevitably escalate and I would have to spend more and more time and energy defending myself until it reached the point where I had neither the time nor the energy left to continue to do it. I had somehow managed to get away with completing a Master’s thesis in information retrieval for bioinformatics before their criticisms completely sapped my enthusiasm for the subject, but they were already criticising my Ph.D. research when I had barely started, and I did not believe that I could outrace them to the finish. I also did not want to go through the pain of getting very far ahead in a subject, and being told that I was in the perfect position to make important contributions to it, only to be prevented by my parents from continuing — for the third time.
And besides, there was now no point for me in continuing to do research in bioinformatics. The entire purpose behind my choice of topic was to work on something that my parents couldn’t criticise me for studying, while in theory studying quantum computing on the side. But I was so busy just managing their interference that I simply had no time for this. (My mother continued to nag me to drop my interest in the Muslim world, despite the fact that I had already essentially given up any hope of putting my knowledge and skills in the related subjects to any use in my career.) If my parents were going to criticise me and interfere with my studies no matter what I was working on, then I might as well be studying something that they had threatened to disown me for studying.
I decided then that I was going to switch into quantum computing for my Ph.D., my parents’ wishes be damned. In fact, I decided then that I had made an enormous mistake in not running away from home as a teenager. There were a number of occasions when I had seriously considered doing so, but I had rejected the idea each time. The thought that I would have been right in the middle of some of the most important discoveries in quantum computing if only I had run away from home to university, and that I had instead wasted what should have been the most productive years of my life and much of my energy during it defending myself against my parents’ continual efforts to destroy my scientific career and hence not accomplishing all the things that I could have accomplished, was very depressing to me. But I put it out of my mind.
At this time, Dr. Richard Cleve came to Waterloo from the University of Calgary, and I somehow managed to convince him to take me on as his Ph.D. student.
– davinci
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