My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”

The main part of my strategy for overcoming my depression is to identify its triggers and confront each and every one of them by writing about them. Since switching my Ph.D. research topic to quantum computing, almost everything that I encountered every single day as a graduate student in this area has been a trigger of my depression.

The very situation itself was depressing to me, which is in some ways quite irrational. I had told my father when I was in high school that there would be a close collaboration between computer scientists and physicists to study the physics of computation, and now I was a part of this. But in many ways I felt very out of place.

My background was in electrical engineering, while most of my colleagues were either computer scientists or physicists. Despite having a Master’s degree in computer science, I think that not having gone through an undergraduate program in it put me at a severe disadvantage. My father had insisted that there was nothing I could do with an undergraduate degree in computer science or physics that I could not have also done after graduating with a “prestigious” degree from the Engineering Science program. I suppose that this might be true from the perspective of anyone who viewed a résumé as nothing more than a checklist of qualifications. But the fact is that people who have gone through an undergraduate program in the same subject, even at different universities, share a common culture that requires a certain amount of effort by an outsider to penetrate. There are certain things that one is just expected to know, and which cannot be learned in their entirety by any means except through frequent association with members of that culture: the situations in which a particular proof technique is appropriate, the consequences of a theorem which are the most important in a given context, multiple equivalent ways of defining a technical term, and so on. And some skills simply take four or more years of practice to master.

When I was in high school, I was often — in fact, almost always — at the centre of collaborative efforts. But I was now on the periphery, and had to learn the language and culture of my colleagues, and this made me very bitter. It would have been a different matter entirely if I had wanted to enter an engineering program in university, and had become interested in quantum computing only after I had graduated. But I had set out deliberately in high school to become someone who could communicate with both computer scientists and physicists, and my father had specifically deprived me of the opportunities to acquire this ability by forcing me into engineering. He had insisted that it would “never happen” that such a skill would ever be useful.

I was reminded of this every time I attended a lecture at the Perimeter Institute (PI) where both computer scientists and physicists were present. Whenever a member of one community gave a talk, it was almost inevitable that someone would ask him or her to rephrase something in terms that the other community would understand, or to explain a concept that was considered elementary by the other community. And the audience was comprised of some very smart people, often including, for example, Nobel Prize winners. Every time this happened, I felt like I was being told that my father is a moron. Even now, more than a decade after I had predicted the need for scientists who could serve as a bridge between the computer science and physics communities, the niche has not really been filled.

My supervisor, Dr. Richard Cleve, worked at the Perimeter Institute on certain days of the week, and while I didn’t have an official position there, I began to work there regularly. I felt very strange about this. When I had participated in the University of Toronto Mentorship Program in high school to study astronomy and astrophysics, my father had opposed it on the grounds that it had “nothing to do” with computer science or my future career, and I had told him that one day I would be studying computer science in “a building full of astrophysicists”. And that was, indeed, exactly what I was doing.

I mentioned that I was working at the Perimeter Institute to my mother on the phone, and she told my father. The next time they came to visit, he sneered, “Why do you have to work at that place?” My parents referred to the Perimeter Institute as “that place” and to the people who worked there as “those people”. My father was dismissive of the fact that I was studying computer science among theoretical physicists, but at least he didn’t scream at me or forbid me to continue. His attitude reminded me of the mindset of religious fundamentalists: he was certain that computer science had nothing to do with theoretical physics, and since I was studying computer science, then it must be the case that I didn’t really need to collaborate with physicists. He often alluded to the fact that other graduate students in computer science (by which I presumed he meant those of Chinese descent) did not need to work with physicists to complete their degrees, as if that should have any bearing on me.

I had very mixed feelings when I went to the Perimeter Institute. On the one hand, I was exhilarated just to be in the presence of Nobel Prize winners and the like. It didn’t matter that I didn’t interact with them very much — just walking down the hallways and looking at the nameplates on the doors was very exciting. On the other hand, it was also somewhat depressing for me. I think that most parents would be very excited about their child working at a place like the Perimeter Institute — at least, I know that many of my high school classmates’ parents would have been. My parents didn’t care all that much about it, but to the extent that they did, they acted as if it was a bad thing.

Considering what a “prestigious” place the Perimeter Institute is, this might seem somewhat surprising. But my parents operate with a definition of prestige peculiar to Chinese parents: something is prestigious if and only if it is considered prestigious by all the other Chinese parents. Thus, a degree from an elite engineering program is prestigious; working with a bunch of white people who are too silly to stick to practical matters in an establishment founded for the purpose of studying frivolous nonsense is not prestigious. My parents kept pressuring me, for example, to work with Ming Li, who is a big name in bioinformatics, the unstated principle being that I should choose my colleagues and research on the basis of my colleagues’ ethnic backgrounds.

(Incidentally, scientific institutes dedicated to pure science research must be the “whitest” — or at least the “most non-Chinese” — places to work in the academic world. There are actually a few people of Chinese descent among the Perimeter Institute’s scientific staff, but almost all of them are from mainland China or possibly Taiwan. The only scientist there with a Hong Kong or Cantonese background that I can think of is Debbie Leung, although I think Hoi-Kwong Lo had spent some time there previously. In comparison, consider the lists of faculty members of the Electrical and Computer Engineering departments at the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto. I once entered the Perimeter Institute building carrying a camera, and I was asked by a staff member to leave because she thought that I was a tourist.)

One thing that came out of my counselling sessions was that I felt “unworthy” of working at the Perimeter Institute and also at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), a word that I never would have come up with myself. I imagined that most of my colleagues at these institutes had specialised in one subject for their entire lives, whether it was physics or mathematics or computer science. I, on the other hand, had been forced by my parents to jump from one subject to another just to be able to stay in school, and I felt that this meant I was not as dedicated as they were. But more importantly, I felt that I had somehow betrayed or let down my colleagues in science by not having adequately defended them whenever my parents dismissed their fields of research as “nonsense” or called into question the intelligence or wisdom of people who were interested in the topics they studied. I had fought openly with my parents to defend science up until the end of high school, but afterwards I changed my strategy to one of subterfuge. The only alternative would have been to run away from home, an option that I had rejected to my subsequent regret. Whenever I was in the company of other scientists, which was essentially most of the time, I felt really ashamed of my association with my parents.

Besides getting to work at the Perimeter Institute and the Institute for Quantum Computing, many other things happened to me as a result of my switch into quantum computing that would have made me very happy when I was in high school, but which as a result of my parents’ actions since that time made me very depressed instead. My parents had poisoned everything, and it took a great deal out of me to fight against their poison.

– davinci