I used to dream of becoming an architect. Quite literally. I would conceive of geometric buildings which defied all natural laws and then wake up to sketch my creations. My earliest memories of drawing hotels and other-worldly homesteads is around the time when I was eight years old. I liked structure; shadows; lines; shapes. I think more than anything, I liked playing with the concept of home.

I moved around plenty in my early youth. Sometimes this left me longing for the spatial stability of that “This is the home I grew up in” narrative which so many of my friends told. Now, I feel most comfortable in the newness of exploration, and houses unbuilt, and places where I haven’t lived yet. This comes with realizing that the only home we ever truly have is our body: the physical form that takes up space, moves us through the structures which we inhabit, and into the professional or interpersonal positions we occupy.

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki writes this short but expansive stanza in his essay called “In Praise of Shadows”:

“In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house.”

The parasol here is what I see as casting a foundation. Postgraduates may do this alone, or maybe the groundwork was laid with a supportive family, or by a privileged secondary education. The pale light of the shadow is the determination to see a project through.

Many tertiary students attend a university far from home. The postgraduate experience has reminded me how we can quickly spend more time in the university than we do in our houses. As a postgraduate, you finish a degree in at least two years but sometimes up to five (or seven if you stick around for a postdoc). There’s an intimacy and proximity in pursuing postgraduate studies together, not the least because we spend a wealth of time in the same space.

Ultimately, we are all building one another’s houses. Stay with me on this:

Imagine for a moment your life as a dream; a plan… You are the architect. You have an idea of which stairs need to lead where, the type of windows you want to gaze through at the world, and which areas in your life you’d prefer to keep private. As I have engaged in my higher degrees, I encounter peers, professors, groundskeepers, cleaning staff, administrators or undergraduate students who actively build me up or (hopefully, unintentionally) break bits of my house down. This allows me to understand myself better through my strengths and points of weakness; areas where I need to put in work; humility to ask for help when I need it.

Research groups are to the postgraduate experience what architecture firms are to the industry of construction. They have a particular niche; a style of design they like to follow; shared interest in brainstorming new projects. Still, opportunities to collaborate across research groups or even across research institutions can build the strongest houses.

Over time, just as in construction, each academic scholar gathers the knowledge of how to build from the ground up. Their expertise is shaped with experience and through making mistakes. So, my unsolicited but honest advice for anyone laying the foundation for a postgraduate degree or path in academia is this:

• Know enough about the type of house you want to build that your vision is clear.
• Work with people who have skills where you have space to learn.
• Accommodate using new materials or adjusting your planned budget and timeline.
• Remember that things will likely go wrong, and you may need to return to the drawing board.
• Keep building your house, and one another’s, one brick at a time.

Somewhere between a childhood dream and placement on the waiting list for the Bachelor of Architectural Studies, a natural human process occurred: I changed my mind. I had experienced compromised health for some years, and my problem-solving side nudged me into a pursuit of understanding the human body. I’m still fascinated by structure; shadows; lines; shapes. Biology is the architecture of deities, and even architects look to the natural world for sustainable solutions. In following my own advice, I embrace both the biologist and the architect within – ever ready to return to the drawing board again.