There's an unspoken agreement around these parts that we don't put naughty words in the title. I know that the person who wrote this letter has said more than her share of naughty words. In short:
Isis,
I'm a third year bio grad student at Awesome Major Research University, and I could use some Goddess-ly advice.
I was pretty lucky as an undergraduate- got handed a project, had it work pretty quickly, had a professor who let me really take ownership of it, got a first-author paper out by the time I graduated, got into AMRU. I therefore came into grad school feeling like hot shit and that I could pretty much do no wrong. I joined the lab of Awesome Women Scientist, read the literature, and came up with a new angle on a project that seemed a little crazy on premise but guaranteed to hit the Big 3 journals if it actually succeeded like I think it can.
That was a year and a half ago, and unfortunately pretty much nothing at all I've done since joining AWS's lab has worked. Since I took over this part of the lab from a post-doc whose lab notebook was literally a stack of scribbled-on paper towels, is totally unresponsive to email now that she's gone, and is crazy to boot, I have to rebuild the methods from scratch since no one else does what I do. I still think my project could work and be interesting, but I can't seem to get the tools to cooperate long enough to ask the cool questions. While I understand that all this failure is supposed to be character building and whatnot, it's gotten me to the point that I dread going to work because I figure that there's no point since everything always fails and since I feel that as in baseball, there should be no crying in lab. How do you deal with long periods of result-less-ness?
AWS is unfortunately off on a months-long lecture circuit due to her Awesomeness; she knows I've been having trouble but doesn't exactly have time to hold my hand while I work through this and I feel awkward asking her to, particularly through email. My friends at AMRU all commiserate, since we all did pretty well in undergrad/industry in order to get here and now all face similar challenges, but it's hard to internalize that it's worth the effort to get back up after getting trampled down so many times.Any advice? A reset button on my brain that I've missed? Even just a Goddess-style kick in the ass probably would help, especially if you manage to do it with fabulous shoes.
Thanks,
Whiny Female Grad StudentPS: Just started a Lost marathon of my own- I'm pretty sure Claire with all her "something is WRONG with my baby"-whining would be an antivaxxer if she weren't, you know, stranded on a crazy-ass island. Thoughts?
First thing's first:
Figure 1: Knock your shit off. There's no crying in science. That'll be $1.00.
Actually, there's a lot of crying in science. I know this because I am the queen of it. I have a running joke with a mentor of mine that my shit only works if I cry. He and I have developed a strange relationship. I call him up, tell him I am having an issue, we sit and have a coffee, I blubber a little bit, and then within moments of walking away I usually have some epiphany. I can't explain it, but I also know better than to question the science furies.
Figure 2: Now that I am all Lost-ified, I imagine them kind of like this.
You're learning a hard lesson, little muffin. Science does not always turn out the way we hope or plan when we do an experiment. That is sometimes really, really challenging for the undergraduates in our lab to internalize -- that their experiments will not work quickly and easily. But, before we get to what you do about it, you really do need to put your chin up and get back to it. It's alright to have moments of tear-inducing frustration, but when that perpetuates into a state of mind, you've gotta shake it off, plan out a new strategy, and move on. It's not easy, but that hot, hot science ain't gonna do itself.
In my experience, there are two reasons your stuff doesn't work:
I can sympathize with you. When I was in graduate school, my nemesis was the HPLC (high performance liquid chromatograph). I began a project with high hopes and dreams of looking at changes in a particular chemical compound with a particular intervention and my advisor suggested I use the HPLC that was sitting in the corner of the lab, untouched. I was really excited about it until I learned that no one in the lab knew how to use it. I went to my advisor and he told me he had no idea how to use it. A previous student had been the primary operator and she had long since departed. Many of the users guides were missing.
I spent many a nights, sitting on the floor of the lab, weeping over some broken component that I had to figure out how to replace. Like you and the former wackaloon postdoc, I did not have access to the wackaloon student who had previously worked with the machine. So, I had to take matters into my own hands. I found many of the instructional materials online. I also actively sought out other experts in the technique and called them or wrote to them. They were crucial to my success. That may be what you have to do here. Having to find my own help made me one scrappy science chick. I am now fantastically good and finding resources and I have developed a "character flaw" that makes the people in the lab crazy - I don't believe it when someone tells me that something simply can't be done and I frequently tell them, "Don't dare return and tell me 'no.'" You've simply got to find the person who can help you do what you need. I'm guessing that this postdoc did not reinvent the wheel and that there is someone in the world doing something similar. Reach out to that person and see if you can get a little help.
If the people around you can't help you solve the problem, then,, as much as you don't want to hear it now, this exercise in self-reliance will make you a better scientist.
"Blah, blah, blah, Isis. Fuck character-building." I know, little muffin. But, it will.
2) You are doing it right but you're not getting the results you expected.
That's a tough one and also something I've faced. Once upon a time in a laboratory far, far away, I had this hypothesis that I thought was extremely well-founded. I mean, I had literature to back me up and everything. I designed an experiment to test my hypothesis and ended up with something completely unexpected. I spent what seemed like an eternity reexamining the 500,000,0000 ways I could have "screwed things up" and in the end concluded that I hadn't. How do I know? Well, I think there are two easy ways to tell if you've got an unexpected result or you've got an overactive pipetting thumb:
- Have you done the necessary controls?
- Are your strange results able to be reproduced by someone else?
But, at the end of the day, you've got a research mentor to help you tell the difference between these two cases. Do some self-investigation as to which you think it might be. A month feels like forever when you think you're floundering, but in the overall scope of your career it's not so bad. You can follow my advice as much as you can, but your advisor need not "hold your hand" to help. It's her responsibility as a mentor to guide you and you should be able to bring her targeted questions to help you troubleshoot. You both are invested in the success of this project.
But, here's the other thing I am going to add. Science if full of highs and lows. Projects that work quickly and projects that take longer than we expect or that don't work the way we expect. I have a physician colleague who is both a hilarious man and an anesthesiologist. I was having a tough time once with something and he told me, "a good surgeon doesn't lose her self-worth in the poor outcome of a single patient." It was exactly the advice I needed at the time and it's become a little bit of a mantra for me.. You were successful when you began graduate school. You had qualities that led you to a particular chain of successes and those qualities haven't changed just because you're struggling now.
So toughen up, Buttercup and get back to it and let me know how it goes. You're going to be alright. In the words of the great India.Arie...
Video 1: This too shall pass. This is my favorite kick in the ass song. I like the sentiment that anything bad will eventually pass...
Education
Life Science
Comments
*standing applause*
This should be required reading for every grad student, if not every student, period.
Posted by: Pteryxx | December 1, 2009 12:55 AM
Dr Isis you are good!
You have distilled an ocean of agony and self-doubt into a simple way forward
The three things every researcher, and their supervisor need to check
Have you done the necessary controls?
Are your strange results able to be reproduced by someone else?
Where's your list of targeted questions?
Posted by: Michael fitzGerald | December 1, 2009 1:10 AM
Dr. Isis- I just printed a copy to keep near my desk. I found myself nodding the whole way through. I got a good giggle of the no crying in science part. In particular because I have a mentor who has dealt with the sniffly phone calls throughout grad school. It is so hard to remember the things you've said when you are *in-the-middle-of-the-giant-mess*. I hope WFGS appreciates what you have written.
Posted by: planetgrad | December 1, 2009 1:27 AM
Such a well timed post! My "shnizz" isn't working either. Whiny Female Grad Student - you are not alone! I spent a good part of this afternoon weeping over my equipment, cursing whichever science god cursed me and my results.
There are two thoughts that cheer me up when I'm results-less, one is that I will get results eventually, it's just going to take a while and two, it means that I'm super-awesome at fixing my equipment and am becoming self-reliant and more employable with every setback. Also, it helps to get out of the lab for a few hours (or days) to come back with a fresh pair of eyes.
Thanks Dr. Isis, for your excellent advice.
Posted by: Emma | December 1, 2009 1:32 AM
Addendum, I've got another old mentor-type friend who, when I'm down, tells me, "Well Isis, it's called 'research.' If you could find the answer easily the first time, it would just be called 'search.'"
That usually makes me chuckle too.
Posted by: Isis the Scientist | December 1, 2009 1:34 AM
Yes, yes, yes....BUT. It's called 'research', but do we have to reinvent the wheel? I hear what Whiny Female Grad Student is saying when she speaks about being the loan player regarding her project. This maybe true in her lab/department, even university, BUT there are other labs out there who she could turn to, IF her adviser made the effort to help.
Whiny Female Grad Student you seem very confident, competent, smart and enthusiastic. This does not (based on this one blog) seem to be a case where you are just being lame.
Its clear proper engagement is lacking. Without this its going to take a long time (and your love for your work) to figure out which of the two suggestions posted by Dr. Isis are closer to the issues.
Good luck!
Posted by: CFS | December 1, 2009 4:07 AM
I would add that it gets better, partly because you'll get better at solving things, partly because in the future you'll usually have a couple of projects at various stages of completion, so when one is sucking, you can pause to work on a manuscript or whatever. Years 2-4 of grad school are pretty universally bad.
Posted by: Dr Jekyll & Mrs Hyde | December 1, 2009 4:28 AM
This should be required reading for every grad student, if not every student, period. (from Pteryxx)
And postdoc. We postdocs know this, but sometimes forget or tune it out.
Thanks, Dr. Isis! A well-timed post for me, as well :)
Posted by: biochem belle | December 1, 2009 6:57 AM
You have omitted a third--and potentially most important--possibility, which is that what one is trying to do just ain't gonna work no matter what (i.e., yield reliable interpretable results), for reasons that will never become apparent. This is why it is even more important for scientists to develop the skill of knowing when to *stop* going down an experimental road as it is deciding which roads to embark on in the first place.
Posted by: Comrade PhysioProf | December 1, 2009 7:37 AM
Great post, Isis. I spent last summer toiling over a project, running controls, asking for help from people who know more than me, and nothing worked. Finally my adviser made us an appointment with another guy in the department who is an expert on the stuff I was trying to do. He spent five minutes going over our data, and previously published data, and concluded that we were chasing an impossible result. That was discouraging, for sure, but at the same time I was glad that my adviser trusted my work enough to believe I was doing everything right, and that there must be another explanation for my failed experiments. I've moved on to other projects, which also haven't worked yet, but I see improvement every time I repeat things. 'Re'search indeed.
Posted by: Laura | December 1, 2009 8:09 AM
This little muffin's problem sounds pretty normal to me. Things will turn around.
In addition to the above advice, I'd suggest that the student stop whining about the postdoc. There are very few people in science who keep good lab notebooks (this is not out of maliciousness, but due to lack of time). And the postdoc is probably of the opinion that if she figured it all out, then so can the student. It isn't the postdoc's job to spoon-feed the student. Although it sounds like this particular postdoc could have been more helpful, the student needs to stop worrying about what this postdoc should have done and start focusing on what she can do to get herself out of this valley.
I've posted a few times on the topic of failure: This one is brief but I'd particularly recommend this one and the associated graph for anyone feeling shitty about the highs and lows of research.
Posted by: Candid Engineer | December 1, 2009 8:21 AM
oh i needed this!! my schnizz hasn't been working so well either and i'm in the midst of prepping for oral comps without much time (tim gun speak:) "make it work". this is the pep talk i've been needing.
thank you!
Posted by: quietandsmalladventures | December 1, 2009 8:30 AM
Fair enough, Brother Prof. There is conceivably a third option where your shit will never work and you will never know why. Although, I would suspect that the "never know why" part is relative to how much time you have to solve the problem.
If you are an early career investigator who needs to focus on the quantity of work produced in the early stages of your career, you might need to cut your losses earlier than a comfortably tenured old dude who has the resources to figure out the "why it doesn;t work."
I suppose in that case it is good that, at every stage in our careers, we have mentors to help us consider our circumstances and make that decision.
Posted by: Isis the Scientist | December 1, 2009 9:16 AM
My thesis advisor used to tell me, "the data is the data." You have to accept it and do your best to figure it out.
And yes, there is crying in lab.
Posted by: Sxydocma1 | December 1, 2009 9:30 AM
Hmmm. This reminds me why "fake"* data has its perks.. My project this semester hasn't started because none of my shit will grow. :-(
*Fake meaning- computer-generated. Something has to be said for working on a project for 2months and then within 5 seconds generate 15MB of data. Its been interesting adjusting to "wet lab" data collection....
Posted by: Eugenie | December 1, 2009 9:39 AM
Some discoveries in science may be greeted with cries of "Eureka!" but the greatest start with "What the FUCK!"
Posted by: D. C. Sessions | December 1, 2009 9:49 AM
This student should know that their experiences are totally normal. The student might take comfort in this post- the graph in particular is reminiscent of what a lot of people experience regarding highs and lows in research.
Posted by: Candid Engineer | December 1, 2009 9:56 AM
I call him up, tell him I am having an issue, we sit and have a coffee, I blubber a little bit, and then within moments of walking away I usually have some epiphany.
This is sometimes called the confessional method of debugging an experiment/software. I've used it, too, and it often brings good results. Assuming your correspondent has some mentor she can trust in her advisor's absence (postdoc, senior grad student, or even another faculty member), she should talk things over with that person.
And yes, the nature of research is that we *don't* know what we are doing. If we did, it wouldn't be research.
Posted by: Eric Lund | December 1, 2009 10:00 AM
In my office & my lab hang signs with this quote from Einstein:
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called Research."
That and making it OK, even encouraged, to drop the F-bomb when need be (my techs consider it a term of endearment) have kept us going through several lean years. We have data that suggested a kick-ass hypothesis that fits with lots of other studies and with clinical observations. The tools we need to test it either aren't there or don't work reliably.
Often when you think you have found the meaning of life, what you have really identified is the limits of our technology, the reason why no one has done this before. It's an OK place for a PI (especially one already tenured), but a LOUSY place for a grad student...
Posted by: Pascale | December 1, 2009 10:45 AM
I agree with Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde- the middle years of grad school are just hard. I found years 3 and 4 to be particularly soul destroying. It is the darkest part of the tunnel: you're too far in to see the light at the entrance, and not far enough in to see the light at the end.
I still remember what a postdoc who found me crying in the bathroom told me: "It is always the bugs, not you." I was doing my first rotation in grad school. I'd been trying to do a simple cloning experiment- we had a two part protein, and the postdoc who was cloning the N-terminus had it working no problem. Try as I might, I just could not clone the C-terminus.
The friendly postdoc was right: it was the bugs. We had an obscure codon usage issue, and once we figured that out, I was able to clone the C-terminus portion without trouble.
This experience may be one of the reasons I ended up in a more computational field. At least when something goes wrong in a computational experiment, you can be pretty sure its your fault, not the computer's.
However, I have also cried over difficult to find bugs in my code. And I have sacrificed as many pints of chocolate chip ice cream to the computer gods as I did to the molecular biology gods. Here is my favorite quote for dealing with bugs that refuse to be found:
"I hate this computer, I wish they would sell it. It never does what I want it to do, only what I tell it."
Posted by: Cloud | December 1, 2009 1:27 PM
You don't even have to be student to know where this student is coming from. I once wasted 10 liters of culture before I realized that the reason my very reliable Quiagen kit wasn't working was that I had failed to refrigerate an important reagent.
And then there's when you and your PI have assumed that the unexpected data is due to your being new, and are getting ready to start the huge experiment again when a visiting researcher pops by and says "Oh that can't possibly work, the two pathways cancel each other out." That was kind of validating.
As for crying in science, sometimes, just sometimes being on the edge of tears but valiantly trying to hold it together will get someone to help you with an instrument.
Posted by: JustaTech | December 1, 2009 2:49 PM
Oooo booo hooo. I have those two problems and I'm only three monthes into graduate school. The instrument that I am using is so rare that you probably could count the number of people who use it on two hands. The instruction manual of said instrument is riddled with typos and inconsistencies to the point where I really can't trust the thing.
Posted by: Adam_Y | December 1, 2009 3:42 PM
Thank you so much Isis!
Posted by: WFGS | December 1, 2009 5:45 PM
All of the above posts are true, true, true.
Most true is 'it happens to anyone who has really-truly done research' at whatever level.
Also true is the 'mid-PhD blues' - which at the time seems like a very long dark tunnel. ...BUT...
When you emerge from the tunnel, you really-truly know more about your project than anyone else in the whole world. Think about that. YOU own that little bit of knowledge, not any advisor or previous researcher - IT IS YOURS AND NO-ONE CAN EVER, EVER TAKE THAT KNOWLEDGE AWAY FROM YOU.
(Just another way of saying what the Goddess and others already said).
d.
Posted by: d. | December 1, 2009 6:20 PM
I've always told myself "This is science. If it was easy, someone would have done it already".
Also that every piece of scientific equipment has a zero put on the end of the price for the exciting bonus of getting something that doesn't work yet.
There is no crying in my lab, but there can be a fair amount of Anglo-Saxon invective aimed at inanimate objects (rule - invective is only allowed at the inanimate objects that count as equipment, not faculty or students, and only once you've made sure the door is locked and no visitors are coming).
Posted by: DrMaybe | December 2, 2009 8:57 AM
That letter could easily be describing Sci's first three years in grad school. I did indeed have a stack of scribbled paper towels and post-it's for methods (LAB NOTEBOOKS, PEOPLE!), a bunch of equipment that did not work, and a possible model system that was VERY theoretical. It does suck, and there was a LOT of tears. But in the end, it worked and it's been pretty well worth it scientifically, and I'm now a super, super expert. So there are positive things. Try to keep them in mind. Coffee also helps...
Posted by: Scicurious | December 2, 2009 10:48 AM
I also meant to add (also echoing others) that if it was easy and straightforward to get a postgraduate degree, they would give one to almost everyone off the street.
Yes it is hard, and overcoming the difficulties is what makes it worthwhile, and what makes the degree (WHEN you finally get it) something to be extra proud of - only a very small proportion of the population are as clever as you are.
(One of my young family members said to me that what he learnt from doing a PhD, and what helped him in his later career that had nothing superficially to do with the subject matter of his PhD, was that "ALL PROBLEMS ARE THE SAME. You just have to take them apart, look at the pieces, and put them back together in a way that makes sense.".)
d.
Posted by: d. | December 2, 2009 5:34 PM
I have to admit, I did decide to quit partway through my research (I'm an ABD) and in retrospect I think it was probably the right thing to do. My specimens were supposed to be embedded in plastic for electron microscopy, and I got a bad batch of reagent: the catalyst to make the plastic harden turned out to be a dud. The company apologized and sent a new batch of stuff at no charge, but in the meantime I had six months' worth of irreplaceable specimens ruined and no good way to get more.
In retrospect, I was in the wrong field anyway, and eventually was able to figure that out. The plastic really didn't have anything to do with that, but I went on with my life on a different basis and am happy with the new direction I took.
Posted by: Chris | December 2, 2009 6:29 PM