The personal resilience of a PhD student
Albeit the looming uncertainties during the global pandemic, how did Beatrice Cassottana still manage to emerge successful?
Although the world seems to have stopped in the past months, 2020 has been quite an adventurous year for my family and I. With the likes of job insecurity, searching for jobs, applying for a grant, submitting my thesis, the review of my paper, experiencing visa problems (with my husband’s unplanned trip to the US at last minute’s notice), and having to serve a Stay Home Notice (SHN). In the end, everything went well – and in fact things were even better than before with a new job, an awarded grant, a scheduled thesis defense, an accepted paper, and my husband being finally back home!
Studying and assessing resilience is my daily job, and I believe that 2020 was a great school for that. What I like the most about this concept is that the system – infrastructure, community, or individual - can learn from past events and build resilience to better prepare for the future. In other words, since we cannot foresee the many uncertainties of life, we can at least make the best of our experiences (positive or negative) to feel stronger, happier, and more self-fulfilled later on.
Beatrice Cassottana is a postdoctoral researcher in the Future Resilience Systems (FRS) programme. Her current research focuses on enhancing existing and developing new methods for assessing the resilience of cyber-physical systems.
Beatrice's entry is one of the top 10 winning stories submitted for the Work From Home Singapore Story Challenge.