Pardis Akbari: Not the end, but a hard moment in the middle

On a sunny day, Pardis Akbari stands in an agricultural field lined with solar panels, smiling and donning a safety hat and vest. — Pardis Akbari points to solar panels stretching across an agricultural field. The integration of agriculture (food production) and solar power generation (energy production) is the focus of her research, a dual-use approach known as agrivoltaics (agriculture + photovoltaics).. Photo courtesy of Pardis Akbari.

This piece was written in the fall of 2025 by GRAD 5144 (Communicating Science) student Pardis Akbari as part of an assignment to write a personal narrative about her research.

Two years ago, I had finished most of my coursework and started my research. My project was about solar panel siting. I had to identify the optimal land in the area and develop different scenarios, for example, putting solar panels on farms, on parking lots, and in different configurations to see how much energy each could provide. I didn’t have any data, so I started from scratch, gathering data, talking with different people about the land parcels, drawing the shapefiles, and doing all the data collection that it takes. About a month later, I began working on the scenarios in ArcGIS, a software tool for conducting spatial analyses.

It took me more than two weeks, working every day from 9 to 5, to do the analysis. I remember I had a deadline the following week and wanted to export those maps and analyses and start writing about them. But suddenly, my ArcGIS stopped working. At first, I thought this was perhaps something that happened occasionally and that I had saved the project, so I expected that nothing bad would happen if I just closed and reopened it. I tried that multiple times, but it had literally stopped working. I could open a new project, but the one I had been working on wouldn't open.

I was shocked. I started searching the internet for a solution. It was about 9 at night, and no one was in the lab. My hands were sweaty and I couldn’t think straight. I called my husband and started crying; I didn’t know what to do. I messaged different people who were experts in GIS, but no one knew what the problem was. In the lab, only the light in my room was on, and everywhere else was dark.

I got up and walked down the hall, trying to think of what I could do. I could hear my footsteps. I was afraid, and my mind wasn’t working. I could feel the tension in my chest, the pulse on both sides of my head. My husband came to the lab and brought me some cake to eat, hoping my brain would start to work. It didn’t. By now it was about 11 at night, and, after searching, I found that nothing could be done; there was an error in the software, a bug, and even on the software’s website, no one knew what it was.

I couldn’t sleep that night, blaming myself for not making a copy or doing something else to prevent this. Why did this have to happen now, after the project was basically done and after I had done so much work? The next morning, I decided to do it again. It wasn’t easy, but I had no other option. Because I had one week until the deadline, I had to work from 8 in the morning until 9 at night every day.

When I finally finished, I realized I had survived something I truly thought would break the project – and maybe break me, too. It didn’t. But it changed how I work. Now I save versions constantly, keep backups in more than one place, and don’t trust any single file to hold weeks of effort. I also learned that panic makes everything feel permanent, even when it isn’t. That night in the lab felt like the end, but it was only a hard moment in the middle. I finished, I met the deadline, and I walked away with something I didn’t have before: a way to keep going even when you are the most frustrated.