I've spent the last few weeks trying to optimize some experiments, and this week, jackpot! I got the first n=2 I'll need for one critical finding of my project. I was delighted, Advisor was thrilled, and everyone congratulated me on getting traction on these difficult experiments.
This weekend, though, some depression has set in. Odd though it sounds, I harbor some resentment about how happy this week made me. The previous couple of weeks were frustrating, full of sort of aimless troubleshooting, and it's still unclear whether anything I did actually improved my experimental setup or if things "just started working" as they sometimes do.
What I resent is how dependent I am on getting data to be happy. I mean, I'm reasonably happy to head into lab most days, I like my co-workers and my advisor, I find experiments interesting, and I'm usually able to shake off a particularly bad day with a beer or two. Still, though, if two or three weeks go by without tangible progress (preferably figure-ready data, although preliminary data or equipment fixing count too), I'm depressed.
What I'm trying to say is that there are times when I wish I had a job that didn't leave me feeling worthless anytime there's a dearth of apparent progress.
Then I usually get some more data, cheer up, and think that science is grand after all.
15 years ago
11 comments:
What I resent is how dependent I am on getting data to be happy.
MUAAHAHAHAHAH!!! You know what this means, right?
:"I'm Dr. J and I'm a dataholic."
: "Hi Dr. J! Welcome to Dataholics Anonymous."
You are at the stage where you need to get a bunch of minions working for you 24/7 to generate data so you can get your fix. 1 ticket to PI-ville please.
In the process, some of your minions are gonna get hooked too, but such is life!
I'd like to think it means what anonymoustache thinks it means. But there are days when I think it means that I am a bad scientist because I don't enjoy the "process" enough. I feel like you or DM might have had a post back at the old site about how one has to enjoy the process, because the data are few and far between?
uuuhhmmm, no. I think it means what anonymoustache thinks it means!!!
You do have to tolerate the process enough to keep yourself working hard in the intervals between data-driven dopamine surges. These intervals get smaller the more trainees you have working in your lab. This is my motivation for attempting to grow my lab as large as is possible.
Many very successful PIs will, in honest moments, admit to having been desultory and even barely competent experimentalists as trainees. (I, personally, was not one of these, and was known as having excellent "hands".)
oh yeah, welcome to the club.
you can learn to appreciate the process a little more... one key ingredient is, ironically enough, faith.
you have to have faith that you will either
a) get it to work or
b) find another way to get the answer.
so i like to think of it as faith in myself and faith in the scientific method.
(But I do have some friends who literally pray that their experiments will work. I'm happy to say their success rate is the same as mine.)
So, you know, whatever works for you.
I like to think, whether it's true or not, that when something doesn't work I'm just ruling out that set of conditions. That every failure leads you one step closer to success.
So I'm with you and anonymoustache: we are ready for having minions. I've been ready for a while!
Unlike physioprof, I have decent hands, but I'm better at some things than others, so I can really feel your pain.
When it's working, you love it.
When it's not, there's all this self-doubt about whether it's just really hard or if we're just failures, am I right?
Most of the time, I find out after the fact that it was actually really hard.
Most of the people I know who have 'excellent hands' were just lucky enough to work on things that are either easier than what I do, or things that suit their particular talents perfectly. But there is some luck involved, or they've deliberately avoided things that they think will be too hard to do. Sometimes it is a wise choice.
For better or worse, I tend to go where the interesting questions are, whether it's what I'm good at or not. Sometimes that means I have to work a lot harder to get the answer.
I think learning not to ride the mood swing is really hard, but worth striving for. I think I've made a lot of progress not letting the experimental mood swings get me. It's the other ones (the politics) that really get me down.
me too, me too. I'd like to think it means i need to move on to PIville, now if only someone would hire me...
I wonder if this type of data-driven mood swing accounts for the number of manic-depressives in science...
For better or worse, I tend to go where the interesting questions are, whether it's what I'm good at or not. Sometimes that means I have to work a lot harder to get the answer.
This represents poor judgment on your part and, more importantly, your post-doctoral mentor's part.
Before new experiments are embarked upon in my lab, we engage in an explicit decision-making process in which we assess the costs and benefits of doing so. This analysis includes weighing, inter alia, the following factors: the potential best-case payoff of the experiments (this is what you would call identifying "where the interesting questions are"), the intrinsic difficulty of the experiments, how much experience we already have in the required experimental approaches (do they play to our methodological strengths?), how long will it take to perform the experiments, how likely is it that the experiments will end up inconclusive, how likely is it that our competitors are on the same path, are there better experimental approaches to the same question, are there even more important questions that would have to be forgone in order to address these.
Most of the people I know who have 'excellent hands' were just lucky enough to work on things that are either easier than what I do, or things that suit their particular talents perfectly. But there is some luck involved, or they've deliberately avoided things that they think will be too hard to do. Sometimes it is a wise choice.
It is not "luck", whatever that even means. It is the outcome of a decision-making process that takes account of the costs and benefits outlined above. Failing to capitalize on existing methodological expertise is an error of judgment.
And if the perception is that existing methodological expertise is not suited to the "interesting questions", then the error of judgment occurred earlier in spending the time and effort developing that expertise in the first place. Sustained scientific success requires at least some foresight to stay in front of the methodological waves that course through a field. (One of the ways to do this is to actually develop novel methodologies that can be used to address interesting questions.)
...there are times when I wish I had a job that didn't leave me feeling worthless anytime there's a dearth of apparent progress.
Not sure it's the job that's the problem. I'd be willing to bet most people in academic science would chafe at slow progress regardless of what job they had. I think science selects for that kind of personality....
So PIs feel it too? I always feel depressed when I work and work and no good data comes. Usually then my PI says, "Why aren't you generating data?" which of course always cheers me up.
It is good to know that the PIs are asking for the same reasons.
Ms PhD-- I LOVE the idea of comparing the success rates of prayer-targeted experiments vs non! That'd be a great data slide....
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