Learning to Love the Questions
I didn’t go into research because I was brave. I went into research because I was scared of it and couldn’t stand the idea of being scared forever. For most of my life, “research” sounded like a synonym for existential crisis. Not in the cute, philosophy-under-fairy-lights way, but in the heavy sense: dedicating years of your life to questions that might never resolve cleanly. No answer key. No guarantee of progress. No promise that your work will matter in the way you hope.
That idea got under my skin.
I’ve always liked questions with sharp edges. School trains you for that: there’s a right solution somewhere, and if you push hard enough, study enough, calculate enough, you’ll land on it. Even when the subject is difficult, the structure is comforting. Someone already knows the answer. You’re just trying to catch up.
Research flips that. Suddenly you’re not being asked, “Can you find the right answer?” but, “Can you live inside a question that might not have one yet? Can you stay there long enough to push the boundary a millimeter?” For a long time, I thought the honest answer for me was no. It felt too big, too undefined. The idea of building a life around open questions was deeply unsettling. What if I spent years chasing something that refused to be pinned down? What if the work never added up to anything I could point at and say, “There, that’s what I did”? That wasn’t just an academic worry. It felt like a question about meaning: What do you do with a life built on uncertainty?
So after my master’s, when the fork in the road appeared, go all in on research, or step away, I made a deal with myself. I wouldn’t commit blindly. Research isn’t a weekend hobby; it’s a long-term relationship with not-knowing. Before I promised it years of my life, I needed to know if we were even compatible.
That’s how I ended up at Cancer Institute.
It wasn’t the safe choice. If anything, it was diving straight into the deepest end of existentialism: oncology is full of questions that cut straight into life, death, and everything in between. But that was exactly the point. If I couldn’t tolerate open-endedness there, I definitely wasn’t built for a research career. So I treated it like a test. Not “am I smart enough?” but “can I live with the weight of questions that might not have neat answers, and still want to show up tomorrow?”
I walked in expecting the experience to confirm my fears. It didn’t. It ruined them, completely.
The first surprise was how normal the not-knowing looked from the inside. On paper, cancer research reads like a catalogue of giant questions. Why does this patient respond and that one doesn’t? What drives resistance? How do we catch it earlier, treat it better, make it less cruel? From the outside, that all feels huge and almost unbearable. From the inside, it looks like half-finished graphs, arguments over controls, people squinting at data saying, “That’s weird,” and then trying to make sense of it. The existential weight is still there, but it’s diffused into a thousand small decisions.
What I expected to feel like standing at the edge of a void actually felt more like joining a long, serious conversation that started before me and will continue after me. Nobody sits in the lab thinking, “Ah yes, the meaning of life.” They’re thinking, “Why did replicate three behave like that?” and “Are we sure it’s not just noise?”
It’s not that the big questions disappear. It’s that they’re woven into ordinary work. The second surprise was how much honesty there was around “we don’t know.” Before, that phrase had sounded to me like a dead end—a shrug, a full stop. At the institute, “we don’t know” was treated more like a hypothesis generator. It meant: here’s where we push next. Here’s where the frontier is.
I watched people say, without shame, “We don’t understand this yet,” and then immediately start drawing on the board, sketching experiments, arguing over what to test first. The uncertainty wasn’t just tolerated; it was the starting point. Somewhere in those meetings, something in me started to shift. The existential ache I’d always felt around unsolved questions didn’t vanish, but it changed flavour. It became less like standing in fog and more like standing at a trailhead. Still unclear, still a little intimidating, but also pointing somewhere.
And then, almost without noticing, I fell in love with it. The project that did it wasn’t glamorous. There was no cinematic breakthrough, no headline-ready discovery. Just a stubborn, specific problem: a treatment that worked beautifully in some conditions and mysteriously failed in others. The old version of me would have tried to read my way out of it. Surely, somewhere, someone had already solved this. I just needed to find the paper, the paragraph, the missing piece.
I did read a lot. But eventually I hit the wall: the place where the literature thins out, where review articles start repeating the same phrases, “likely mechanisms,” “possible explanations,” “further research is needed.” That wall used to terrify me. It’s where I’d quietly back away and pick an easier topic. This time, standing there, I felt something else: an unexpected rush of responsibility and excitement.
Nobody has a clean answer yet. So what if we’re the ones who move it forward? What if we’re the ones who turn “likely mechanism” into “here’s what’s actually happening”? The existentialism I’d been so afraid of—that sense of staring into a question that might not resolve, was still present. But instead of feeling like a void, it felt like freedom. There was no script to follow. No teacher holding the “correct” result. Just us, the data, and the possibility of seeing something genuinely new. It hit me that this is what research is: not the performance of certainty, but the craft of learning to work inside uncertainty without letting it swallow you. And to my surprise, I liked it. A lot.
That’s when the idea of “research as a commitment” started to make sense in a new way.
From the outside, a PhD or a long-term research path looks like a commitment to a field or topic: cancer biology, machine learning, epidemiology. But living inside it, I realized that the deeper commitment is to a relationship with questions. You’re choosing to wake up, day after day, and say: I accept that there might not be a final answer waiting for me. I accept that my work will be one layer in a much larger structure. I accept that I’m signing up not for closure, but for contribution.
It forced me to ask myself honestly: can I live like that and feel okay? More than okay, can I feel alive in that? Watching senior researchers helped. Many of them had spent decades on lines of inquiry that evolved, looped back, dead-ended, branched. They weren’t crushed by the lack of neat conclusions. If anything, they were energized by the constant unfolding. They took the existential uncertainty seriously, but not personally. The absence of a tidy ending didn’t mean their work meant nothing. It meant the story was still being written.
I remember thinking: if I’m going to commit to research, this is what I’m committing to. Not to “solving cancer” single-handedly, but to joining this long, imperfect, essential struggle against not-knowing, knowing full well that I’ll only see a small piece of the arc. And surprisingly, that didn’t feel unbearable anymore. It felt right.
I joined the cancer institute after my master’s precisely because research scared me. I knew it wasn’t a casual decision. You don’t just “try” a life full of open questions the way you try a new app. I needed to stand in the middle of it and see if the weight of “we don’t know yet” crushed me or called to me. What used to hurt, the idea that there are questions with no guaranteed answers, became the very thing I fell for. I learned to love the feeling of being at the edge of what’s known, of designing one more experiment not because it will finish the story, but because it will make the story more honest.
I still feel the existential pull. I still have days where the uncertainty feels like too much, where I crave the clean lines of problems with single solutions. But now, underneath that, there’s a quieter understanding:
I don’t want a life where every question is already answered. I want a life where some of the questions are mine to push on.
That’s what the cancer institute gave me. Not clarity about every future step, but clarity about this: I can live with the open-endedness. More importantly, I can care about it, work inside it, and find meaning there.