Ep8_Confidence Chasm_Dr. Mohamad Nadim Adi.mp3
Ep8_Confidence Chasm_Dr. Mohamad Nadim Adi.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
Ep8_Confidence Chasm_Dr. Mohamad Nadim Adi.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Emily:
Hey there.
Emily:
A quick warning before we start. Today's episode touches on weight gain, civil war and the death of a family member. The mention of these topics is very brief, but I'm erring on the side of caution. Please be mindful if you continue to listen and reach out for support, if you need it. Today's guest, associate professor, Dr. Mohammad Nadeem Aadi, opens up about feeling the pressure to be perfect. The detrimental health impacts of a micromanaging postal supervisor and how the deterioration of his confidence led him to leave academia for a few years.
Mohamad:
It was mainly in my postdoc and it reached the point when I because, as you know, in academia, we always have to be applying for funds and writing and writing research papers and all of that. And it's reached the point where I thought of any fund or any application I applied for would be tossed in the bin right from the get go. So I, I kind of didn't have enough confidence to even do that. So after a while I thought, well, maybe academia isn't for me. In a sense. I think it was one of those things I was managing to get them to conferences and talks during my postdoc. But it always felt as if I'm kind of standing there pretending to know something or pretending to have my life together.
Emily:
Welcome to Voices of Academia with Emily King, it's a podcast where researchers from around the world open up about their mental health. They might laugh, cry or say things you disagree with, but this is lived experience, not professional advice. We cover some sensitive material, but it's worth it to normalize difficult conversations, reduce stigma and help people feel less alone. Let's get into it. But just before that, super embarrassing, there's a distinct sound of my partner washing dishes in the background that I cannot, for the life of me, edit out! The pleasures of working from home during a global pandemic. If you can get past that, it's a great discussion. OK, let's go. Nadim is an assistant professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. He completed his doctoral studies in the field of virtual reality and obtained his undergraduate degree and master's in architecture from the U.K. Dr Adi studies how people respond to different types of built environments using various virtual platforms as a medium. He's worked in several universities around the globe, in the fields of High-Rise wood buildings, hospital design, dementia and elderly friendly design and interactive architecture. It's a fascinating area of research and I'm really excited to have you here. Welcome Nadim.
Mohamad:
Well, thank you for having me, Emily.
Emily:
So I wanted to ask you just a couple of questions so that we can get to know you a little bit before we get into some other parts of your story. And I'm aware that this is now probably the most loaded question I can ask, given that we're in a pandemic. But how are you.
Mohamad:
I know. I know. All things considered, I'm doing well, much better than expected in a pandemic.
Emily:
So that's good to hear. And I'd be interested to know you mentioned you do a little bit of teaching and you're obviously in virtual reality now. But what actually drew you to academia?
Mohamad:
I come from a family where we've kind of always drawn into the academic fields growing up. I grew up around, my mom is is a hematologist. My dad is an engineer, and most of our relatives are either doctors or engineers. So for us, it was kind of the it was almost the default setting is go to university to try to get the highest degree you can get. And that's kind of what drew me to academia. At the same time, I wanted to explore some things in research. And at the time, virtual reality was not your kind of traditional learning course that you can do. So I could only do it through research and I was lucky enough to find a professor in computer science who was willing to take on an architect who knew nothing about programming or coding and teach them the ropes and how to use virtual reality effectively.
Emily:
That's fantastic. And yeah, a big learning curve, I guess, coming from architecture.
Mohamad:
Yeah. Most of my colleagues at the computer science department are pure computer scientists. So whenever you ask a question to them, well, how do I run the system or how do I run this equipment? That's the most natural answer as well. Just write a program from scratch and you can run to them. I'll be like, oh, I can draw up from scratch, try. So I had to kind of learn how to read code and all of that. I still don't consider myself as a person who can code, but I can navigate my way through these things now.
Emily:
So you've obviously done very well getting to the level of assistant professor there. So a couple more questions. I guess this one a little bit more personal in your downtime. Is there anything that you're particularly reading or listening to or watching at the moment?
Mohamad:
I'm kind of always drawn to a series that kind of explore the threshold between what humanity is and essence of things like, for instance, raised by Wolves or ex Machina series that kind of explore. Well, when does a robot or simulation ceases to be a simulation and becomes reality and kind of that relationship? It's always fascinating to me. Sometimes I'll just wind down and watch SpongeBob, but those days I'm just too tired to think. So I just want a quick laugh so
Emily:
I can understand that. Yeah, I. Have you seen iRobot?
Mohamad:
Oh, yes. I love that one.
Emily:
Yeah, that was fantastic. I only saw it a couple of years ago. But yeah, I also think it's pretty fascinating when you can get to the point of being sentient as an artificial intelligence, you know. And one final one, I would find this difficult to answer, but luckily I'm not the one that has to answer it. What were you like as a child?
Mohamad:
I think my mom would say that I never said so, it's almost as if I have a space somewhere attached to to my lower half. So I was always moving. I was always running around. But I think I got fascinated by computers and computer games at the time. And I think I grew up in Saudi Arabia. So there wasn't much that we could go outside and play because it's the weather there is pretty brutal. It's we get regularly, we get plus 50 degrees in the summer. So most of our time we're kind of at home. So TV and computer became the two best two best friends we could have. So so I think that kind of started me on my journey to kind of get fascinated by computers and computer research.
Emily:
Yeah, definitely. It's an interesting link. Once you kind of look back, you always can find some kind of connections, I feel.
Mohamad:
Yeah. Yeah.
Emily:
So I'm going to shift gears now a little bit into your mental health story. So you've indicated to me that during your Ph.D., you always felt this pressure to be perfect, which intensified during your postdoc and sometimes affected your ability to complete simple tasks. Your home country was in the midst of a civil war and you were sort of battling your own mind at the same time, I was wondering if you could maybe take us back and talk us through that journey and maybe starting with your first memories of feeling that pressure to be perfect.
Mohamad:
Yeah. So during my Ph.D., because in university and luckily with an architect, like the style of learning architecture, I'm doing design studios. We can work out. What you usually learn is that you do your design, you hang it on the wall, and your professor would come. And we had old school professors and my undergrad. So they were kind of trial by fire kind of mentality at the time. And we didn't like it one bit because the professor would come into your work and say, oh, this is awful, just take it down and do it all over again. But I think that kind of toughened up a little bit. But also at the same time, we were always kind of striving to get that perfect design, the perfect kind of project to get the highest mark possible, because that's the thing you aim for. If you want to continue your studies, you need to have a good job, I think. And in my Ph.D., I think one of the earliest memories, talking to my supervisor and saying, well, I want to do artificial intelligence thing that really encompasses what I knew about the field at the time, that I thought I could program it on my own. And he gives me a book that's about a foot thick and he says, well, this is kind of the book was titled, I think The Fundamentals of Java. And I look at that and I say, OK, if I go away for a for a month or two and just go through the whole thing with I know how to program, he said, oh, oh, no, you'll just learn how to think.
Mohamad:
And from a programming point of view and at that time I was like, OK, I need to come up with something that'll work, otherwise I'll stay doing like basically 12 years down the line. So so I was worried about that. And and also I think the other thing was that I didn't have anyone prior to me who did a Ph.D. from my family part. So I think the expectation was, you're doing exams. You're doing what? You're getting good grades and you're you're advancing as opposed to what you're doing is experimentation. And even if you take all the boxes, it can go well or it can go wrong. So that kind of caused me to become quite stressed. It doesn't help that I'm a night owl and I regularly stay up late. So that doesn't help at all when it comes to these things, too. But I think it became difficult. Even if I had a report to complete and which is something pretty normal, it'll get done last minute. It'll be done well, but it'll be done last minute because I'm worried. Oh, it's not perfect. I'll do it again. It's not perfect. I'll do it again. So I think that's kind of the thing I have to struggle with during my PhD, during my postdoc, that kind of increased a bit more.
Mohamad:
I didn't have the best of relationships with my postdoc supervisor and at the time, he's the type of personality that likes to micromanage everything and his department down to where you placed things on your desk to that level. And we didn't see eye to eye on many things, so. He would continuously say, you know, we do things differently and this lab to where you've studied so so that kind of cause problems, I think during my first year of my postdoc, I gained quite a bit of weight and I wasn't happy about it. And in my second year of postdoc, I kind of started adopting the mentality of I'll do what I can. And if it's like it's like if if it's not like it or I have to do it again, then I'll have to do it again. And I think that kind of really helped me through the years. That's one of those things that, yes, it's fine, nothing's perfect. And I came to realize that, surprisingly enough, I came to realize that through one of I think it was a story or a comic I was reading where a scientist person was saying, well, perfection is the enemy of scientists because if something perfect, we can't research it anymore. So I'm going to use that as my motto.
Emily:
I like that I might adopt that one, too. So how did you make that shift? Because I struggle with perfectionism as well and it's it's been a really long journey. And so I'd be interested to know how you sort of made that shift. Was that difficult for you to sort of change that mindset?
Mohamad:
It was at one point I started noticing that I was demanding the same perfection from from my life, from my kids. And at a certain point I thought, well, I'm never going to reach that perfect Allstar kind of level. I realized I'm never going to reach that kind of perfect status that the people will. That in your head you think a researcher should be doing. Yes. Papers published everywhere. You're getting invited to talks here and there and all of that. And I thought, well, I kind of had like an aha moment that at one of those nights where I thought, you know what, my work isn't perfect. My work might not be even good, but that's fine. I'll I'll consider it as one of those experiments. And if I have to do it again, I'll do it again. And that's absolutely fine. And I think as soon as I kind of started adopting that, I started feeling quite a bit better. My supervisor and my postdoc at the time didn't like that mentality a lot because here you want the perfect to work all the time. But we did kind of reach a point where he said, well, OK, I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors. And I was like, yes, that's absolutely fine. We didn't gel together well, but that's fine. It's one of those things that I'll explore other options. So that was fine for me to write.
Emily:
Ok, yeah, because I was going to ask actually how how did that go with that sort of difference in opinion, a mindset. So it sounds like he let you go.
Mohamad:
Yeah. And I think that that's the thing. Five years doing my own thing. For those years I worked as a consultant for the university for a couple of projects. At the time I was going through the news, there were a few reports about about virtual currencies and all of that. And I thought they might be related to virtual reality, sort of diving deeper into the and it got me hooked into that world for a while. So in my company, I started working on on that for a while. So I met a whole different batch of people through that world because because it was such a new kind of technology. And most people who have worked in that field were not academics. So I kind of understood the other side of the equation that, OK, we'll learn by doing and they do something. It doesn't work or it spectacularly fails. And they're like, OK, mother, that again of something else. So so work in the world for about four years. And at that time I decided I kind of missed academia. I missed the the teaching there, like the formalized research field. So I wanted to shift back to academia. So and I think I was lucky enough to to be able to sell my company at the time, not for not for a great deal of cash. Mind you, I would love to do that and retire somewhere, but it was enough to kind of it was enough to have a good level of income. So I sold that and shifted back to academia. And here we are.
Emily:
Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to chat some more to you in the next episode about how you gained some confidence back from working in your own company. But for this part, I was it difficult to go back to academia, I guess, because you'd mentioned that at one point you were having trouble completing simple tasks. And I'm guessing that was when you were sort of right in the middle of things. I'm unsure if that was during your Ph.D. or your postdoc, but I imagine it would have been maybe some fire associated with whether you might get pulled back into that space again.
Mohamad:
Yeah, yeah. I think it was mainly in my postdoc. And and it reached the point when I because, as you know, in academia, we always have to be applying for funds and writing and writing research papers and all of that. And it reached the point where I thought of any fund or any application I applied for would be tossed in the bin right from the get go. So I, I kind of didn't have enough confidence to even do that. So after a while I thought, well, maybe academia isn't for me. In a sense. I think it was one of those things I was. Managing to get them to conferences and talks during my postdoc, but it always felt as if I'm kind of standing there pretending to know something or pretending to have my life together. And when I was talking on the sidelines, people were saying, oh, no, you're doing great. You're you're doing awesome. But in my head, that's kind of the voice in the back of your head saying, no, no, no. You know, if they talk with you for five minutes, they're going to learn that you're just pretending to know something and you don't really know anything. And that was causing me to kind of pull back, in a sense and just be very cordial with everybody, but not kind of get into developing these strong connections and in conferences which which everyone should do, I think, and not talk in depth about my work because I was always worried. Well, OK, your work isn't good enough. They're going to find out that you're a hoax or something and you're going to get found. So so that was kind of the the trouble I was facing, I think, during my research.
Emily:
Do you now that you've sort of gone back to academia, do you still feel that imposter syndrome at all or do you feel like you've been able to overcome that to a large degree?
Mohamad:
It's always there. It's like the little person, they're always there whispering, but I think I've learned to kind of ignore ignore that voice in a sense, because I think one of the one of the biggest things that help is when you sit down with the students and you teach them and you realize that. Yes, because you've been in a research environment for so long, you expect that most of your knowledge is common knowledge. And when you sit down with students or people from outside of the field and you start signing these things up, their eyes go wide and start asking the most basic questions and realize, oh, hang on, no, I've got a good body of knowledge in my head and sharing is good. So so, yes, I am an expert of sorts.
Emily:
Yes. It's really interesting because I yeah, I feel that too. And I understand that imposter syndrome and that feeling of, you know, like someone's going to find you out. I know that's really common for academics. So it's interesting to sort of hear how that shifted for you. And I imagine being in your own company for such a long time and having those very different perspectives, you have sort of the academic background. And then you were working with people from various different fields. It sort of sounds like that was really, really beneficial for you and kind of tackling that mindset and then and then coming back. Academia. So I think for any listeners, that's probably really great to hear because I think a lot of people like you kind of get to that point where they just don't think they're good enough. They don't think they're going to make it. And confidence can be dropped so low because you're constantly around people that are so incredible at what they do and so intelligent. And it's a very competitive field.
Mohamad:
Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think it's doing your own thing for a year or two would be something very beneficial for anyone for just on the basis of mental health, because I think it's it's one of those things because you start doing all the kind of small, everyday things that you never notice. So I need to go buy Post-it notes. I need to get someone to deliver something from point A to point B and all of these. They're really my new things. But you start appreciating how much work goes into the whole thing and you start appreciating the well, you've got the confidence and you've got the skill set that comes from doing research. You know how to organize things. You know how to kind of juggle 50 balls in the air at the same time. And those are the kind of soft skills that people who do research kind of sometimes don't think that they're learning anything besides research. But in reality, we're kind of learning how to think logically, how to tackle problems, how to multitask all the time because of the 50 different deadlines always looming in the background. So so all of these things are really, really beneficial. And I think the other thing is volunteering in organizations. I think that's another big thing because it kind of also helps you understand it's usually a low stress environment and you're appreciated when you volunteer. So that also kind of helps helps you feel good about yourself in a sense. And and depending on where you volunteer, you can almost see the immediate effect that goes on and you get insights that you kind of want to get in a professional setting to think, yeah.
Emily:
And I might sort of ask you some more questions about that in the next episode as well, because I think that could tie in really well with maintaining wellness. But is there anything else you'd sort of like to add to this part of your story before we wrap up this episode?
Mohamad:
I think the one thing would be I know the near the end of my BHB and at the beginning of my postdoc, so that kind of maybe three to four year period at the time. So that was kind of the civil war back home, kind of was starting and ramping up. And I think at the time, I think a coping mechanism of mine was to kind of just focus on work and try to do work. Twenty four, seven, and just to avoid thinking about what might happen back home. So I think in a sense that helped with not thinking about the civil war, but in another sense, it kind of got me into the mentality that I should be working all hours of the day, possibly some of the nights as well. Otherwise I'm not doing enough. So I think in a way that wasn't. That wasn't the best solution to have, because I, I ended up well, because I was afraid of not leaving a good impression at work. So at the beginning of my postdoc, my uncle passed away. And here he was in Toronto.
Mohamad:
I was in Edmonton. So that for listeners who are not familiar with Canada, that's about a I think it's a three or four hour plane trip. So and the time I was just starting my postdoc, I was in that mentality. You have to work. You have to leave a good impression. You have to stay in your offices as long as possible and do as much work as possible. And when my supervisor told me, well, you can take time off and go to them, I was I was in the mental space of saying, no, no, I shouldn't do that because I wouldn't leave a good impression. And I think that was a mistake on my part. I should have taken that time off. But at that time, I didn't feel that voice in the back of your head. It was much louder. I was saying that now if you take time off, they'll get that impression that you're just coming up with excuses not to work. So. So I think sometimes it's good to ignore that voice in the back of your head.
Emily:
So, yeah, that that would have been really difficult. And I I wonder if you have maybe some words of advice for anyone listening to wrap up this episode on on that, you know, is there anything that you would say to someone, that sort of feeling like that voice is very strong?
Mohamad:
I think it's a couple of things learned to ignore the voice, but at the same time, it's fine if you mess up. I think that's that's the biggest thing. And it's fine if you disagree with your supervisor or your employer. Don't let work overtake you or research off or take you to the point in a sense that if you go out trying to please everyone, you'll end up losing no one. So do what you to be true to yourself in terms of a researcher or in terms of an employee. If the person who was your supervisor or your boss has such a great problem with you that they don't like you. So that's fine. You'll you'll find a spot where you're appreciated. So I think there's a thing that says go to where you're celebrated, not tolerated. So I think in that way that that's fine. If if if a person doesn't like you or your work or you think that your work isn't, that's great. That's fine. Nothing's perfect. And you'll find people who like you in the long run. So, yeah,
Emily:
I love that. And I feel so lucky to be in this position, being able to host these interviews because I got so much good advice. And we will wrap up this episode there. So that's today's episode of Voices of Academia. Thank you for joining me. On the next episode, we'll hear how the game has learned to manage his mental health. In the meantime,
Emily:
If you found the same story relatable, inspiring or otherwise, I'm sure he'd love to know he's available on Twitter @mnadeemadi. For a hassle free, linked directly to his profile, check out these episodes description before you go. We have some support, resources and information for how you can share your own story if this episode brought anything up for you. There are mental health resources and emergency numbers available for various countries at www.checkpointorg.com/global. For information found in this episode, refer to the episode description or visit the podcast section of our website. www.VoicesofAcademia.com. There you can also access the full transcript of this episode made available by our lovely voices of academia team member Daniel Ranson. This podcast was written, hosted and produced by me, Emily, with support from some very special people in my life. You can find me on Twitter @eking_sci for science, but I'm part of the larger voices of academia team. We have a website, a Twitter account at academic voices and also share stories in blog form with the option of them being anonymous. If you like this podcast and want to hear more stories, please leave a review. Subscribe tell me what you think on Twitter and tell your friends. The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple podcasts and most other major listening platforms. You can also follow the Voices of Academia blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Just head to our Web site www.VoicesofAcademia.com to sign up. If you have a mental health awareness story to share, we absolutely want to hear from you. Whether you're a team leader, research assistant, postdoc, student, x academic or any other type of researcher. Fuller Academic Voices on Twitter. Visit the link in the episode description or visit our website www.VoicesofAcademia.com for details on how to share your story. It's time someone gave you a voice.
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