Do you ever wish you could redo the past 3 months of research?
Perhaps, if you could rewind the clocks, you could redo everything from scratch and finish in 2 weeks! Why? Well, you wouldn’t have forgotten to calibrate your microscope (that delayed your experiment by at least a few days). Oh! And you wouldn’t have tried to analyze your data using that one program that relied on software developed in the early 2000s (the one you tried to debug for at least two nights - one of which was spent with a large tub of ice cream). And then there was that time when you threw out your cell culture, UGH! What a disaster!
Sometimes it feels like this is what grad school is - one stupid mistake after another. Time slows to a crawl, and the end of your degree feels like an ominous brick wall that you’re going to slam into rather than a timely date at which you can celebrate your contributions to science. Do you even deserve to celebrate when your major contributions have been to understanding the wrong way to do research?
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that if we only celebrated research done along a path of zero mistakes, we wouldn’t be celebrating anything. But mistakes often aren’t communicated in dissertations or listed in resumes. It can give an idealistic but inaccurate picture of the clean, tidy path of research that starts with a question and ends with an answer.
I have been so fortunate to have had some wonderful conversations with brilliant researchers who have openly shared their bumps and pitfalls. I think if such anecdotes were more frequently shared, students would forgive their own mistakes more easily, and create more realistic expectations for the results of their research. This is not a roundabout way of saying we should stop trying so hard to avoid mistakes - it’s more so saying “bad stuff happens”, but we can move on, and learn from what went wrong. We are students, after all. It is in our definition to learn, and it’s probably pretty hard to learn how to do things better if you’re perfect all the time (I can only make assumptions, here).
Someone suggested to me that in addition to having PhD seminars, we should have an additional talk by that student called “the Dark PhD”. In this talk, the student would have the opportunity to let out all that went wrong during their degree. I think this would have a multitude of benefits: (1) the poor student can finally get some emotional satisfaction from what is essentially a scheduled rant; (2) we get to learn that we’re not alone in our mistakes; and (3) perhaps we can even gain some wisdom on how to avoid some bumps and hiccups we haven’t yet encountered (note-to-self: always double check the lid on the fruit flies) allowing the entire scientific community to conduct research more smoothly (alight, so maybe I’m overreaching here, but I believe the general idea still stands)!
Might I also add, that so far in this entire blog, I have talked about mistakes? You know, those human things we do that make us take a wrong turn on the road to “success”? (Whatever “success” means - but I’ll touch on that one later.) But that’s not all that can get in our way and make us feel like we’re hopeless at research. What if your research question didn’t lead to the interesting answers you thought it would? What if the technology doesn’t yet exist to help you overcome a roadblock you encountered in your experiment? These are all situations that can leave us feeling like a failure, but it’s not our fault. It’s simply the nature of our study. Science is unpredictable, and we’re just doing our darndest to figure it out!
So sure, you spent your entire degree learning how not to do research - but I’m pretty sure we all do! The meme indicates that at least a lot of us feel that way. Regardless, you have gained a lot of valuable knowledge along the journey that has brought you here. And you are not alone in this journey. Of this, I am sure.
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