Stories | 2016

*This is a long one, feel free to skip to the next section for the more salacious parts*

I was in the middle of my PhD in plant genetics in a small Northeastern town when I matched with someone named Elsa on a dating app.

As for context, my PhD experience had been isolating and alienating-- cold, harsh winters seemingly spent as endless days pipetting buffer and fixing an endlessly dripping HPLC and nights of writing and debugging R code.

The freshmen on the team all stood in a circle outside on the basketball court, laughing nervously at what we’d just seen. The seniors had called us to the baseball house for what we thought was a team meeting to settle some differences in the squad, but it turned out to be an initiation ritual. They’d set it up for days, and we thought we were all fucked, in trouble, until they revealed that it wasn’t real and it was just a ritual sort of bonding exercise they did every year.