The great philosopher Led Zeppelin has always has a way with words:
In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to do science, Now I've got a degree, I've tried to learn important facts the best I can. Memorized and synthesized and learned the entire Krebbs cycle too, [Chorus:] Good meetings, Bad meetings, we know you’ve had your share; When my attention span wanes after 3 hours, Do I really still need to care? As a career scientist in the modern era, you have numerous jobs besides being a scientist: you’re a project leader, teacher, motivator, finance manager, accountant, PR manager, public speaker, fundraiser, and personal secretary. In an ideal world, you could concentrate on doing your science, writing papers on your own at your own pace, and spending most of your day in your office or in the lab thinking about new ideas and bringing them to life. In reality, you have to manage your own tasks while working with others on large multi-organization projects, engage with collaborators to write new grant proposals, and be ready to work as a team to get something finished that would take you ages to do on your own. While we know the type of science needs to be done to make progress in our understanding of the universe, it’s not always clear how to do the necessary thing that will enable scientist to do this great work. One of the essentials is learning how to work in groups, and part of that is how to lead productive group work. Unfortunately we all know too well what a painful, unproductive meeting feels like: the project meetings where one person drones on endlessly, a conference call that was scheduled to last an hour but has already gone for an hour and a half with still three agenda items to go, or a club at your University that meets every month and always talk about the same thing with nothing getting done. It may seem more productive (and enjoyable) to avoid meetings altogether, but disengaging from work groups will put you at a huge disadvantage. Part of being a scientist means collaborating, and part of collaborating means you engage in group discussions. If you avoid them now but then end up in a project leadership position down the line in your career, will you know how to make an agenda? If you miss out on key discussions with a group you’re involved in, will you know how to make the group’s activities more impactful for both the group and your own career? If you skip out on face-to-face meetings on your project, will you know how to respond in a work setting when your boss turns to you in a group and asks ‘So, how does your project fit in with our 10-year plan?’ Learning how to be involved in group activities, as well as how to deal with groups that may not be going in an ideal direction, can set you up for success in your future career. Knowing how to lead a small group of people effectively and efficiently is a huge skill for any type of research position with leadership or management responsibilities. Honing the art of finishing a conference call on time, while still covering all the key discussion points and doling out action items, can help lead you to more papers and more grants. Regardless of what sector you end up working in or at what stage of your career you find yourself, learning how to manage and work in groups can bolster your own project’s productivity—setting you up for future success on a wider scale. What makes a group or meeting effective? - Having an overall goal. Above everything else in this list, a clear and well-understood goal is the key to making any group effective and to make any meeting productive. Whether it’s a conference call about a draft manuscript or a graduate student society group at your university, there should be an understanding of the goals and objectives of your group’s activities. The goal doesn’t have to be complicated-it can be “To write a paper by May 2017” or “To organize events for graduate students at our University on a regular basis”, but doing anything without a goal in mind can lead to tangential discussions and unproductive meetings. Having a goal doesn’t mean everyone in the group will simultaneously know the process to achieve the goal. If the goal is simple then the process is easily understood (e.g., if the goal is to write a paper then you get there by writing the damn paper), but for more nebulous events like lab meetings the goal or process can be unclear. Are you there to give an update to your PI on what you did each week? Or maybe to summarize a month’s worth of findings as part of a longer presentation? Or does your PI simply feel that your group ‘needs’ to have a lab meeting and you end up suffering each week through two hours of the same rambling comments as the week before? Identifying the overall goal and how to get there can alleviate the need for long, drawn-out discussions or just meeting ‘because we should’. - Clear expectations of who is doing what task. As with having a goal and knowing how to get there, an important part of group work is actually doing the things you talked about in the meeting. It’s great to generate new ideas, but leaving these ideas on the table without a clear picture of who will take up what charges can lead to you coming around to the same table again in a month’s time with nothing new to discuss. In a formal meeting setting these are usually drawn up as ‘action items’, but if you are feeling less formal you can always just refer to them as a to do list. Drawing up this to do list is usually the job of the group leader, but if your meeting is more informal you can help in productivity by offering to keep track of action items and who is responsible for which task. You can then link these tasks back to the goals of the group and see if what the tasks contribute to achieving the initial goal. If not, then the task can be considered less of a priority. - An engaging leader who listens and directs. Leaders have to take charge and direct, but they should also be good listeners and people who get other members of the group to engage. At the same time, they should be people who keep tangential discussions to a minimum and will change or redirect the topic as needed. Depending on the type of group, this could be either an elected or an informal position, and most of the time you won’t get to pick who this person is. If you feel like a group you’re working with is lacking in this type of leader and also doesn’t have a formal set-up for who directs the meeting, feel free to talk to the group members and give it a try. Offer to lead a conference call or a lab meeting and see how it feels to direct conversations and discussions. At some point you’ll have to do this kind of work anyways, so ‘practicing’ in a less make-or-break setting can help when you do have to take a lead on a project that directly belongs to you. - Deadlines that aren’t arbitrary but can still be flexible (to a point). No one likes deadlines, but they are a part of working life and should be ascribed to whenever possible. That being said, a good way to motivate your group is to have deadlines that mean something. Instead of ‘Finish your part of the proposal this in by Friday because we need to finish it,’ spin it as ‘Please get this to me by Friday so we can send the proposal to the University Organizations committee for consideration next week’. This shows the group that what you’re doing has a reason for needing to be done when it should be done, and isn’t due to your own personal whims or schedule. There will always be a task or two that falls behind schedule, whether someone forgot about what they were supposed to do or had an unexpected trip or other deadline turn up. If you’re active in the group, be ready to help out and get other tasks done that really need to be done, and if someone crucial is being slow then be ready to remind them a few more times before handing off the task to someone else. - Participation from all the players, not just the leader or a select few. This is where both you, as a participant, and the leader of the group come into play. A good leader should not only listen, direct, but also ask for feedback and participation from other group members. People may not always volunteer opinions or offer to help with a task. If you know someone has something good to say or might offer some support for a task that needs to be done, asking that person directly is a good way to get them involved. That way it’s not just the outgoing ones that get involved with the work, but the quieter ones that may not want to speak up in a group setting. You can also follow up with them after a face-to-face meeting by email, where less outgoing people might be more comfortable expressing themselves. - Celebrate successes and learn from mistakes. As with the rest of your scientific career, the success of groups you are involved with will be a mixed bag: some things will work fantastically, and others will fail miserably. A successful group is one that takes the good with the bad, and one that celebrates and thanks its participants for achieving good work, and looks back and tries to learn from the things that didn’t work out. So now that you’ve got this list, every meeting you go to will be a good one, right? Right? Unfortunately bad meetings are a part of life, no matter what type of job you have. But you can make bad meetings better by putting this list to practice: by encouraging your group members to have goals, to think about leadership styles and engaging all members, and to help out when you can in getting ideas off the ground or moving on from a topic that’s been droned about. Even group members who aren’t leaders or organizers can have a huge impact on productivity, and actively participating and getting others engaged can help you get remembered by the folks in charge. And with that we’ll close off our post with The Zep, who more than anyone knows you’ve had your share of good and bad. But yes, you do still have to care, and by caring you can help take a meeting from bad to good. Just think of all the times* you could listen to Stairway to Heaven if you help bring a meeting to a close in a reasonable amount of time and get an extra 30 minutes in your day? *Approximately 3.75
We previously discussed the first four members of your research entourage, the people who are there to offer guidance, support, encouragement, and alternative perspectives: your coach, your dreamer, your doer, and your ally. To finish out the series, we’ll be shifting focus to a different type of person, one who may not always offer practical words or advice, emotional comfort, or one who knows the ins and outs of how to get a task done. Instead, this person is here to provide you guidance not on the doing side of a career in research, but on the thinking side: your sensei.
From Japanese, the literal translation of ‘sensei’ (先生) is ‘a person born before another’. In Japan, it is a formal form of address used in the context of referring to a person in a teaching role. At first glance, a teacher and a coach may not seem that different from one another. Both of them tell you what to do in order to grow or succeed, both of them give you instructions to follow, and both of them have expectations of what you should be able to achieve. However, the role played by your coach and your sensei is different, and can be summed up shortly as that the coach is there to push you to do, while the sensei is there to get you to think. One of the crucial parts of success in graduate school or scientific research is knowing your limits and working to get past them, which is what a coach is there to do. A sensei, on the other hand, helps you work ahead to your future career by helping you learn what you don’t know you even need to learn yet. In essence, they are helping you go forward when you still don’t know where forward is. Your sensei should be a person who helps you not in doing the task at hand but in asking the good questions that will help you develop your skillset for any task ahead, and will prepare you for your future career and not just your present to do list. Sounds like a rather nebulous type of role, doesn’t it? Your sensei has a more philosophical role in your entourage as the person who is teaching you how to think like a scientist, not just act like one. In one of our early posts, we discussed the philosophy side of your PhD. All of the science that you see, from papers to presentations to news headlines, is usually the result of a lot of hard work, blood, sweat, tears, the whole lot. But the idea or the insights from which the work initially spurred from came from knowing how to ask good questions and from recognizing that science has a deeply intellectual and philosophical side that goes with the ‘publish or perish’ side. And the ‘common sense’ part of science, how to think about what you should do, is where your sensei can help. Part of obtaining a PhD is through getting things Done, but if you want to get good things done then you need to Philosophize about them first. A sensei in your entourage can inspire you to ponder the tasks at hand and why they need doing, where the ideas came from, and where the results can take you. The sensei is there to remind you of the philosophy side of science, to show you how science should work, and to help you learn the process of thinking of new hypotheses and knowing how to address them. Think of your favorite martial arts movie—maybe you’re inspired by the Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi’s lessons or wish you could train under Kill Bill’s Pai Mei. Whoever your favorite fictional sensei is, you can get a sense of their style as how they differ from a more traditional type of coach. A sensei is not just there to teach you how to punch and kick, and they often times convey lessons in a way that don’t make sense on the surface (e.g., ‘wax on, wax off’). But the benefit of their style is that the lessons they teach go deeper and can resonate beyond the simple or the practical and can be incorporated into a way of living. What makes a good sensei? They don’t need to talk in riddles, only eat rice and fish heads, or make you wax their entire floor, but you should look for the following type of characteristics in a potential sensei for your entourage: - Always asking ‘why’. This will always be the question they ask, and there’s a reason for it. In anything you do, whether it’s a quick experiment or how you decide to analyze data, you should always have an answer and you should always know the answer (without relying on repeating back what your advisor/PI said about it in the first place). A sensei knows the importance of asking ‘why’ in order to better understand the reasons and motivations for working on a certain task, and can help see what sorts of things are important and which are superfluous. - Tend to give more nebulous or open-ended suggestions. They won’t always be straightforward in their replies, and may not even give clear advice (or any advice at all). As portrayed in movies, a sensei wants you to work towards the solution on your own instead of being told the answer right away, because working towards it on your own is part of how you obtaining a more complete understanding. - Provide insights from past experiences. As sensei literally means ‘person born before another’, and as such your sensei has been through the process of a career in research already and knows what it’s like. They offer guidance from their experiences, but appreciate that you will need to figure out some things for yourself, and in these cases will simply encourage you to keep learning. - They want to see you learn more than succeed. This is different than the coaching relationship. A sensei cares less about the win and more about making sure you grow and learn from a situation. A coach might push you to do something before you’re ready to test your limits, but a sensei would rather hold you back than push you forward, making sure that you’re ready before going to the next step. A sensei would see it as a greater failure to let you move to another threshold or milestone without having achieved what you need to at the current one, and will encourage you to stay where you are until you’re really, really ready for the next phase. - They know how to take time away from work or from a specific problem. A coach is more likely to have you work through a difficult situation, whereas a sensei will have you walk away from it and come back again with new eyes. This is because the sensei knows the importance of having a fresh perspective, and likely themselves can be seen taking a lot of breaks or doing things not related to work, with people maybe thinking they’re more on the lazy side. It’s not due to being lazy or unmotivated, but rather because a good sensei knows that you can’t always figure something out by staring at it. Fostering the sensei-student relationship One of the fundamental parts of any relationship (and as we mentioned before while discussing the coach member of your entourage) is having clear expectations of what you and your sensei expect from one another. Ask what they want to see you achieve and have them tell you what their working style is like and what they want you to learn from them. At the same time, keep these points in mind when working with your sensei: - Respect their perspective and their method. You might find them too slow for your tastes or giving you too many questions and not enough answers, but if they are in the scope of your relationship expectations then work towards meeting them at their level. To keep a sensei on your side, you need to maintain respectfulness in terms of both who they are and the process they use to help you learn. A sensei will likely not respond keenly if not treated with respect—remember that their role is a voluntary one and if they think that you can’t learn or don’t respect how they’re trying to teach you, then they won’t keep working you. - Ask questions of your own. Part of learning how to be a good scientist is learning how to ask good questions, and part of learning comes from doing. Ask how something works, how they figured out an idea, how they brainstorm, how they unwind, why they do things in a certain way. Their exact style may not work for you, but it can help you figure out what types of approaches and methods you can use in your own career. - Don’t get frustrated when you feel like you’re not moving fast enough. A sensei won’t let you move forward until you’re ready, which can make you feel frustrated or like you’re being held back unfairly. Relax and try to see their perspective, and see what gaps you need to fill before you can move forward. Pushing against their will can only lead to a falling out between the two of you, but listening and being patient can help you move further as a scientist (and as an added bonus, you might even learn the five point palm exploding heart technique!). - Follow by example and take your own thinking breaks. If your sensei leaves the office for a swim workout every day at noon, try your own regularly scheduled activity that takes you away from work. Whether it is a coffee away from your desk, a lunch break at the gym, or just a walk around campus every afternoon, a regular time away from the bench or your computer screen can give you the perspective you need to see what was beyond your narrow focus before. - Recognize that learning is part of success, whether it gets you 100 papers or 1. Learning won’t always come easy, and it may sometimes takes time away from tasks, which we feel are productive, but are not really clearly thought-out. Learning is something you take with you through every stage of your career and is something that additional replicates or new experiments won’t take away. Work with your sensei to ensure that your work has dedicated time for learning, not just doing. So now with some advice and suggestions for finding and maintaining a sensei relationship, your research entourage is complete! And as with any relationship, communication and expectations are the key to having a relationship that’s mutually beneficial for all parties involved. Talk to your entourage members about what role they play in your life and your career, what you’d like to learn or experience from them, and ask how you can be better at being at the receiving end of their guidance, support, or philosophizing. We hope you enjoyed this series and that you make progress on establishing your own research entourage, whether it be the people that get you through grad school or the ones that help you build on your career in research. Science isn’t an easy role, but with a supporting crew like these you’re sure to go far!
In last week’s post, we discussed the importance of having a coach in your research entourage. Today we’ll focus on two people who you need in your group of colleagues and collaborators, even though having both of them in the same room might drive you crazy: a dreamer and a doer.
Life is naturally full of opposites and opposing viewpoints: yin and yang, hot and cold, up and down, cat and dog. Working in research is the same: there’s a crucial balance you need to find between what seem like polar opposites in how you see your work, in how you interact with other colleagues, and how you progress your science. Having opposites on your team doesn’t mean they will cancel each other out or claim superiority of one over the other, but instead they should provide external impetus to complement your own traits and personal balance, as we’ve touched on in other previous posts. A career in research is not an easy gig: it requires that you continually think of new ideas while re-evaluating the old ones, and are always thinking one step ahead of where you’ll go next. At the same time that you are thinking big, you also need to see the real-world limitations and be aware of the detailed steps that you will need to achieve those big ideas. The people that think about those big, new ideas are the dreamers, and the ones who think about the here and now and the limitations of what you can do at this moment in time are the doers. Everyone exists somewhere on the dreamer-to-doer spectrum, For your entourage, you will need to identify someone that dreams bigger than you and another person that notices the logical flaws more than you do. You should then strive to use their opposite perspectives to balance your own, with the dreamers showing you what you can do and the doers helping you see how to make it happen. The dreamer vs the doer: Is one better than the other? Who are the dreamers? Dreamers are the people who think not just about the big picture, but the big, BIG picture. They look at research and how it fits into the grand scheme of the universe, and how science is out there to save the world. Dreamers can come up with brilliant ideas and hypotheses that challenge the status quo and who push the envelope further and further. Dreamers don’t tend to focus on the details of research but rather the potential of research, and tend to have a positive outlook on the field and its ability to impact the world. Who are the doers? If the dreamers are the ones on stage talking about how they’re going to save the world, the doers are sitting in the audience getting a headache thinking about all the work that would need to be done to achieve that vision. Doers tend to see the here and now, and focus on the challenges that lay behind every idea and what it takes to actually bring an idea to fruition. Doers want to make sure their evidence is solid before pushing the envelope or challenging the status quo. Doers like details because they helps them understand the steps it takes to get somewhere, and they may come off as pessimistic (although they are more likely realists), especially if you take the potential of an idea farther than they think it should go. Is one of them wrong or right? Is one of them a better scientist than the other one? The answer to the both questions is no. Both the doer and the dreamer have valid points and key perspectives, which is why you need them in your entourage. As a career scientist, you need those big picture ideas and wide-eyed dreams to motivate you to keep going with your work and to keep you engaged in what you’re doing by dreaming big about what it can can impact. But you can’t just have good ideas, and those good ideas won’t come to fruition overnight. It takes time to get to a big breakthrough, and you need to learn what it takes to prove or disprove an idea and how you can do research in a targeted, logical, and realistic way. And even if you’re on one side of the doer/dreamer spectrum of one side or the other, it’s good to have an additional set of eyes from both sides, in order to have a clearer 3rd party perspective on both the big picture and the small details The dreamer and the doer in common research scenarios Let’s take a look at how the dreamer and the doer see things differently, and how you can learn to see from both perspectives and gain from both ways of seeing the world: Dreamer: Wow! Your data is amazing! It’s the best data ever, and you’re going to get a Nature paper! Doer: Um, where are your error bars? And is this a corrected p-value for multiple testing errors? Dreamers will always get excited about new ideas and promising results. Dreamers can also help you get excited about your research again, especially if you feel like you’ve been trudging through a problem for a while. In contrast, doers tend to take everything, especially data, with a skeptical first glance, needing to be convinced of something before accepting it as truth. Feed off the optimism of the dreamers but listen to the skepticism of the doers. Dreamer: That talk was so great! Dr. BigName is really going to change things in the field! Doer: Dr. BigName is not interpreting the data correctly, and his/her slides are poorly done. Dreamers love learning about new research and the potential it can have to change things, and are optimistic of real changes being made by science. The doer listens with a cautious ear, keeping in mind that even the best data from the best researcher has limitations in terms of what it can tell you and how it can be interpreted and used. Let dreamers help you get excited about what’s happening in your field, an excitement which can help you get through the duller moments of research, and let the doer be there to remind you to look closely at each new finding or idea with a fine-toothed comb. Dreamer: Ooh, interesting side projects! You can do this experiment, or that analysis, or both, or … Doer: What does it say in the project proposal that you should do? Also the machine you need is broken and when it’s fixed then that experiment will take 2 weeks to finish. Dreamers are good at coming up with lot of new ideas, many of them quite good or interesting. But it may not always be the best to pursue every side project or idea, as too many offshoots won’t lead you to a cohesive project, but instead an amalgamation of interesting facts with fewer long lines of logic running through it. Doers like to stick to the plan and to think before jumping into new experiments, and also see the practicalities that lie in projects and side projects, including time and consumable costs. Recognize that the dreamers will have good ideas for other work to do and that the doers can recognize which ideas can lead you to the best end product and what it will take to get you there. Dreamer: Hi, new collaborator best friend! Here’s 50 great ideas and things we can do with you. Doer: Hello, potential collaborator. Let’s discuss the terms of our collaborative venture and decide who’s doing what. Dreamers enjoy making new connections and talking to other researchers about ideas, not all of which come to fruition. Doers are more pragmatic in how they interact with and reach out to colleagues but go into working relationships with a clear understanding of what comes out of it. For meeting new people and getting excited about potential, follow the dreamer. For making things happen and keeping yourself from being stretched too thin, follow the doer. Dreamer: Let’s have an hour-long conference call and talk about all the great things we can do! Doer: Let’s send 2 emails and decide on a way forward. A dreamer understands the importance of face-to-face meetings and conference calls as a source of new ideas, and is always an engaged party in the discussion. Doers may not be big talkers but they always make sure there’s a plan going forward, even after a long brainstorming session. View meetings and discussions as a positive, idea-generating activity like the dreamers, but leave the discussion with a clear plan of goals and deliverables like the doer. Dreamer: I’m going to change the world! Doer: I’m going to get more coffee. Dreamers have an infectious excitement about work, their research, and what it all means in the grand scheme of the world. Dreamers are the type of people that got excited about science as kids and never turned it down a notch. Doers may have a more realistic view on the future and their place in it, which is practical but not always exciting. While you do need this pragmatic perspective, not having it balanced out with a bit of enthusiasm can lead you to feeling like you just need to churn out data in order to succeed, forgetting that it’s the ideas and the dreams that help get you to success and help keep you going. Dreamers and doers both have a place in the world, and we need both of them in an entourage, even if their opposing viewpoints can sometimes drive you mad. They help us see the benefits of being practical versus dreaming big, of getting excited versus being skeptical, of the BIG picture versus all of its crucial details, and of talking the talk versus walking the walk. And if you’re not a particular fan of our analogy, you can try another one for size. And just think: if they made a caffeinated beer, what need would there be for a research entourage at all?
In your group of friends, there are probably quite a few personality types, and different friends that you rely upon in different situations. Some friends always have a funny story that gets you laughing no matter what else is going on. Some friends give great advice for any tricky situation you end up in. Some friends will just listen to you on the bad days when all you really need is a friendly ear. Your group of friends is a source of laughter, encouragement, distraction, or whatever else you need to keep you going.
Just as with your group of friends, you should surround yourself with colleagues and collaborators that balance your own skills and personality, ones that can help you out in the wide array of situations you’ll end up in as a researcher. Your entourage can be there to help your scientific achievements or can help you further your own career. In this series we’ll be looking at the five types of people that every career researcher needs in their entourage. Just like the moments in your life when you need a good laugh or need a shoulder to cry on, there will be times in your career when you need these different perspectives and different types of help. In this series we’ll talk about what each member of your entourage can do for you, how to identify a person who can serve in that role, and how to foster each type of relationship. Entourage member #1: The coach If you played sports or did any sort of competitive or organized activity (chess, dance, cheerleading, drama, etc.), you know the difference that a coach can make for both individual and team success. We can look back on moments of practices, competitions, performances, or games and see the role that a coach plays. Coaches are the ones who push us to the edge of our current abilities, who break down each part of what we do in order to improve and perfect our skills, who develop our game plans and competitive strategies, who recognize when we’re giving it our all and when we need to push a bit further. But from the coach’s perspective, what is coaching all about? Yes, there is usually some credit, award, or recognition that coaches can gain when helping a team or an individual to a win. But in the end it’s the person or the team that does the work and gets the glory, and the coach is there to help a person or team achieve the best possible outcome. And that’s why your research entourage should include a coach: they are there to help you grow, to encourage you to foster your strengths and ameliorate your weaknesses, and in the end they are primarily after the satisfaction of seeing you succeed. While I played some sports (rather poorly) in high school, it was only recently that I noticed the parallel between athletic coaching and academic mentoring. I spent a busy week at work re-analyzing data alongside my boss, feeling bogged down by the tedium of going through R code together in his office for an entire day and feeling like I should be able to do it on my own and figure it out along the way. After a Monday morning discussion about the importance of not editing code without knowing what that part of the code was doing because it could make the results uninterpretable (certainly a valid point!), I headed to tae kwon do class feeling a bit frustrated about how the day and previous week had gone, and ready to work off some energy. As our warm-up for class, we started with circuit training. We do alternating exercises ranging from non-intimidating (e.g. jump rope) to pure torture (e.g. triangle press-ups). For each exercise, we first perform it for 1 minute followed 20 second break before moving on to the next exercise. At the completion of the circuit of exercises, we do them all again for a quicker 15 second time period and only a 5 second break. After the exhausting ‘sprint’ circuit, we finish with a 30 second interval with 10 second breaks. During the circuits, I consistently put my hands behind my head for sit-ups due to bad habits (and sore abs), and was corrected by our class instructor not to do the sit-ups that way because it was bad for my neck. I quickly took his suggestion, and while finishing the warm-up I began to think about the parallel between what my boss and my tae kwon do instructor had done that day. Pointing out an error, explaining why it was bad, and keeping a side eye on me to make sure I didn’t repeat the mistake again. At work, I had become frustrated, but I had taken a similar type of comment in tae kwon do class in a more open and understanding way. I realized that the difference between work and tae kwon do was in how I was seeing the relationship. I have always looked at my tae kwon do instructor as a coach, which is easy to do since it's a sport and our classes feel like a ‘normal’ coaching situation. However, I had seen my working relationship with my boss in a different way, not as a coach but as a boss, and someone telling you what to do because it needs to be done for the company/project/task. But on reflection I could see that my boss and tae kwon do instructor are both coaches, and are both good ones at that. I know my boss wants me to succeed because it means more papers or grants for his lab, but in our conversations he’s also made it clear that he wants me to see me become the best researcher that I can possibly be, and takes the time to discuss problems and approaches with me because of that. So what exactly makes a good coach, and how can you find one if you don’t feel you have a person filling that role already? One of the key components of a strong coach-athlete (or in this case scientist-in-training) relationship is that the coach emphasizes growth and development. A coach may tell you to do things you don’t want to do on your own, or critique your form or method or working, but the goal of what they are doing should be to make you better. A good coach is one who pushes you and works with you not just for their personal benefit but in the joy and satisfaction he or she gets from helping another person succeed. At the same time that there are strategies for good coaching, there are also ways to be a better scientist-in-training. Listen to your coach with the mindset that what they are saying is to help you, not to judge or critique harshly. If you do something wrong and they acknowledge it, take what they said and use it to improve how you're doing what you’re doing. If you’ve identified a coach type of person for your entourage, one way you can make this relationship more concrete is to discuss the expectations and goals for you and your coach. With an athletic coaching situation, it’s usually clear what the end goal is, be it a winning season or a faster 100m sprint time. Within research, there are usually milestones within a project but not always a detailed set of expectations or goals that can help you get from start to finish. Should you report to your mentor frequently or have a one-on-one meeting on a regular basis? What format of feedback should your mentor provide to help you determine if you’re reaching a goal or not? What set of skills do you already have for the task at hand and which ones need to be further developed, and do you need formal training outside of lab for any of them? Addressing the expectations of both you and your coach, as well as recognizing that being pushed in a positive manner is essential for personal growth, can help prevent any communication break-downs that arise simply from not knowing what the other person expects. If you don’t feel that you have a coach type of mentor in your entourage, try to identify a senior group member, a professor in your department, or even just a slightly more experience colleague as a potential coach and talk to them about their interest in being your guide and mentor as you navigate through your research. There are quite a few articles on what makes a good coach, but for the sake of brevity we’ll focus on just a few of the crucial ones:
While I already have both a PhD and a black belt in tae kwon do, I am thankful for my coaches in both the lab and in the dojo, because both are there to help me work on becoming an even better researcher and martial artist respectively. I’m still seeing R code when I close my eyes and the triangle press-ups have given me excrutiatingly sore arms, but perhaps that’s what progress is supposed to feel like, at least for a little while (or in my case until the next day of work/tae kwon do class!). Once you’ve established the coach for your research entourage, you’ll need to identify the remaining members of your group. Your entourage should include a coach, a dreamer, a doer, an ally, and a sensei. Who are these other four people, you ask? We’ll focus on the rest of your research entourage in the rest of our series in the coming weeks. In the meantime, enjoy one of our favorite movie clips with, shall we say, a slight misstep in constructive coaching (although we do agree there’s no crying in science, there’s probably a better way to say it).
Whether it was the new Star Wars movie, sparkly outfits worn by people going out on New Year’s Eve, or your aunt’s Christmas pudding, we all likely spent part of our holiday break making assessments, judgments, and the occasional criticism (especially towards puddings). We can all be very critical at times, judging the outfits worn by celebrities or passing judgement on whether a movie or song or day was good or not. But while some may pity those who live their lives in the critical limelight, scientists also find themselves the brunt end of criticisms, whether these criticisms come from peers, mentors, or colleagues.
Science progresses through a combination of new hypotheses and the constant scrutiny which is necessary to establish and validate them. Unsurprisingly, the scientific field is rife with people ready to tear down what you do and judge each individual piece of your work to make sure that what you’ve done or shown is really worth it’s weight. Those of you in graduate school or early career researchers have likely had your fair share of it already, but here are a few more examples to set the tone for the rest of the post:
The first step in handling criticism is choosing how to respond to it: Learn how to receive critique and grow from it, take the good out of comments, and forget the overly personal parts. At the end of the post there are a few short suggestions of how to do this. Before that, however, we’ll look at the extreme ends of how people can fail to deal with criticism in a positive way: The softening response: Becoming overly sensitive and losing self-confidence If you are naturally not a self-confident person, you may find that criticism can hit you very hard and very fast. While you can likely recover on your own with time, the pace of a career in science, especially as graduate students, does not leave you much time in the way of building yourself back up again before the next round hits or before you need to get up and going again. Without time to recover from prior wounds, your outlook can quickly become overly pessimistic. You lose the ability to benefit from criticism and assume you’re simply not cut out for research. This attitude is often self-perpetuating, which can lead to reduced motivation and increased sensitivity to additional comments. The hardening response: Becoming overly confident and losing self-criticism On the other side of the spectrum are those who have very high opinions of themselves. They deflect all types of criticism by having an inflated self-image, but by doing this they can lose critical insights by being too quick with their defenses and assuming the critic was wrong. While in no danger of losing self-confidence, they can easily become attached to their own ideas and may deflect valid critiques or alternatives, just because they don’t want to admit they might not be 100% right. Too much pride can lead to a stubbornness which can hinder scientific progress, and can even bring a person to a dead-end halt in the middle of their career if they do end up eventually being wrong. The nonexistent response: Becoming apathetic A third option is to become entirely apathetic to the stream of criticism. Instead of defending their own ideas, trying to improve their work, or trying new ideas they do none of it, an apathetic researcher carries on stuck to their plan of research and avoids deviating from it. While not at the extreme of either case, apathy generally leads to mediocre research based on questionable ideas that were never defended nor improved upon, with any chance for greater success or implementation lost in the stagnation of effort. The balanced response: Stay true to yourself while learning what to fix As with our rubber vs steel post, there is a balance in work and in life where we must be strong and unwavering yet flexible and adaptable. It’s working towards this same type of balance that helps you deal with and grow from criticism during your career. There are times when you need helpful criticisms to improve your work while not letting the overly negative/personal criticisms get under your skin. Tell yourself that, despite the occasional misstep, you are on the right track and are learning more every day. For the moments of being too soft: don't take criticism directly to heart, but listen instead to what the message at the heart of the issue is. Instead of taking it personally that your committee member made an off-handed negative comment about figure legends, think less about the tone and more about the message, and work towards making clearer figures for your next committee meeting. And for the times or the people that are too hard: It’s possible that those grant reviewers were all jerks, but it’s also possible they had something valid to say. Even if it was an idea you really cared about, a fresh set of eyes provides a perspective that you wouldn’t have had if you had only looked at things your way-even if the critique itself was a bit of a blow at first. Part of achieving a balanced response is by knowing what side of the spectrum you tend to stay on and doing exercises to keep yourself balanced Even if you already have some new year’s resolutions on your ever-growing to do list, you can start off the year by working on the following as you muse over your own personal reactions to criticism in the workplace:
With the holiday season rapidly approaching and with the stress of year-end work diminishing everyone’s immune systems, it’s time to be on the lookout for any signs of impending sickness in you and your colleagues. In addition to the cold or flu, the stress of finishing the year while reflecting on your work in the lab can bring about an ailment known as ‘imposter syndrome’, a common condition among academics and researchers ranging from graduate students to full professors. While there is no complete cure for this ailment, with this guide you can recognize the symptoms and prevent any unnecessary flare-ups that may cripple your productivity and/or your Christmas spirit.
What is Imposter syndrome? A sufferer of imposter syndrome feels that they are unable to fulfill their career goals, that any accomplishments they have achieved are due to dumb luck and not to skill or level of expertise, and that they are simply not cut out for a career in research because they are not as smart/skilled/outgoing as their colleagues. The holiday season offers a time to reflect on the year behind and a chance to prepare for the year ahead. It also entails finishing up lab work, writing up end-of-the-years reports for projects, and having to place orders and spend grant money before the financial office closes, which can compound the normal stresses already surrounding the holidays. Scrambling to get things done before heading home for the holidays can leave anyone with the feeling of ‘Why am I doing this all NOW?’ and ‘What exactly have I been doing all year?’. These questions then create a prime target for imposter syndrome and its counter-productive symptoms. What are the symptoms of imposter syndrome?
In addition to the rushed and hurried lead-up to the end of the end of the year, time spent reflecting back can lead you to feeling like you didn’t do anything productive all year long. Maybe the year didn’t bring you as many results or papers as you’d hoped for. Maybe a crucial experiment for your thesis didn’t work the way you thought and you had to go back to the drawing board. Maybe you just went to a lab mate’s graduation party and realized how far away you still are from finishing your PhD project. These thoughts, coupled with the already high stresses of the holiday season, can lead to making one feel more like an imposter or a failure than during the rest of the year. It’s easy to look back at our own year of work and compare it to the work of other students, post-docs, or professors, and see theirs as being much more worthy than our own. But the comparisons aren’t always even, and depending on the field you’re in or the type of work you’re doing, there might be a lot of depth to your year’s worth of work that can’t be seen as easily by anyone but yourself. Think of an iceberg, where the part above water may look unimpressive but the real bulk of it lies beneath the surface. When you feel stressed about what you’ve accomplished in a year and feeling like you’re not worthy of this type of career, take a closer look under the surface. Maybe you don’t have all the manuscripts done that you’d planned, but you made nice figures for a recent conference poster and can use those and a few tables as the bulk of a manuscript. Maybe a big experiment didn’t work the way you thought it would, but it led you to a new direction that no one else has been down before. Maybe this wasn’t your year to graduate, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t do meaningful things in the lab that can give you strong momentum for the next year: optimizing assays, writing code, running simulations, going to a conference and hearing great talks and getting new ideas, doing a literature review for your thesis that helped give you a bigger picture perspective on your work. Not all of these things will have a tangible, surface-level impact, but they will provide the necessary depth of knowledge and support for you to start off the next year of studies and work with the tools you need to succeed. Graduate students and early career researchers are especially prone to getting imposter syndrome, as we’re in the point of our lives where we’re doing the day-to-day lab work required but at the same time thinking about possibilities for our future careers. When you struggle with trying to get PCR to work or spend an afternoon trying to understand one paper, it can be hard to look at a professor’s life and see yourself as able to do something similar. But take a closer look at the people we feel imposter syndrome about: They’ve spent quite a bit of time getting to where they are by doing the type of work that you’re doing right now, by running into problems and figuring out how to solve them, and now teaching you and your colleagues how to do the same (with some professors being able to pass on their lessons better than others). The work you’re doing now is not meant to tell you if you’re cut out to be an academic or a researcher or not, it’s meant to show you how the process of research works in practice and to provide you with your own depth of knowledge and support as you work and progress to the next stage of your career. You don’t have to be perfect the first time around to become a great researcher-very few of them got it right the first time, either, they just got good at not being wrong quite as often. In academia you work with the cream of the crop, researchers on the top of their game who are pioneering work at the very edge of technology and understanding. Academics have to sell their research and to conduct themselves in a very confident way, making them attractive for collaborators and funding agencies: Anyone looking into this field without that same level of self-confidence is likely to feel like they don’t belong. How can you treat imposter syndrome? Imposter syndrome has no cure, but you can take prophylactic measures to prevent flare-up using the following measures:
Prognosis Academics and researchers suffering from Imposter Syndrome tend to recover rapidly with treatment, although many will experience remission before retirement. Prognosis is generally good for those who prescribe to self-esteem building activities, personal development, peer interactions, and an optimistic outlook on the future. Best of luck to everyone finishing out the year. We’ll have one more post to close off 2015 and are excited for what’s ahead for Science with Style in 2016! ‘Heroes of Science’: Galileo Galilei, Father of Science and Master of Standing Up for Science11/18/2015
You could easily fill up an entire blog talking about all the lives of the great scientists, the pioneers, the giants’ shoulders who we stand on (so to speak). A hero of science isn’t necessarily the smartest, the most well-funded, or the one with the most papers: a hero of science is someone who has recognized the value of the scientific method as a way towards reaching the truth about how the universe works, and not letting any adversity or barrier stand in the way of making that truth known. With this ‘Heroes of Science’ post series, I want to highlight both my own personal heroes of science as well as scientists that stand out for their contributions to the realm of science and to how we navigate through our own careers as professional scientists.
I was partially inspired for this post series by a recent Science Friday podcast featuring a 1996 interview with the great science communicator Carl Sagan. During his life, Carl Sagan was a proponent of the scientific method and had a great passion for sharing science with everyone. After listening to the podcast and remembering how much I loved reading Contact, I started off on ‘Demon-Haunted World.’ I was surprised to hear in the introduction that two of Carl Sagan’s heroes on his path towards a career in science were his own parents, both of whom were not professional scientists or even had a strong inclination for science. In the book Sagan mentions his parents as a source of fascination balanced with skepticism about the world. He touts this balance as a crucial part of life for any career scientist: to be continually interested in learning more, yet cautious when it approaches. Reflecting on his words—with more on his discussion of the dangers of a world full of pseudoscience featured in next week’s post—led me to think about my own scientific heroes. I can’t help but think back a long, long time ago to a 16th century Italian astronomer and physicist, called the “father of science”, and a man who stood up for his views on the place of the world within the universe: Galileo Galilei.
As a disclaimer, this post is by no means an exhaustive biography of the Life and Times of Galileo Galilei, but is meant only as an overview of his life as a scientist and why I feel he is a Hero of Science. The information on his life is based on everyone’s favorite source of fun facts, and certainly there are better sources than this blog if you are interested in learning more about Galileo.
But before jumping off to Galileo, let’s set the scene with another scientific giant: Copernicus. In 1543, just shortly before he died at the ripe old age of 70, the Polish astronomer and mathematician published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), a very technical publication using mathematical functions to provide an alternate universal model: one in which the earth revolved around the sun, and not vice versa. With the completion of his seminal work and the first such mention of a heliocentric theory, Copernicus passed away, and unfortunately the immediate impact of his work passed just as quickly. The book was never formally banned but it was removed from circulation soon after initial publication, with a low initial demand due to its technical nature and described as ‘mathematical fiction with no physical reality’. Jump forward just three years later to 1546, when Galileo Galilei is born and named after his ancestor who was a physician and university professor (no pressure, of course). Galileo went to school to become a physician (OK, maybe there was a little bit of pressure) but he soon realized he had a much deeper fascination for things outside of medicine, concerning questions like ‘why do things move the way they do?’ Galileo asked his father to change to natural philosophy and math, and was given permission (despite the fact that Galileo must have forgotten that doctors earned more money). Galileo soon excelled in a new program, with his skills in applied science, mathematics, and enough of an artistic background to also be an expert of design. During his scientific career, he taught at the University of Pisa and the University of Padua, penned twelve books, and made numerous discoveries and tools, including the refracting telescope which to this day is still referred to as the Galilean telescope. His efforts were focused on observation, experimentation, and bringing in mathematics to better understanding natural laws. With his new telescope he was able to write the first treatise of observational astronomy, including observing the moons of Jupiter, the roughness of the moon, the Milky Way, and even sunspots. Through his observations he also worked on promoting the Copernican theory of the universe, but was unable to prove the theory at first. He went through theories on tides and comets, but realized that these ideas didn’t fully support the theory of heliocentrism. Nonetheless, he continued to search for scientific and mathematical means to support his claim. After Copernicus had died, his heliocentric theory was not overly controversial, mainly because the available data, the lack of stellar parallax, did not support it. A parallax is the phenomenon that occurs when you perceive a shift in the position of a faraway object depending on where you are: try looking at a picture on the far side of the room while closing just your left eye, then closing just your right. Similarly, if the earth revolved around the sun, then there should be observable shift in a star’s location every six months (beyond the changes corresponding with the seasons). The lack of this shift was evidence to many in the 1600’s that the heliocentric theory was invalid, even though Copernicus had argued that the distance was so large that the parallax would be negligible to the naked eye (and it wasn’t until the 19th century that there was even good enough instrumentation to detect it at all). However, the controversy with the heliocentric theory was more than just where the sun and the earth sat with respect to one another: it was about respect for Papal authority. This was seen as especially crucial in Italy, who had just witnessed the effects of the Counter Reformation after the Protestant uprisings against the Catholic church in the early 1500’s. The heliocentric model was attacked by the Papacy using biblical references which were vague at best, including Psalm 96:10 (King James Version) ‘Say among the heathen that the Lord reigneth: the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the people righteously.’ Galileo argued that heliocentrism was not in contrast to the bible in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, and he was soon called to Rome by the Inquisition for his Protestant-like threats to ‘reinterpret’ the Bible. He was ordered by the Inquisition to abandon the idea, with works by Copernicus and other authors banned until they could be re-written by the Catholic church. Soon after Galileo’s papal hand slap, there was a new pope elected, Urban VIII (one who happened to be a friend and fan of Galileo and who had opposed his condemnation) and Galileo chose to stay out of spotlight. While the papacy might have thought him tamed, he instead spent a considerable amount of time building up his arguments on heliocentrism. After nearly twenty years of work and staying away from controversial letters and treatises, he emerged from the shadows and published “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,” his seminal work on the heliocentric theory. He had received formal permission and authorization from the Inquisition and Pope Urban VIII, who had previously requested Galileo to give arguments for both the heliocentric and the geocentric (also called Ptolemaic) theories and to include Urban VIII’s personal views within the book. Galileo did so, although in a way to be sure as not to make either the Inquisition or Urban VIII very happy with the result. Galileo’s Dialogue is set up as a debate, with the players being a Copernican supporter Salviati (named after a friend of Galileo), who voices many of Galileo’s opinions directly and who is referred to as the ‘Academician’ in Dialogue. Dialogue also features an initially neutral but intelligent man named Sagredo (another friend of Galileo) who offers additional comments and direction throughout the discussion. The last character is Simplicio, who holds to the ways of Ptolemy and also voices the direct opinions of Pope Urban VIII. In addition to putting the words of Urban VIII into the mouth of a simpleton (the connotation of Simplicio from Italian), anyone reading Dialogue sees the clear victor in the discussions being Salviati, and with the book being apparent to any reader not an evenly-balanced dialogue but a direct attack on geocentrism. While Galileo’s arguments on the heliocentric theory using tides as an example were not correct, Galileo’s book did touch on a number of other scientific topics and was clearly directed at Rome and her challenges made against science. Galileo was called to Rome to defend himself in 1632 immediately after the publication of Dialogue, where he was forced to admit that he had held onto his Copernican beliefs after his last trial, despite being told to do otherwise. He was found ‘vehemently suspect of heresy’ and was sentenced to imprisonment and to ‘abjure, cure, and detest’ his opinions on the matter. He remained under house arrest for the rest of his life until 1642, and his Dialogue was banned. While there is much doubt of him uttering the infamous words ‘and yet it moves’ while being forced to recant his theory during the trial, the urban legend brings to life the power of his story and defiance of papal law. During his imprisonment he was forced to read seven penitential psalms per week, while in his spare time writing summaries of his work which were published in Holland to avoid censorship and are credited as the foundation of modern physics. While his most controversial arguments on heliocentrism were not founded on observation, he still had numerous contributions to the field of science before his death: work on the science of motion, the mathematical laws of nature, and his support for a separation of science from philosophy and religion, which was a new and turbulent idea in his time. He was also willing to change mind in accordance with observations, understanding that information was crucial to bringing an idea to life. Perhaps that’s why he worked so tirelessly to the tides theory, and a shame that only technology more than 200 years after his time could prove him right. He was also a lover of design and of function, and left behind many practical and beautiful engineering works such as his refracting telescope. Perhaps the reason Galileo first came to mind for me, however, is his relentless search for the truth even in the face of adversity. His quest was for knowledge and for scientific truth, and this is what should drive us as scientists. But all too often we are driven by other pressures: for funding, for acceptance of ideas, for pleasing our outside collaborators or PIs. What should drive us is the search for answers to questions, regardless of what those answers are, whether they are what we thought they would be when we first set out. Being a hero of science means adapting your mind and your ideas to what you see, not in adapting what you see to your mind and your ideas. To this day, Galileo is still called the Father of Modern Science by more modern scientific greats such as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. And while the Catholic church may have negated his works at first, his legacy stands in a more positive light. In 1939, Pope Pius XII made his first speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and described Galileo as being among the "most audacious heroes of research... not afraid of the stumbling blocks and the risks on the way…" While we probably won't all become future pioneers of modern science as Galileo was, we all have the opportunity to be ‘audacious heroes’ in our own worlds, to stand up and work towards truth, and to meet the challenges as they come with fervor and with courage. I hope you have enjoyed the start of our Heroes of Science series. If you have a hero, be he or she modern, ancient, or anywhere in between, send your suggestion and a rationale for you choice to our gmail address or leave a message in the blog post. We look forward to sharing more heroic stories in future posts! Playing nicely with others: When success in science hinges on more than just what you know10/21/2015
I think it’s safe to say that most of us have benefited from Jorge Cham’s PhD comic series even if our research and general productivity hasn’t. It’s easy to spend an afternoon scrolling through the comic archive and thinking Yep, been there, done that, seen that. His all-too-real depictions of situations strike a chord with many aspects of life working in a research laboratory. One of his recent comics resonated for me on two separate occasions. Originally posted on Sept 4th, I think I actually laughed out loud when I first saw this one:
I’ve seen far too many similar warnings posted in the lab, office, or shared kitchen, reminding us all that equipment belongs to one person and one person ONLY, or reminders that ‘your mother doesn’t work here, so clean up after yourself’. I’ve received a fair amount of scorn from lab managers and senior grad students or post-docs for using a piece of equipment without signing the log book about the 2 minutes I spend on the machine. I have borne witness to a wide array of emails on department and even college-wide email lists chastising someone for a minor infraction or something that could have been handled more maturely and directly (instead of involving the entire department). While Jorge Cham might lead us to believe in his comic that grad school isn’t kindergarden anymore, sometimes I feel like we’re back in elementary school all over again, but this time with the mantra of ‘sharing is good’ replaced by messages on snarky post-it notes indicating that if someone doesn’t clean up their mess they’ll be promptly sent to the 3rd circle of hell.
While it’s easy to laugh about situations like this, these attitudes in academia, and in scientific research as a whole, can hold us back from making progress in our work. I was reminded of this comic a second time last week when I found this article “How the modern work place has become more like preschool”. The article is not comic material but instead discusses the reasons for the increase in the number of jobs requiring interpersonal skills. While the loss of many ‘unskilled’ jobs may not be of concern to someone holding or working toward a PhD, in today’s competitive workforce there are WAY more PhDs than ever before. The traditional place of employment, academia, can’t make homes for all of us, and those that are trying to get into any sort of permanent position will be competing against a long list of other applicants, some with more publications, more grants, or more relevant experience. Interpersonal skills and how you work with others in a team setting can make the difference in you landing your dream job versus you landing just any job. The Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman wrote a paper on the relationship between cognitive skills (e.g., intelligence as measured by aptitude tests) and non-cognitive skills (e.g., motivation, perseverance, self-control, etc.) and how these two factors correlated to endpoints related to success in life: getting a 4-year degree, how much money you make, etc. While there are quite a few conclusions that can be drawn from the results, depicted as surface plots over the two-dimensions of cognitive and non-cognitive skills (scroll to the end of the paper), the quick take-home message is that it takes more than just being smart to succeed. It’s a combination of how smart you are as well as how well you make it through life’s challenges and how you interact with teachers and peers. There is a strong need in today’s workforce, and in science especially, for people who can empathize, see others emotions, and respond to them appropriately. The New York Times article goes on to describe the reason for its title: “Children move from art projects to science experiments to the playground in small groups, and their most important skills are sharing and negotiating with others. But that soon ends, replaced by lecture-style teaching of hard skills, with less peer interaction. Work, meanwhile, has become more like preschool.” This is an all-too-true situation for those of us in the scientific fields: we spend our time in high school and undergrad gaining in-depth knowledge on a topic before we graduate. Then for those of us that decide to continue our studies, the world suddenly changes: the bulk of our time is now spent in lab meetings presenting our research, learning a new protocol from a lab mate, collecting data with a collaborator, or revising papers with our advisor. While there is always a part of your research where you will work independently, the collaborative atmosphere is much more prevalent after your undergraduate studies. It’s here that the natural sciences such as biology and chemistry can learn a lot from engineering programs. A bachelor’s degree in engineering is designed with the knowledge that after graduation most engineers will work in teams on large projects. As a student, group projects may seem tedious, but they provide experience with necessary teamwork skills such as how to divide tasks based on the members’ skills and knowledge. As such, students who will end up as professional scientists could also benefit from team projects. Just like how trends in the general workforce are leaning away from hiring people that can only do manual labor tasks, scientists need to hone their teamwork and collaborative skills in order to set themselves apart from the rest of the crowd. Another section of the NYT article describes a situation that many of us have likely faced already: “Say two workers are publishing a research paper. If one excels at data analysis and the other at writing, they would be more productive and create a better product if they collaborated. But if they lack interpersonal skills, the cost of working together might be too high to make the partnership productive.” This is an example of something that happens all too often in academia. If people know that you’re a genius at what you do but know that you can’t be bothered to sit in a room with other people and work together on a problem, who do you think they’re going to hire for the project manager position or ask to help write a grant with them? As stated in the NYT article, “Cooperation, empathy and flexibility have become increasingly vital in modern-day work.” Likewise, science has become a world of collaborations: large-scale international grants, multiple PIs with teams of graduate students and post-docs, data that requires expertise from several areas of knowledge, or a complex physical infrastructure (such as the particle accelerator at CERN). Science does not work in a vacuum, especially in this day and age where so many of the questions that remain to be answered are pressing and complex. As professional scientists we need to learn how to play nicely with the rest of the class. As you build a network of collaborators, you’ll find that this will be much easier if you earn people’s respect for who you are both as a scientist and as a person. While non-cognitive skills and ‘politeness’ lessons may not have been covered since your time in kindergarten, you will spend your entire life outside the classroom being evaluated on this skillset. It’s your responsibility to be aware of how you work with others and your strengths and weaknesses outside of your basic foundation of knowledge. To give some guidance, I’ve compiled a few things to keep in mind in order to help you play well with others. - Visualize any collaborative venture as a team effort. When you work in a group, look at people’s skills and expertise and think about what components each member can contribute. Keep in mind who will be timely with their efforts, who will need additional support, and who can be trusted to finish their contribution independently. - Foster an environment for sharing your research. Take ownership of your research but don’t keep it to yourself. Talk about ideas with your lab mates, your PI, as well as researchers completely outside of your research group. Seek out new perspectives on your work even if it’s not a formal collaboration by sharing insights and data with your peers and people outside your lab. - Your mother may not work in your lab, but pretend that she does. Moms tend to give good insights on how society expects us to behave. Even if you’ve been out of her house for a while, keep her recommendations in the back of your mind when it comes to how you conduct yourself (and the next three bullets are certainly mom-approved!). - Be nice to everyone. No matter what level of lab/office hierarchy, be they technicians, office staff, or administrative personnel, being friendly and cordial to people even when you don’t have to be will make your day-to-day life easier. It’s not just about being nice to your PI but to the people who will bring you deliveries, get your paperwork sorted so you can get paid, and who may or may not look past office deadlines in order to help you out. - Think before you speak, ESPECIALLY in emails. There will be a lot of tricky situations you’ll be faced with: scientists that don’t respond to emails, challenging your findings, or demanding more than was agreed on in a grant proposal. You don’t need to be snarky or defensive, and most issues can be managed politely without the need for overly strong wording. Remember that your emails can very easily get forwarded to a department head or saved in someone’s inbox, so use some thought before you send them! - Pay no mind to jerks. You will run into people that you won’t like, ones who won’t work well as a team or who will continually seem to poke you with a stick. Don’t worry about them, and as your teacher or mom said: mind your own business, at least when it comes to letting people interfere with your work and your mood. Do your best to try to establish a professional relationship as needed, and if that person is truly caustic then find other teammates to work more with, and be comforted by the fact that they’ll likely run into later issues with finding collaborators and colleagues in their own careers. Academia can feel like a ‘don’t touch this it’s mine’ kind of world, where the good guys just can’t win. There will inevitably be people that make messes or that won’t be nice to you. How can you set yourself apart from this preschool mentality? By setting an example through your courtesy and kindness. Focus on establishing a positive attitude for teamwork and collaboration, and work on the transition from a mindset of ‘don’t touch this it’s mine’ to ‘it’s nice to make friends!’ Your research now as well as your career in the future will be better off for it!
The Lakes District offers some of the UK’s best scenery and is a popular destination for weekends and summer retreats. Before I moved to England for my post-doc, a friend of mine took me for a day trip to the region during my visit to Durham in 2013. It was a spectacular mid-August day, with not a drop of rain and just a touch of wind. I remember looking down into the valley from the summit and feeling like it was a scene taken straight from The Hobbit. Another trip to the area a year later recalled a similar mood: with gorgeous greens contrasting stony heights and shimmering lakes, who wouldn’t want to spend a weekend wandering about this amazing landscape?
But as much as I and the rest of England love the Lakes District, it has a notable and well-earned reputation for crappy weather. Storms can come from nowhere and leave you wet, cold, and uncomfortable, and summits that leave you exhausted even after only a 1km ascent. After the two previous sun-filled summer trips, my husband and I went by train to hike around Lake Windermere in March of this year. While not expecting the lavishly sunny warmth of our last visit, the ever-present fog prevented any sort of view that day. This past July we made a full weekend trip to try to summit the tallest peak, Scaffel Pike, only to finish summitless due to disorienting fog before becoming drenched to the bone by cold driving rain, shivering in the car ride back to the hostel and spending a good 20 minutes in a hot shower trying to warm up again.
I thought back on these previous Lakes District jaunts this last weekend, as we headed to take on Scaffel Pike a second time. While the leaves hadn’t changed to their autumn colors like we had hoped, we were rewarded with a fantastic weekend at Wast Water Lake: no rain, small crowds, and a chance to breathe fresh air and stretch our city legs. At the same time, I couldn’t help but reflect on previous hikes, as well as my own ongoing ‘journey’ through a career in science. While I’ve already drawn parallels between getting a black belt and getting a PhD, I can also see a parallel between the joys and challenges of the Great Outdoors with those of becoming a professional scientist. Both offer challenges, opportunities, and rewards, and the parallels between the two can give us insight and perspective on how we should approach the hard times we inevitably encounter while navigating our way to a rewarding career. Be prepared and ready to adapt. A day on the peaks can be glorious or it can be dreadful, sometimes back and forth in the very same day, so be ready for hot, cold, wet, and/or windy weather. Carry a good map, plenty of water, and some extra socks, although after your first hike or two you’ll probably learn the hard way what you really needed in your bag. At the start of graduate school, I thought my undergraduate coursework in biology and chemistry would be all I needed to start research, but I quickly found out this preparation wasn’t enough. So I got deeply familiar with the literature, learned to optimize assays before running important experiments, and reached out to advisers and professors when I got stuck. These are the things that kept me dry through rainy spells of my PhD project. Know when to take in the scenery and when to keep going. While the summit or the trail’s end might be the ultimate goal, knowing when to enjoy the moments before the ultimate goal, and when you need a break to help you get to that goal without being exhausted, will make the trip more rewarding. At the same time, there will be times when you can't make a break at every view point and moments when you need to push through a bit of discomfort or tiredness to get to another milestone along the trail or a more sheltered place before the rains head in. As with the previous post on rubber versus steel, the key is to maintain a trajectory for your ultimate goal while recognizing that if you just push for that goal without stopping you’ll miss so much along the way (and arrive at the end exhausted). Stay focused so you don’t trip, but don’t forget to look up now and then to see where you’re headed. Some parts of the trail will be easy, where you can look around at the sights along the way, oblivious to precisely where your feet land. Other times there will be boulders, steep drop-offs, or slippery rocks that you’ll need to watch closely as you walk. As a scientist, there will be crucial moments that require your full attention: a technically difficult experiment that you get one shot at, planning an annual sampling expedition for the two weeks of the year that you can get samples, or writing code that will take months to run before you get an answer. When these moments come, give your focus to them and think about each step you take, and what can go wrong at each point, in order to achieve success during that crucial moment. At the same time that staying focused on one step at a time is important, don’t forget to look up now and then and see where you’re heading to make sure it’s still in the right direction. It’s easy to think that because we’re still on a trail that we’re going the right way, but oftentimes we might find ourselves on a side path we never intended to be on if we are only looking one footfall ahead at a time. If you find yourself staring down at the same assay or experiment over and over again, take a look at the bigger picture and see if it’s still the right direction. Even if you thought that this was the right way, it might turn out that the data is trying to tell you otherwise, but you may need to look up from your pipettes in order to see it more clearly. The journey is better with friends. There are times when a solitary hike is a good thing, but more often it makes for a better time when you share the road with friends. You’re less likely to feel bitter in a downpour or to get mad at yourself for missing a turn if you’ve got good friends and colleagues who are on the same road with you. At the end of a long hike you’ll have someone to laugh with about the casual mishaps and to exchange stories with at the trail’s end pub, celebrating feats of strength and good views and commiserating with each other about the rainstorms and the sprained ankles. While you may be the only one wrapped up in your specific project, you likely have a lab or an office full of other students or researchers who are on the same journey as you. Share your joys and challenges and listen to theirs in return. Even if you’re working on completely different topics, you’ll often find a lot of intersections you can meet at or parallels between your separate journeys, whether it be rejected papers or terrible lab meetings. Keep these people close during your own journey, and let them remind you that you’re not out there in the wildnerness on your own. There will be ups and downs. Some hikes you’ll do will be fantastic, sunny, and you won’t get lost or even tired out. Other hikes will absolutely suck, it will be rainy and windy and you won’t even get to the summit, or you’ll get there and there will be nothing to see but a giant cloud. Likewise, some experiments will work the first time around, you’ll have beautiful results for publication, but other experiments won’t work at all, or you’ll get results that confound everything you did already and you’ll sit there scratching your head about what to do next. The key is to persevere through the rougher times, knowing that if you keep on going you can reach another valley where the sun is shining and the p-values are significant. Part of the destination is the journey. As many millions of ways as it’s been said before, it’s not just about where you end up but how you get there. If you get to the end exhausted and not having seen what was along the way, was it as worthwhile as it could have been? If you went straight to your destination without facing challenges or enjoying the sunshine, did you learn as much as you could have? You learn as much about the end result along the journey itself as much as you do just from arriving at the end. The gear you really needed and what was superfluous, what trails led to something good and which ones got you nowhere, and finding the balance between the moments of intense focus and moments when you just enjoyed the walk. When you actually get there, you’ll recognize the importance of every step you took more so than when you’re on your way. I had this stark realization at the end of my PhD defense. I gave an hour-long seminar about 4 years of work, then I was asked a few questions about future experiments and experimental design for maybe 45 minutes by my graduate committee. Then I was done, and in a matter of a few minutes deliberation and signing paperwork, I had a PhD. My first thought wasn’t exuberance, it was … Really? That was it? And now I’m a PhD? I felt a bit cheated, like I hadn’t done enough to warrant the end result of becoming a doctor. Soon enough you realize that it wasn’t that hour-long seminar and a few questions that got you the PhD but rather the 4 years of work that led up to it. The years of staying focused on answering questions while knowing when to take a side path and explore something else, of pushing through the rainy days while enjoying the sunshine when it came, and also writing a really long, probably rather boring 182-page word document. But that’s a topic for a future blog post. One of the things I love most about hiking is that it’s one of the things that truly anyone can do. You’ll see everyone on the trail: from the power couple with matching Gore Tex jackets, a laminated topographical map, and a portable oven for making steak and ale pies on the summit, to the stag party guys in tennis shoes and jeans. While everyone comes to the mountain with their own set of gear and motivations, we all get up the mountain the same way: one step at a time. With the right mindset, navigating to a rewarding career (or just getting through your PhD) is something that everyone can do by taking it one step at a time, by being prepared, and by learning from the journey as much as working towards getting to the destination. How to make a fulfilling break: Using your time away from work to achieve a better work-life balance9/9/2015
People like to comment to me about how much I travel, asking where I’m jet-setting off to this weekend and if I ever stay at home. I’m not sure how to respond sometimes. Most of the time I’m proud of all the places I get to see and things I get to do, but occasionally the comments make me think that I travel a bit too much. This feeling is greatly enhanced by the irony that this week’s post is currently being written from a hotel room in Dublin on a RyanAir-enabled weekend away from home (with flights so cheap, why not?). While marking off cities and countries from my massive travel to do list is something of an obsession of mine, it’s also one of the major ways I unwind. Spending an afternoon wandering the side streets of a new city on the look-out for hidden cafes and photo-worthy architecture or scarfing down a ham and cheese sandwich on the summit of a hike are things I greatly enjoy. More importantly, these adventures, both big and small, help me unwind when I’ve been twisted and my tightened by stress, responsibilities, and the daily grind. Traveling allows me to rebuild my respective, refreshes me, and leaves me feeling ready to tackle my work's problem when I get back home.
So often as PhD students, post-docs, and senior academics, we feel like we just can’t take a break, as if something just has to be done right away. While there certainly are moments when deadlines and teaching commitments and emails pile on us endlessly, a lot of the ‘academic guilt’ comes during times when our workload is at more of a steady state. We very easily let ourselves fall into this mental trap, in which we think we should be doing something at every given moment: reading/writing a paper or getting lab results analyzed or trying to find a date for that continually-rescheduled meeting with your collaborators. Academic guilt is necessary, to some extent, for academic life to function, since a full-fledged academic is essentially their own boss and has no one to tell them during the day when they need to get back to the grind. At the same time, too much urgency can be a hindrance both to our productivity and to our work-life balance. For those of us working in academia, it's crucially important to balance our work with our personal lives, using well-timed breaks coupled with periods of sustained work. Scientists seem to be pretty good at the periods of sustained work part, but can be terrible at the well-timed breaks part. The key with taking breaks (and not feeling guilty about it) is to make each break a fulfilling one, one that leaves you energized for the rest of the day or week ahead. There are many effortless alternatives to working, as any Tumblr and Netflix binger knows all too well, but simply not working is not always a fulfilling break. In order to have a fulfilling break, one where you come back to your problem with a clear mind and a go-get-it attitude, you should use your free time to purposefuly unwind, unthink, un-everything. We all need moments to scroll through the vast wasteland of the Internet or to watch our favorite TV series with a glass (or three) of wine, but in order to come back to work the next day or after the weekend ready to tackle what you left unfinished, your free time can’t be spent with only these types of breaks. A break can be a large one or a small one, maybe a lunch outside on a sunny day or a Saturday out with friends instead of working on that experiment that just ‘has’ to get done. Whatever your schedule and needs are, a fulfilling break should enable you to do the following things: - Step back and see the bigger picture of what you’re doing and why you’re stressed about it. If there’s a hard deadline for a paper resubmission or grant application, it’s easy to see why getting things done for that time is stressful. But what about those moments when you feel rushed but don’t really have an explanation? A lot of the times that we feel stressed, we may not even know why and there may not be a concrete reason for it, or we might be making a mountain out of a molehill. Many people respond to stress by working, even when the stress originates from some other part of our life and issues outside the lab. Maybe your 10-year high school reunion is coming up, where you know all your classmates will ask what you’ve been up to for the past 10 years, which somehow triggers your memory into remembering that you didn’t work on that manuscript for a few weeks, and then, What have I DONE with my life, why didn't I just get a 'normal job' like all my other classmates, and also why do I have nothing to wear to the reunion? At times like this, its important to take a breath and consider whether getting more data points is really the solution for addressing what may be some bigger issue that has nothing to do with your research. At times like this, that weekend trip to the lake or an evening drink with friends instead of working nonstop can give you a better perspective on your life, your stresses, and the necessity of stepping back and taking a deep breath now and then. - Let your mind refocus when you run into problems. Problems in science tend to require a lot of focus to figure out. Why did all my cells die? Why am I getting this error message while running the data processing script that was working perfectly 2 days ago? Staying focused is good, but if you stare at something for too long you’ll lose your sight along the periphery. You can easily end up banging your head against a problem trying to throw everything you have at it, only later to recognize the solution while walking out of the building three hours later. Taking a step back from a problem, difficult or simple, is a good strategy because it gives you a chance to think about all the components of what you’re working on instead of the one thing that’s giving you trouble. Often times the solution was a simple one, maybe you forgot to add serum to your media or you saved your data file as a different format. Taking a break at the moments when you get the most frustrated can help allow your brain to get to those ‘a-ha!’ moments of remembrance and insight that can’t come when you’re staring a problem in the face and letting it get you flustered. - Let your brain disconnect from work, as much as it can. It’s difficult to unwire ourselves completely from our work, especially with those 11pm emails from your advisor asking what you’ve been up to in the lab for the past week. As hard as it may be, work on setting aside a part of your day and your week when you don’t check emails or work on the pile of data/papers you brought home. This gives your week more structure that you can fill with a fulfilling break, knowing that you won’t have to be bothered by some science emergency (which usually ends up not being a real emergency at all). Professors do tend to send emails at odd hours, perhaps due to their own odd life-balance, but likely it's because they just enjoy science that much and want to know what you're doing. It's both full-time work and hobby for some, but remember that you don’t have to reply to every one of their emails instantly. Most likely they’re releasing a barrage of emails to all their collaborators and students at once when they have a free moment, so don’t always feel like you’re being singled out. - Have Internet-free moments. In the wired workplace especially, this goes hand-in-hand with disconnecting from work. Whether it’s during the work week or on the weekends, take some time to unplug from your laptop/tablet/phone/whatever. Go to a museum with a friend, take a long walk somewhere new in your town, or go out to dinner and leave your phone on airplane mode. It’s hard to unplug when you have the world in your pocket 24/7, so when you have moments where you can enjoy the moment, be sure to do so. - Take time to focus on a different problem/idea/concept/activity. While binging on the internet and Netflix can help us disconnect, it’s not always the best way to focus away from work. We can get good at multi-tasking, watching TV at the same time as checking our phones or reading a paper. So make your brain take a break by thinking about something else. Read a Sherlock Holmes story and see if you can figure out the case before he does, dig our your oil pastels from your high school art class, learn how to say ‘the turtle drinks milk’ in a different language, or call your grandma and ask her if she has any extra knitting needles. Whatever suits your style, find something that you’ll enjoy doing that provides an external focal point for your brain, something that’s not as easy to let professor emails and thoughts of your next experiment slip in without you being ready to tackle them at your desk the next day. To find your ideal fulfilling break, all you have to do is look for something that fits your style, something that helps building you up when you’re feeling down and that unwinds your knots when you’re twisted around. My fulfilling breaks come both from travel and from tae kwon do. Both give me a reason to not check my phone for emails for blocks of time. Both give me things to focus on, like figuring out which trail or street to follow or remembering all the moves in my pattern. Both make me feel happy when I’m done (even though I may be physically exhausted from endless walking or kicking, depending on the activity), and that good feeling reflects back on the rest of my life and my work. Both take time away from when I could be reading papers or analyzing data, but when I do come back to work I feel like I have energy and take on those tasks with more fervor than if I just trudged through them constantly. I can also enjoy both at different time scales: tae kwon do is there twice a week to finish off a day in the lab, and travel is there on the weekends to clear my mind after a busy week (or two). There are also strategies you can use to relax during the work day to keep yourself from feeling like you’re banging your head against a problem or when you fall into a pit of unproductivity: - Take a walk. This is especially good for those of us that spend most of our day at a computer. You’ve likely already heard the lecture on taking a break from staring at your computer monitor so you don’t go cross-eyed, but stepping away from your monitor is also good for a quick 5-10 minute mental unwinding at work. If you feel yourself being unproductive or opening a few extra tabs of buzzfeed articles, take a walk somewhere in your lab building or make an excuse for a short walk around campus. A trip to the corner store or a lap around your building gives your eyes a chance to re-focus on the world and can let your brain think about the idea or problem you’re working on when you don’t have it staring you back in the face. - Have a fika. No, its not a new Science with Style candy bar (although that could be a good way to pay for the URL registration). ‘Fika’ is a Swedish word/concept which means ‘to have coffee’, but it’s more than just a way to get some extra caffeine. Fika is having a break with colleagues, friends, or family, and if you work in Sweden then you’ll even have a dedicated break time during your work day. It’s a time when you socialize but also to take a step away from your work for a few set moments of your day. You may not get a set time off from work (or have any fikabröds to go with your coffee) but you can start your own fika trend with office mates or lab mates and bring some of that Scandinavian culture to your own daily schedule (IKEA mugs and blåbär juice are a great fika starter kit, and tea is an appropriate substitute for those who prefer their caffeine from other sources). The hardest part about taking a break is that there are times when we feel like we just can’t. When we feel anxious about getting something done or that something MUST be figured out right away. The thing about a career in science is that it’s not an easy job to have. A lot of the answers are unknown and won’t always come to you easily, especially if you’re in an endless staring contest with them. Recognizing where your stresses come from as well as recognizing when you’re stuck can help you not only figure out what you can do to feel better but also to move forward with a problem and be more productive with your work. Any job, and science especially, comes with a lot of external pressures and stressors, but staying focused on the bigger picture of your world can help you face the stresses that you have to face and keep at bay the ones that you make for yourself. And now as this post is ready for some editorial wrap-ups, I can feel free to wander the streets of Dublin again before my flight back home and another week of work. Before taking my 313th flight (yes, I’ve counted the total number of flights I’ve been on in my life. Everyone needs a hobby!), I’ll pop over to the Porterhouse brewery to enjoy some Irish music and a final pint, knowing that I’ve crafted a decent post to self-validate my incessant need for travelling. But while there’s still free wi-fi, I might look into the weekend flight prices to Prague in the autumn, as I’ve heard that Czech beer (and sightseeing) is divine! |
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