Courtship of the Grad Student

Epilogue

"You're looking great, Harald."

"Yeah."

Mally looked into the eyes of the once broken man, but lately those eyes had shown a glimmer of hope she had not seen in years. Even in this cage, he looked free, freer than he had been since the virus infected him and his life.

"The new medications are working great. I'm starting to feel more like the old me," he said. Mally nodded.

"That's great. Side effects?"

"A pain in the ass, but I can bear with it. It's getting better though. Guess this old body of mine doesn't want to give up just yet, haha."

"Well, you know Elsa is waiting for you."

"Heh, not just her actually," Harald slipped the letter he had left on the desk over to Mally, "You read this?"

"Oh? From Anna?"

"Yeah. I guess she's already treating me like her dad. Her relationship with Elsa must be going great."

Dear Harald,

How is it going? Winter is coming and it's getting colder here in Manaw too. Bet it's already snowing up there in Arendelle. Make sure you have plenty of layers on when you walk outside, alright? Elsa always says the cold doesn't bother her, but ends up catching a cold regardless, then telling me it has nothing to do with wearing too little since it's a virus that's making her sick. I don't care about the scientific basis of her claims, but you better be more careful than Elsa, alright? We can't be there to take care of you now, but we promise to visit during Christmas break. We're really looking forward to chatting with you again. Yeah, Elsa too. She really wanted to be the one to write this letter to you, but lately she has been getting home super late and going to the lab super early in the morning – I thought she should get a little more sleep instead. Working at the Motunui Lab is quite something. There is just so much going on. So many people, so many projects. You know how it can all get quite complicated. But Elsa is doing fine! She really is! She said that it can be a little tiring with all the politics that's going on, but the funding is great, and her research is always well-received, in no small part due to the name of her new PI. That's what she says anyway, but you know Elsa, always so modest. I think her research would be well-received anywhere she goes. The prestige that comes with her current position is just a bonus. I mean, Dr. Motunui being an academy member and what with the whole shortened peer-review process in journals they publish…you get how it works.

Not sure if Mally has told you, but things at the U of Arendelle is pretty fun, and hectic, too! Can you believe that Brad Winters took on Merida as his grad student? Merida, the crazy redhead? She's really smart though. Back when she was an undergrad, those triplet highschoolers worked with her, right? Well, now they're her undergrads, and it's even crazier in the Winters Lab these days. Just last month they somehow managed to spill ten litres of chloroform and tried to clean it up with a wet vacuum. Nearly made an explosion! Had to evacuate the whole building, geeze. At least there's no way Hans could steal data off them. He's having a whole lot of trouble getting together his PhD proposal. His old Masters Committee was already reluctant to give him his degree. He had to find a new committee for his PhD and nobody really wants to do it. I wonder how his comps would go. Kristoff also got a scolding as Mally's tech, you know? He tried to melt agar on a hot plate and Mally asked if his skull is stuffed with straws! Poor guy. Aurora and Diaval had to step in else he'd be chewed out.

As for me, I'm starting my new job at FacTech next week. I first heard about them at that Creative Genomics conference and sent in my resume before I left Arendelle last summer. The panel interview was really stressful, but sounded like the scientists interviewing me weren't having the time of their lives either. What's with those HR questions? What is your strength and weakness? Haha. Sort of stupid, if you ask me, but I think I answered those stupid questions well regardless. I had been a little worried about my career when I first moved to Manaw, but now, things seem to be settling down. I'm really looking forward to the future. Let me know how things go on your end too, okay? Hope those new meds are working well for you. Waiting for your good news! Keep fighting!

Best of wishes and love always,

Anna (and Elsa)

"I didn't chew out that kid. He was the one too stupid to use a microwave," Mally said after reading the letter, to which Harald laughed.

"You're the same as always. There's a Japanese term for this, you know…in those cartoons of theirs…what was it? Tsundere?"

"I'm definitely not a sun-dear-ray, or whatever you call it, whatever that means."

"If you would admit it, you wouldn't be tsundere, right?"

"I do not feel like partaking in this elementary school-level conversation."

Mally turned to face the window. Harald followed her gaze. It was a rare clear day today. The sun was shining from high in the skies, giving much welcoming warmth to the cold winter. They wondered if it was sunny in Manaw too.

Somewhere under the same sky, Anna was inside her car. It was a mess. She had far too many letters from both her parents and Elsa's dad. There was a certain feeling of closeness that only written letters could convey, but at times, she wished the older generations would just learn to use WhatsApp. She hastily shoved the letters into the compartment in front of her passenger seat, took out her mirror and checked her face. Her hair was neat, make-up not too strong but just enough to give her a sharp, clean appearance. Her dress shirt was nicely creased, jacket was snuggly buttoned, fitted perfectly. Alright, now onto her bag. All her certificates and identification were prepared, filed in a folder. Cellphone was switched to silent. And she had a lunchbox with her. Maybe she'd have to go out for lunch with her new coworkers, but even so, she wanted her first lunch to be one prepared by Elsa. She'd just have to have two lunches if she must then.

"Just arrived at FacTech. I'm heading in now. Have fun at the lab today. Don't work too late!"

After sending the text off to Elsa, she exited her vehicle. A white-haired woman was waiting for her at the company's front entrance. Her nametag said "Helena McBride, PhD".

"Thanks for waiting, Dr. McBride. I am Anna Summers. It is my pleasure to work with you."

"As is mine," Dr. McBride answered, and shook Anna's hand.

End of Epilogue

Concluding Notes

It has been more than three years since I started writing this story. Sorry for taking so long to finish this, and thank you for sticking with me. I started writing this story due to a myriad of reasons. For one, of course, was my love for Frozen. I don't think I need to go into the specifics of why it was such a good movie. I loved the focus on the sisters. I loved how they both grew as characters. I would love to see more, which was why I decided to write in this fandom. I had played around with a couple fic ideas, such as a canon continuation, or an urban fantasy. I settled with this lab idea because it was something familiar to me, making it easier to write. That was how it started anyway. Initially, this was intended as a lighthearted comedy set in an academic lab, but my own experiences made me decide to add more twists to the plotline.

It seemed to me that the public has an inaccurate view of the scientific field. In fiction, laboratories are often portrayed as mysterious places, and scientists enigmatic geniuses. In my experience, the scientific field functions like any other occupation. Research is the work of not just people titled "scientists", but also post-docs, techs, grad students, undergrads…and this work cannot be performed without funding and logistics. No matter how brilliant an idea you have, you need a facility, equipment, reagents to carry out your research, and none of this can be obtained without the help of many others. Research staff and office staff need to get together to write grants. Admin staff help sort out all the finances. Shipping and receiving guarantees the materials we need get to us in a timely fashion. Building managers keep our lab space safe and accessible, equipment managers keep machinery working smoothly, IT staff make sure we have all the programs needed to analyze our data and communicate our research, and that all our information would be safely stored. All these people working in the background are needed for research to happen, not just the "scientist" running some fancy piece of equipment, spewing out reports in the matter of minutes. This is not how research works. Research is a long, tedious process, most often fruitless. Indeed, one of my former mentors had once told me that training to be a scientist is less about how to get things working, but more about learning when to give up. There are still so many questions we have about the world around us, and sometimes we simply lack the tools to find the answers in the present. We need to move on to the questions that we can answer now, trusting in others in the field who are working on making new tools, developing new methods that would help us answer those other questions in the future. Scientists specialize. A molecular biologist might not know a single thing about quantum mechanics, but doesn't mean those fields aren't interconnected. We just need to accept that we can't know everything, and that collaborations between many, many people are what advances our knowledge, which converts to technological developments that may one day benefit our society.

And with so many people working together, limited resources to fight over, lab politics is inevitable. After all, scientists are just people. In fiction, we are sometimes viewed in an overly positive light, heroes looking for a cure for cancer or a stop to global warming. At times, we are viewed in an overly negative light, teaming up with big pharma to deny the public of affordable medications. But really, research is just a job, and people work not just for interest's sake but for sustaining a living. To get paid, you need to show that you have done work, and because the scientific field isn't about providing a specific good or service, we are evaluated by the research we publish. This is where the term "publish or perish" comes from. There is a lot of pressure on scientists to get their research out into high-impact scientific journals. Rather than exploring new ideas through experimentation, a lot more time is dedicated to repeating experiments to get a large enough sample size for statistically significant comparisons, making pretty figures and tweaking the wording on manuscripts. The peer review process is very time-consuming and it is not uncommon to go through three or more rounds of reviews, with your manuscript sometimes getting rejected because some random reviewer #2 hates your research without reading it in any detail. Writing a four-page research article takes around a year of work, if not more. That is why people care so much whether their name is on that four-page article and the order of which their name is placed. First-author and second-author is a huge difference. Heck, in the case that equal contribution is declared, the first-listed main author and the second-listed main author still get completely different amounts of recognition. There are people who would claim work that they have not done to get their names on papers, or get their names placed earlier on the list. There are people who "buy" the work of others through money and connections, people forced to keep their mouths shut as their work is "sold" off. And of course, there is the outright fudging of data seen in those prominent cases of academic misconduct. The way I wrote Hans, though, represents how that kind of academic misconduct may be far rarer than the alternative of stealing other people's real data. Of course, people like Hans have questionable personal integrity, but should we also revise the way researchers are evaluated to take away the incentive for this kind of behaviour? Should we really put so much focus on writing pretty research articles instead of dedicating more effort into exploring new ideas? I don't think this story has gone deep into these issues, but I touched upon them in hopes of shedding some light into the real problems I see with how research is conducted now. And, well, these problems provided the necessary drama to further our characters' growth.

This brings me to another focus of my story: homosexuality. I debated about whether I should write so much about this issue here. After all, while I believe LGBTQ+ characters have limited representation in fiction, I am not a fan of fiction that simply focuses on LGBTQ+ characters being LGBTQ+. Stories about coming-out are great, but we also need more stories about LGBTQ+ characters just being…people. In the end, I still wrote about Anna coming out, but I wanted to parallel her self-discovery with Elsa coming to terms with her empathetic powers and what she had done, or not done, with it in the past. In the current heteronormative society, coming out is still a big deal, and you don't just come out once to a single person, but each time the conversation swerves in a direction where sexuality comes to the spotlight, you need to consider whether to come out again to this other person, be it a new friend or coworker or just a stranger on the bus. You never know if you would be rejected, however unfair that might sound. Yes, being queer can still be a struggle. But I don't want this struggle to seem an otherworldly experience that nobody else can understand. We all have different struggles, and the way to overcome the struggles are similar – through love and acceptance. That is not to say Anna's struggle is the same as Elsa's, but that they both become strong enough to defeat the challenge when they find support in each other.

These are the main ideas I wanted to convey. I think this story has much to be improved upon, be it my writing skills or the cheesy plotline, but I am satisfied with the overall development of the characters, which reminds me of my own growth through these three years. While this is the end of CotGS, I don't want you to think that the journey of this Elsanna incarnation ends here. Their new lives together have just begun. And imagining that life of theirs makes me wonder what is ahead of my own life. As I, myself, am getting closer to graduation, I start worrying about my future job prospects, and the idea of leaving my hometown for my career. While I have grown, am I ready to take flight? What kind of experiences will I have from now on? What people will I meet? It is important when young people like us get lost in our insecurities to remember that we are not alone. Everyday there are others our age taking on the same challenge of growing up. Scary as it is, without these challenges, we will never reach higher heights. With as much fear in our hearts we should have excitement for our unknown futures. So long as we stay true to ourselves, we will make it to where we want to go. We need to at least believe this to make it happen!

And with this, I conclude the last of my ramblings. Thanks to the reviewers of the last chapter: PenguinVuelve, ItsJustMe244, and Lance58. I don't currently have any plans to write more Elsanna in the future, but I may add some side stories to this story depending on whether plot bunnies find me. I still have a lot of other fics to revise and complete, especially that other lab fic I have over at the Mai-Hime fandom, so if you are into Shiznat, consider checking it out! Thanks again for all your support throughout the years and best of wishes in your respective endeavours. I hope this story has given you some inspiration, some courage, no matter how little, to live your life to the fullest! I certainly have been inspired by your kind words. It has been a pleasure writing for you. I hope you have enjoyed the ride.

Ramblings of the Grad Student - End