Before I picked a lab to start my research career, like any sane person, I devoured Instagram carousels and LinkedIn posts on how to spot a good mentor. They talked about how to pick the ones who “communicate expectations clearly” or “foster psychological safety” or “encourage open dialogue”. Sure, all of those are great pointers. But none of it really prepared me to recognize what a good mentor should not do. “A good mentor should not treat you like a child” sounds ambiguous. What does it actually mean?

So I decided to make a list of every time my PI could treat me like a child, but chose not to.

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1. I was not made to feel guilty for knowing that industry was always my exit plan
In any relationship, it is always better to be honest about an expiry date (if there is one) from the get-go rather than breaking up with your partner without any warning whatsoever. Both are fine, as long as no one gets hurt. I had been brutally honest since my first year, and that honesty was greeted with gratitude and respect. Unfortunately, most PIs treat “I will not stay in academia” like a confession. A confession inherently insinuates that the person who is confessing is guilty. It should not feel like that. Instead, it should feel like a project plan. Your mentor should help you to plan your PhD accordingly. If you wish to stay in academia, publications should be prioritized. In case you wish to transition to industry, they should help you to gain work experience and build an external network.

No graduate student should me made to feel guilty for choosing their own path, and a good mentor will appreciate the clarity. Being treated like a child would involve a lecture about loyalty every time I brought up leaving.

2. I was not forced to go to a conference that would care more about my data than me
By the start of the final year of my PhD, my project had evolved into an important breakthrough in the field of precision medicine in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). My PI was excited to present it at the Gordon Research Conference (GRC), the holy grail for NPC research. Understandable. The catch was that the GRC had less than 100 attendees, comprising of only Chinese labs focusing on only NPC. Note that NPC is largely endemic to Southern China and Hong Kong. Being in my final year and dreaming of venturing into more diverse and global cancer types, the GRC was not my first choice. I had aimed to attend the European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) instead, where I could network for future postdoctoral or industry opportunities in Sweden, Switzerland and Germany. The more frustrating detail was that the dates of the conferences overlapped completely. Most would advise to attend the GRC because that’s where the data is the most relevant or most valued. But I was allowed to pick myself over the project and build my international network, while a co-author was arranged to present my findings at the GRC.

No graduate student should be forced to choose conferences that do not align with their personal and professional goals, and a good mentor will appreciate you taking charge of your own future. Being treated like a child would involve rejecting my travel grant application for EACR without any further discussion.

3. I was not rushed to learn a brand new field before being demanded for data

I was fresh out of a chemical engineering degree, and handed omics data and DNA extraction protocols like a foreign menu with no pictures. I was learning benchwork and building next-generation sequencing (NGS) pipelines from scratch in a relatively new lab. I had joined with the ambition of curing cancer during my PhD, but alas, I was sorely mistaken. A fresh round of progress reports were due in a few months. It was 2022, when ChatGPT was just being rolled out and still totally trash at generating or debugging code. While I scrambled to write functioning code, I remember feeling a sense of impending doom. When I met my PI for weekly meetings though, her calmness startled me. It was almost scary. She assured me that she had backup data to present as progress. Neither did she downplay the importance of my results and pipelines, nor did she make me feel like I was not doing enough.

No graduate student should be handed a strict Gantt chart to measure their progress. Sometimes, progress can look like quiet phases of personal growth. Not explosive bursts of measurable productivity. Being treated like a child would involve her rewriting my code instead of waiting for me to get it wrong first and learn from it.

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4. I was not expected to pay back the time I lost being sick
When I caught COVID-19 last month amidst manuscript revisions, I was allowed to rest and heal without having to explicitly “make up” for it later. There is a difference between a mentor who says “take care of yourself. hope you feel better soon, we can pick this up whenever” and one who actually says nothing. No check-in message. No gentle nudge about the manuscript. The former sounds kind, but the deadline is still there in the sentence. The student would still track it in their head the whole time they’re sick, because the cost of the delay is put entirely on the student to manage and repay, even while feeling supported. The other scenario is to trust the student to absorb the cost without making it painfully aware. For me, the delay was never mentioned because I was trusted enough to catch up. The silence itself was the tell.

No graduate student should be expected to be productive at all times, especially due to circumstances outside their control. They should be trusted to pick up work after a period of illness and trusted to be responsible. Being treated like a child would involve having a revised deadline landing in my inbox while I was recovering.

5. I was not expected to spend only 2 weeks a year with my family living in another country
Any international student reading this understands the importance of what I am saying here. Officially, we may be given 2-3 weeks of leave a year. We may or may not choose to travel to another country to visit our families. As a severely homesick person, I meticulously planned the days I would get to see my parents and sisters every year. And to me, 2 weeks a year was never nearly enough. There was a time during the peak of the pandemic in 2021/2022, when I was stuck in Hong Kong for 1.5 years. I do not wish to describe the plunging state of my mental health during those months, which had led to promising myself that I would not subject myself to that loneliness ever again. Taking that into consideration, I was never questioned by my PI when I wished to travel to Dhaka, sometimes multiple times a year. It was quietly understood that family time was sacred, and spending time with them re-energized me like no fancy lab dinner or activity could. I was not expected to keep working and generating results during that time. Needless to say, my productivity would sky-rocket as soon as I would get back to the lab.

No graduate student should be questioned when they wish to fly out to spend time with their families during the stressful years of attaining a research degree. A good mentor values that family connection plays an important role in keeping our mental health intact. Being treated like a child would involve being asked to justify a second trip home in the same year.

None of this shows up in a carousel or the glossy acceptance email welcoming you into a program. If you want to know what you are walking into, ask the current students in the lab what their PI lets them get away with. If the answer is unremarkable, you have hit the jackpot. I did not know to ask this when I picked my lab. I got lucky. But you should not have to gamble like that.

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The very first solo trip I took was to Stockholm, Sweden. I was accepted into an exchange course in Medical Development Biology between the University of Hong Kong (HKU), University of Toronto and Karolinska Institutet early on in my PhD. I had literally clawed my way in to the course and when I was accepted, I felt a strange mixture of apprehension and frisson. I knew no one in the course or Stockholm. I had never been outside Asia. I felt slightly uneasy telling my parents, especially my Dad, mostly because I had watched Liam Neeson’s Taken trilogy with him when I was a teenager (iykyk). I had written down my arguments and was fully prepared to make my case. But, in hindsight, I should have given them more credit, because they were absolutely delighted. I had a nagging suspicion that my Dad had forgotten the movies. But anyway, I did not remind him.

As cliché as it might sound, that first solo trip would mark the beginning of my becoming. Since then, I have traveled solo to Warsaw, Krakow, Berlin, Grindelwald (Switzerland), Chicago and Tokyo. Don’t get me wrong. I was always worried about something or the other - making it through immigration, finding my accommodation, understanding the language, or sticking to my budget (just broke grad student things!). But somewhere between navigating public transport in a new city, deciding what to do on an unexpectedly free afternoon and finding a place to eat, I realized that solo travel was giving me something I rarely got in everyday life: complete agency of my choices. I made good choices, questionable choices, and downright bad choices. None of it magically made me become fearless or effortlessly independent. But I picked up a few lessons along the way that made surviving academia a little bit easier.

1. Give myself permission to get lost

I was humbled on my very first morning in Stockholm when I was traveling to Gamla Stan, the Old Town, from my Airbnb using public transport. I had gotten off at a wrong stop and found myself about 20-25 minutes walk away from Gamla Stan. Exasperated and furious at Google Maps, I was frantically trying to find my way. I had the sinking feeling when I heard that tiny whisper in my head - “You are so incapable!” However, because of that mistake, I ended up stumbling upon the military band marching towards The Royal Palace. I followed them and witnessed the changing of the guard ceremony. It was not in my initial itinerary because it did not look particularly appealing to me on an Instagram reel. But I was surprised that I thoroughly enjoyed the march and ceremony in person. The loud, dramatic fanfare music created an authoritative and captivating atmosphere, almost like it was commanding me to stay put and watch. It became one of the highlights of my Stockholm trip!

Taking a wrong train or bus in a new city has become a rite of passage for me at this point. I can have everything planned to a T but some of my most memorable experiences sprouted from unplanned detours. I learned to allow myself to be flexible and more open to them. I carried over this philosophy to my negative data in research. Unplanned results and detours in experimental plans were not time wasted. They gave me clarity on what not to focus on. Sure, we all have plans and timelines but they should support our project, not control it.

2. Being alone is not the same as being lonely

Eating alone at a restaurant is like a muscle that needs to be trained. At first, it can feel deeply unsettling. You walk in, feel a tinge of embarrassment when you tell the waiter that it’s just you, imagine their pitiful look and shuffle over to your table. The menu seems to have way too many options. You default to the usual egg’s Benedict with salmon, eat hurriedly and rush out as fast possible.

Instead of doing that, I urge you to slow down. Look around and you will realize that no one is watching you because no one cares. They are too busy catching up with their own friends or lovers and deciding whether to splurge on dessert. I promise that you only imagined the waiter’s pity.

The more comfortable I got with that idea, the more enjoyable my own company got. Just because there was an empty chair across from me did not mean I was lonely. True loneliness comes from being disconnected from yourself. Initially, I felt the pressure to act confident alone with a book or my laptop or looking mysteriously nonchalant. Eventually, it became normal. I learned to just sit and eat with nothing but my thoughts. Sometimes I would people-watch. Not in a creepy way, but in a curious way.

And strangely enough, being comfortable with solitude made me more intentional about spending time with others, too. I would no longer entertain company that would drain me. I have been surrounded by people and still felt lonely. I have sat alone for hours and still felt alive.

Learning to enjoy solitude gave me a steadier relationship with myself, so when the inevitable lonely stretches of research showed up, it did not bother me quite as much as one would think.

3. Be curious even when there is no deliverable

On a particularly warm evening in Warsaw, I was walking aimlessly in its Old Town. I came across a Chopin concert being advertised in one of those beautiful, historic-looking buildings. It was packed, which made sense once I remembered that Chopin was from Warsaw and that I was, in fact, in Warsaw. So I bought a ticket and went in. During one of the breaks, I got to chatting with the person sitting next to me: an ostrich farmer from the US. He is not someone you would expect to meet at a Chopin recital halfway across the world, but solo traveling has a way of making these combinations seem completely normal. He told me all about the practical realities of raising what is essentially a very large, fast, and scarily modern version of a dinosaur. I have forgotten most of the details, but I remember being completely fascinated.

The encounter was rather useless - unproductive and definitely not a networking opportunity. But it was a brief window into a life I would have never known existed if I had not randomly walked past that concert. I think we need more moments like that. It is healthy to remember that life is about more than the research question we are pursuing.

4. Figure out who I am when no one is looking

I used to spend a lot of time in museums in historic cities in Europe because I thought that’s what you are supposed to do. In Berlin, I arrived on the first Sunday of the month, when to my surprise, all the museums are free to visit. I felt morally obliged to take advantage of the opportunity. So I went, and racked up 30,000 steps that day.

To be completely honest, I did not enjoy it nearly as much as strolling along the East Side Gallery and Spree River, or spending hours at an unknown, non-famous park, lying on the grass reading my book. I would consider that a very successful afternoon. I did not simply want to tick items off my list.

I noticed other small things, too. I do not like pretzels, despite them being extremely popular in Germany. I am happy making dessert my entire meal three times a day while solo traveling. No one gets to judge. I do not need to negotiate or argue with anyone why I do not want to include 30 grams of protein in every meal.

Solo travel did not reveal a more enlightened version of me. It just made me listen to my own preferences without other voices mixed in.

5. I am so small in this big, damn world

When I saw Mt. Fuji with my own eyes, I was STUNNED at how magnificent it was. Pictures truly do not do it justice. You have to be there. It has this powerful presence that makes you understand why an entire set of spiritual and cultural stories have grown around it. I learnt about the Shinto goddess Konohanasakuya-hime and how Fuji is believed to bring good luck and shape the communities living around it. I found it strangely moving. There is this mountain that existed long before any of us, carrying stories, rituals, fears and hope passed down several generations and here I was, checking if my phone had enough battery. There is something liberating about realizing that you are not the centre of the universe.

I watched strangers pass through train stations. Each person rushing somewhere with a whole complicated life I knew nothing about. Back home, it is easy to for a difficult meeting or a rejected paper to ruin my whole day. When I am travelling alone, the enormity of those problems seem proportionate again. The world is far too big, old and full of other people’s lives for mine to matter in the grand scheme of things.

And that thought is oddly calming.

So book that intimidating trip. Eat at the table for one. Take the wrong train. Talk to the ostrich farmer. Skip the museum if you want to. Have dessert for dinner without explaining yourself to anyone. If you are a student waiting until you have more money, more confidence, more free time, or a perfectly coordinated group of friends to travel with, I would say: go anyway, when you can. You may come home with the same research question and the same looming deadlines, but you will come home knowing that the world, and your capacity to move through it, is much bigger than you thought.

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So I joined the gym around the corner. One of the first people through the door when that branch opened, which is how I ended up friendly with Antonio, the head trainer. He’d wander past mid-set, tell me if my form was off, or that I could probably go heavier than I thought. I got stronger faster than I expected to. A few weeks in, I was leg pressing 70 kg comfortably, a number I bragged about to my friends at dinner more than once, of course. Antonio disagreed with 70 kg being enough, though. He kept telling me to go heavier. I kept telling him no because 70 already felt like a giant achievement at that point.

Then one evening, after a long day in the lab, I racked my usual weights and got into position. It felt heavier than normal, but I figured that was just exhaustion talking, so I pushed through the set anyway, which, in hindsight, is a decision very on-brand for a PhD student. Antonio stood across the room watching me the whole time with a look I couldn’t place. I finished, nearly died doing it, walked it off for two minutes, went back for the next set. That’s when I understood the look.

Pride.

I looked at him and he gave me this small, silent applause from across the room, like I’d done something he’d been waiting on for weeks. Turns out someone before me had left an extra 30 kg loaded on the upper rack and never took it off. My regular set that day was 100 kg, not 70. Neither I nor my extremely tired brain had clocked the difference until it was already done, which says a lot about either my strength or my situational awareness. Possibly both.

At the gym, progress is easy to prove. There are more plates on the machine than there were last week. Progressive overload, as they say. Simple. A PhD works differently. Most weeks it hands you nothing you can point to, and on the rare week it does, the size of it never quite matches the effort it took to get there. I kept wanting research to behave like training: put in the work, get some results, add a little more, get some more results, and repeat. Instead, I could spend three weeks rerunning an analysis and emerge with a brand new error message about a package version incompatibility.

I had started strength training before every talk I had to give. Heavy session a few hours out, then straight into the room still riding the high of adrenaline and dopamine. I gave good talks on those days. Won an award or two off the back of it, which I will take credit for, thank you very much! Then I’d go reward myself with a cupcake, but that’s beside the point.

For a while, I really did believe the gym mindset was bleeding into my research. Then I’d hit a personal best on a Tuesday and feel like the most disciplined person alive, while my actual project was just sitting there. Exactly as stuck as it had been the week before. Same dead end I’d been staring at for months, except now with the added insult of knowing that effort and outcome behaved themselves in other aspects, but just not here.

So slowly, without really deciding to, I started choosing the gym over my desk. It became a pattern I only noticed in hindsight, the way you notice most bad habits. The gym gave me numbers that moved in the right direction. The PhD threw me vague WhatsApp messages, wacky plots, complicated equipment and half-written conference abstracts. So I started spending more time at the gym. It helped, some weeks, when the PhD was actively wrecking my mental health. Other weeks it was just a very well-dressed excuse to not sit down and work. I’ve never been able to fully pull those two apart and I’m not sure I need to. They can coexist. Not exactly a controversial thing to admit, is it?

No matter how badly I wanted the two to line up, the PhD was not built to follow the rules of the gym. The gym was not always kind or linear. But at least it was honest in a way the PhD often wasn’t. In a PhD, you can work exactly as hard as I did on that leg press and have nothing to show for it. No plates. No Antonio watching from across the room to catch the moment you did more than you thought you could.

There is no machine or metric in a PhD that tells you you’ve become more resilient. But sometimes, I would suddenly notice at 9pm on a Friday night, that I am still there, opening the same cursed analysis for the hundredth time, and realize that I would, without question, come back to it again if it didn’t work.

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The video used Hermione Granger from Harry Potter as the example, and I understand why. Hermione is the character who has it all together. She excels in every class, she juggles studying for twelve O.W.Ls (versus the usual seven to nine) in Prisoner of Azkaban (…albeit with the help of a Time Turner), she starts a whole social movement for house-elf rights in Goblet of Fire, and she organizes Dumbledore’s Army in Order of the Phoenix. She is the face of competence itself, and she makes it look like second nature.

Hermione is fiction, and a gifted one at that. So it feels a little unfair to hold real people to her standard. But I’d argue it happens everywhere in academia, and especially among scientists like me.

Many of us feel like we need to look effortless in order to be taken seriously. When I first joined my lab, so did I, because everyone around me seemed to be working hard at hiding how hard they were working. And I don’t think I imagined this. Let me tell you a story.

The first lab technique I ever learned, right out of undergrad, was multiplex immunohistochemical staining (mIHC). A senior student was training me on it, and because I was baffled at the minute details, at some point I asked him a simple question: had he ever messed up, after repeating this protocol hundreds of times? He didn’t answer. I remember taking his silence as a yes, that he was too far above making mistakes to even discuss it. He left the lab a few weeks later.

By the time it was my turn to stain my own slides, a new microwave had been installed in the lab. I didn’t think to recalibrate its settings against the old one (anyone else who did that? No? Just me?..). So for the majority of you out there who has no clue of my massive blunder, this means that I used the same “high” setting on the new one without realizing that their wattages may be completely different. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that the “high” of the old microwave was equivalent to the new one’s “low”. I ended up burning my slides. I panicked, because somewhere along the way I had absorbed the idea that nobody else in that lab ever got anything wrong. A week later, when I finally confessed to my supervisor when I realized the images were clearly botched from the high heat, she barely blinked. She mentioned, almost as a side note, that the “perfect” lab mate I’d once asked about had made a similar mistake himself while boiling his slides.

I was stunned. Why was it so hard for him to just admit that to me?

I think about it a lot now that I’m further along. He was in the final year of his PhD when I met him, still figuring out how to hold himself in a lab full of people who seemed to know exactly what they were doing. Admitting a mistake to a first-year probably felt like handing over proof that he didn’t belong the way everyone assumed he did. I don’t think he was hiding it out of arrogance. I think he was scared, the same way I was scared a few months later with a tray of burned slides in my hands.

I’ve noticed the same pattern showing up now, as I prepare for my own oral defense. I’ve been asking around, trying to learn how other people got ready for theirs. The answer I keep hearing is some version of “I just relaxed and winged it.” Excuse me? You spent four or more years building your project, and you’re telling me you walked into the room where a committee interrogates every choice you made, and just “winged it”?

I don’t believe them. I think they just do not want to admit that they put in the work.

Becoming a competent scientist takes years of failed protocols, rejected papers, confusing results, and long stretches of not knowing what you’re doing. That is the actual job. And yet the culture around us insists on acting as though real competence should look natural.

When everyone performs ease, the people struggling assume they’re the only ones struggling. That assumption stacked on top of a PhD, where the isolation is already built into the structure of the work, it becomes dangerous. You start to wonder if you’re simply not cut out for this, when in reality you’re just the only one being honest.

A PhD is already a strange kind of solitary confinement. Most of us spend years on a project narrow enough that almost nobody around us, including our own supervisor, fully understands what we’re doing. There’s no one to compare notes with in the way you could in undergrad. No model exam answers to gauge yourself against. The only real signal you get is how other people seem to be handling it. So when that signal is fake, when everyone is performing calm they don’t feel, you are not even comparing yourself to reality anymore. You’re measuring your difficult experiences against everyone else’s highlight reel.

I keep thinking about that conversation with my supervisor, and how differently I would have felt if the senior student had just said “yes, I mess up all the time, here’s what I do when it happens.” One honest sentence might have saved me from spiraling like a mad person for an entire week.

If there’s a version of academic culture I want to be part of, it’s one where we talk openly about the work nobody puts in the acknowledgments. The failed protocols, the expensive reagents wasted, cells mistakenly contaminated, the practice talks that went terribly before the real one went fine. It is okay to admit to our mistakes because it might help someone two years behind us in their PhD who is probably spiraling in a lab right now, assuming they’re incompetent.

Hermione had a Time Turner. The rest of us just have the hours we actually put in honing the skill or perfecting the slides, and it might be time we started admitting it.

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That’s where we get the phrase Pyrrhic victory. It is defined as a win that costs so much that it ends up functioning like a loss.

I finished my PhD this year, and for most of the years I was in it, people around me treated it like a Pyrrhic victory in progress. There was no malicious intention, just the default read. You spend four years earning a stipend that undercuts what your undergrad classmates make in industry, delaying the raises and promotions that compound the fastest early in a career. From the outside, the shape of the story writes itself. I was supposedly winning the degree, and losing the years.

I used to believe that story too. I don’t anymore.

The textbook case for calling it Pyrrhic

I’ll make the case against myself first.

Time is the cost I can’t argue away. Those were years I’m not getting back, spent while people my age were stacking promotions and raises in industry, the kind of early-career compounding that’s hard to replicate later.

Money is the one place I won’t sugarcoat. My stipend in Hong Kong was better than what most PhD students here get. It was still nowhere close to what a capable 29-year-old who went straight into industry after undergrad would be earning by now. I trailed my industry peers financially, and I still do.

And the system itself isn’t neutral. Academia produces far more doctorates than there are tenure-track positions to absorb. It keeps a pipeline of highly skilled, cheap labor flowing through labs that couldn’t function without it. If you assume the entire point of a PhD is to end up in a tenure-track job, then most PhDs really do lose this war on the numbers alone, and the years spent chasing that outcome look exactly like Pyrrhus’s dead veterans. Gone and irreplaceable.

That’s the reading most people default to. Let me tell you why it is an incomplete read.

What I lost, and what didn’t stay lost

Winning always costs something. Pyrrhus’s cost was that what he lost couldn’t be replaced, while Rome’s losses could. His losses were deemed unsustainable. That’s the true mechanism behind the phrase. It’s the part people skip past when they use “Pyrrhic victory” to mean “expensive win.” Expensive isn’t the same as unsustainable.

So I’d rather ask what I lost and whether it grew back.

This is exactly where the comparison to Pyrrhus gets interesting. His war chest bled out and bought him nothing durable. Mine bought a credential and a set of research and analytical skills that has resale value in a market I haven’t even stepped into yet. A trade-off isn’t a loss just because it isn’t cash.

When it comes to lost time, I, however, didn’t just let those years pass. In the first year of my PhD I started eating better and training properly, and it changed almost everything downstream of it. My sleep improved, my energy through the day improved, I got strong enough to move heavy things around the lab without thinking twice. It was infrastructure I built during the PhD, the kind most people don’t get around to until burnout forces the issue in their thirties. I also built real friendships during those years, the kind that came with trips and history. They blossomed out because of the PhD.

Would I do it again

No. I wouldn’t.

I used to think that answer settled the question, that if I wouldn’t repeat it, the whole thing must have been a bad trade. But Pyrrhus’s line about a victory like Asculum finishing him off nay sound like regret but it was more about whether the strategy could scale. It was about whether he could keep paying that price battle after battle. Think about strength-training. Nobody expects someone who spent a year building real strength to keep repeating that first grueling phase for the rest of their life. Once the base is built, staying strong takes maintenance. Some costs are supposed to be paid once. Refusing to repeat something doesn’t make the first round a mistake. Instead, I think the effort was specialized, front-loaded and not meant to be a recurring expense.

Leaving the theatre

Here’s the part I think really matters, more than the ledger of costs and gains.

Pyrrhus lost the war because he kept fighting Rome on Rome’s terms, against an opponent that could out-lose him indefinitely. If he’d taken what his army had become and used it somewhere else, the story might read differently. He didn’t. He went back for a third round against good sense, and it broke him.

Academia’s version of Rome is the tenure-track system. The system is a machine that produces far more PhDs than it has permanent jobs for and will accept an unlimited number of people willing to keep fighting for a shrinking number of seats. That’s the fight most PhDs lose, and it’s the fight the Pyrrhic victory story assumes you’re stuck in.

I’m not going back for that fight. I’m taking what four years produced, the analytical training and the ability to stand in front of a room and explain something technical to people who aren’t specialists, and I’m deploying all of it somewhere Rome’s endurance advantage doesn’t apply anymore. Industry R&D, medical affairs, regulatory affairs, data analytics, healthcare investments, where the years I spent are the badge of honor I’m walking in with.

The Pyrrhic reading of a PhD assumes there’s only one win condition, the academic career the system is designed to produce. But that was never the only win condition available. I extracted something transferable from a system built to extract labor out of me, and I plan to leave before it can ask me to pay for a second costly victory.

Here’s the difference between his story and mine. Pyrrhus’s soldiers only had value inside that specific war. The moment he stopped fighting, or lost too many of them to keep going, whatever he’d spent them on stopped mattering, because none of it existed outside the fight itself. What I paid these past four years doesn’t work that way. None of the skills I gained needs me to stay in academia to keep being useful. I can leave the war and take all of it with me.

I wouldn’t fight the war again. But could I still walk away with what I paid for during the war? Pyrrhus couldn’t. I can.

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