PC Blog 0: Introduction

Note: This blog entry was first posted on Monday, Oct 3, 2022.

Hello all. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ryan Lake and I’m currently a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, serving as a Science and Math teacher at a Senior Secondary School (equivalent to High School in the USA). I wanted to start this blog to share some of my experiences during my time volunteering with the Peace Corps as well as what the people, cultures, and daily life of Sierra Leone is like. Accordingly, I plan to have two main categories of posts that I will keep as separate numbered blogs: 1) experiences related to the Peace Corps (PC Blog); and 2) experiences related to life in Sierra Leone (Salone Blog).

Yep, that's me, and I'm even in lab!

For this first post, I won’t detail any of my experiences just yet, but I would like to take a little more time to introduce myself and explain a little bit about why I decided to take more than two years out of my life to volunteer with the Peace Corps in a small West African country. Prior to finally joining the Peace Corps this year in 2022, I had spent the past 7 years of my life in a PhD program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying Chemistry. Yes… 7 years. That is, indeed, a long time. I won’t go into details about what I was studying, because presumably that’s not why you’re here, other than to say that I explored the application of synthetically-derived DNA to be used in different types of applications, primarily as a novel type of sensor, as well as some initial explorations into the possibility of non-genetic biologically-derived DNA. If you’d really like to read more, you can see my LinkedIn page or Google Scholars page, because you won’t be getting any more here.

To fully explore what first brought my interest toward the Peace Corps, we need to flip back the calendar to November 2016. Specifically, to November 9, 2016. I think very many of you in the US, and even outside, will remember what happened on the day before this: Tuesday, November 8th. I’ll touch on this more in a bit, but in addition to the importance this period of time had for virtually everyone nationwide, it also held significant importance to me personally for a completely different reason: on that previous Friday, the 4th of November, was my Preliminary Exam for my PhD program. Graduate programs in different programs and different institutions have different requirements, so even if you have experience with programs elsewhere, it’s worth explaining what prelims, as we called them, are like for Chemistry at Illinois. These weren’t “exams” in the more traditional sense of a written test on a certain subject, but rather more like an oral presentation and defense of all of the research work you had done so far (for our program, this would have been for nearly two full years) as well as your plans for the completion of your research. Because our program was focused primarily on undertaking our own novel research (as is also the case with pretty much all PhD programs) rather than on classwork (as many Masters programs might focus much more on), this Preliminary Exam during our third year was essentially the decision point on whether we would be allowed to continue with the program. Those who passed would virtually always go on to complete their degree, whereas those who did not would either have to make drastic changes (such as completely changing labs and projects) or else drop out of the program entirely. With these two major events looming ominously over the preceding weeks, I distinctly remember feeling like it was too much to ask for both events to go the way that I wanted and I fully expected to enjoy the outcome of only one. And if anything, I felt it much more likely to fail my defense than for the other to go belly-up. Well, as it turned out, things went entirely the opposite. I did in fact pass my prelims, and the elections went in a direction that nearly everyone had not anticipated.

The first slide of my Prelim Presentation for all to enjoy.

And so on November 9, after the outcome of both major events had been decided, I had a lot of contemplation to do. On the one hand, though I largely liked the area of research I was pursuing and still planned on finishing my PhD, I knew I wasn’t really satisfied with continuing this kind of work for the rest of my career. Since I knew that for any future employment, regardless of what it was, I would be spending a significant portion of my limited time and energy, I knew that I wanted it to be meaningful and important. On the other hand, I knew that over the next four years, America would be going down a much different path than I think anyone had been expecting. For the first time in my adult life, I was confronted with the fact that if my country could no longer live up to the minimum expectations that I had for it, then maybe it was time for me to personally get involved in whatever capability I would be able to serve. Even if my meager contribution seemed insignificant, I should still do my part to the best of my ability.

I was especially concerned at the time about the country's future relations with foreign countries, not just with their governments but especially for the peoples of the countries that America had traditionally given aid and support for. I had already done a lot of travel, mostly in the US but also some outside, but the one thing that I felt was lacking, was that I never had much chance to get to know and live among the people from the places I visited. In my time at both my undergraduate and graduate schools, I got to know a tremendous amount of people from outside the US, and I very much admired their drive and tenacity in picking up their lives in their home countries to come live, work, and learn in a completely new and foreign one.

So, with all of these thoughts in my head, it seemed like I was looking at pursuing some sort of foreign service. I had of course heard of the Peace Corps before, though I didn't know that much about it and hadn't really considered doing something like that for myself before. But in looking into the possibilities, especially those available to someone like myself, the Peace Corps seemed by far to be the most thoughtful and beneficial, even when looking at the comments from those who were very critical of it. It can be very easy for people coming from more privileged and developed countries to cause more harm than good in trying to "help" the peoples of other countries, and to me at least, the Peace Corps seemed to be among the best at both recognizing many of these problems as well as striving toward minimizing them, with their focus on integration and sustainability. Additionally, I felt that their service time of two years was both long enough to truly integrate into a new community as well as make some small impact, while still being short enough that I could still finish my time there even if I felt that this line of work wasn't something I wanted to pursue further in future. This was similarly one of the reasons I wanted to pursue graduate school: to see if I wanted to pursue scientific research as a career, and I feel like these sorts of "tester" opportunities are great to experience before committing to something long term.

However, I knew that I still had at least 3 more years of grad school to finish first, so I decided to wait it out and see if I still wanted to pursue service with the Peace Corps (or something similar) by the time I finished. Over the intervening years, I'd occasionally check in and see what opportunities were open at different times. By the time that I felt I was getting close to being able to graduate (within a year or perhaps a little more), I was still just as interested as I had been at the end of 2016, so I started looking more in earnest and even met with the Peace Corps recruiter at my University to get her thoughts and learn what her service was like in Macedonia. I knew that I wanted to pursue Science education specifically, both because I felt I would be the most qualified for this role (I'd done a couple years of teaching and tutoring Chemistry while in grad school), but also because I felt very passionate about it (I was pursuing a doctorate in the sciences after all). Especially considering this is a particularly difficult area of education in countries and communities that do not already have the experience and resources to teach it. As such, in my search, I focused mostly on the largely English-speaking (as opposed to French or Spanish) countries that offered Science education, especially at the high school level. There were a few different options (including Liberia), but I eventually decided to apply for Sierra Leone in the fall of 2019, set to leave in June of 2020.

The application information for High School Science Educator in Salone for 2023.

After submitting my application and going through a virtual interview, I was provisionally accepted pending legal and medical clearance, which can be a long and tedious process (that I might detail in a later entry). Though I was cleared for both at the beginning of 2020, as time was swiftly approaching and February turned to March, I was growing more and more anxious that I wouldn't actually be able to finish in time and that I'd have to choose between a PhD or Peace Corps service (and quite honestly, I was strongly leaning towards the latter). As you can probably guess, however, it never came to that because of the worldwide pandemic.

Since the Peace Corps was on hold (as well as virtually everything else at the time), I decided to stay at my grad school lab for a bit longer and even took on a new project to help a Postdoc extend her virus sensor platform to detect the new SARS-CoV-2 virus. Meanwhile, the Peace Corps was continually pushing back their expected leave date every 3-6 months, and before I knew it, it was 2021… and I still wanted to pursue the Peace Corps as much as ever. I finally wrapped up my research in August of that year, and after several more months of waiting, we finally got an actual leave date from the Peace Corps for June of 2020. So after several more months of paperwork, doctors visits, and waiting, I was finally able to leave in June with the first cohort since the pandemic forced everyone out: Salone 10.

That's right, I'm not above showing off my diploma.

That brings us up to the present and the start of this blog. Hopefully there will be more for you to enjoy soon!