What makes you indispensable?
Grad student scientists want to become their advisor’s go-to investigator. This position makes you privy to the advisor’s more closely held thoughts and often spares you from working on trivial/crappy projects. (Within reason: you don’t want to be so trusted that they end up overburdening you with every task they deem important—since we know profs believe everything they work on is of the utmost importance.) A post on Keith Ferrazzi’s blog lists ten tips for becoming indispensable at work. Some of his ideas strongly resonated with me, in the context of doing research.
1. Get out in front and analyze cutting-edge trends and opportunities.
I want to get better at this practice. As grad students we become occupied with our particular project and how to get it done. But the big-time scientists out there seemingly predict what next year’s Nature-level hyped topic will be, and get to work on it this year. I don’t have a ready idea for what to try on this topic, because the “cutting edge” of science that you read is something that was submitted up to 12 months prior to publication. Read the rest of this entry »
Send this man to Toastmasters!
Poor guy. Seriously, though, this is a FAIL on the part of the team’s media relations director for allowing the player to end up in this situation.
What is Toastmasters? Find out here.
Where do you like to recharge online?
A lot of science is waiting five- to twenty-minute intervals for a sample to finish drying, or to finish centrifuging, or to finish reacting. Often, this interval is too brief to do any serious reading that requires information retention, but just enough time to recharge the mind by doing a puzzle or reading interesting non-science ideas. My favorites are below; what are yours?
Career/Networking
Puzzle Games Read the rest of this entry »
One Plus One Equals Three
I visited one of my scientific mentors last week and she gave me this advice: Become an expert in two areas. We did not pursue the topic further, discussing particular areas of materials research, for example, but her words remained in my thoughts after the visit.
Being knowledgeable in two areas certainly gives me more options when selecting research projects, but the real power of knowing two areas is the potential to combine them and discover something worthwhile in a third area. One of my favorite books, The Medici Effect, calls this phenomenon “being in the Intersection.” The book relates the tales of a diverse collection of innovators, past and present (examples: Charles Darwin, Richard Branson, and the guy who invented the card game Magic The Gathering) and how they connected concepts from two seemingly unrelated wells of knowledge to make an astounding discovery and/or a huge pile of money. The book is a great read, and I’m glad my mentor’s words reminded me of it, because I know I should spend more time brainstorming intersectional ideas along with directional ideas (ones that seem to naturally evolve from a previous finding).
In my still-evolving scientific career, I have been fortunate to experience the Intersection once already. By combining electrophoretic deposition—an efficient technique for depositing nanoparticles into solid films from a suspension—with the use of a sacrificial layer—a concept from MEMS fabrication that allows thin sections of material to be suspended freely—we invented a new technique for creating standalone nanoparticle films. Our lab was already using electrophoretic deposition, but because I had previously studied MEMS and done some microfabrication work, I was able to draw from this second well of knowledge. This experience shows the value of collaborating with scientists outside of my field and even taking steps to branch out on my own from the confines of what I’m already comfortable with studying.
In any creative work, most of the ideas put forward end up unused or turn out to be ho-hum. The Medici Effect even points out that past success in finding an Intersection is no guarantee that someone will find it again. So the conclusion here would be: never stop thinking, never stop visiting new places and soaking up new concepts, and never stop trying out new (and seemingly crazy) ideas.
Science is supposed to be challenging.
This sentiment is the key point of an essay by Martin Schwartz that I found. Titled “The importance of stupidity in scientific research,” the piece explains that unless one truly delves into the unknown (thus feeling “stupid”) it is not possible to achieve great, groundbreaking discoveries.
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.
I certainly agree. In materials science, we strive to create new and useful materials or fabrication processes. The foremost question is, “Can we make it?” If it were easy to make, someone else would have done it already. So we struggle through a process of trial-and-error: the first pass is based on known techniques, with subsequent refinements based on what we find after each step with a change in the fabrication parameters. Trying to create something–without a recipe that limits the scope of mistakes one can make–is incredibly humbling.
No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
Conclusion: research is not easy and it certainly is not for everyone. Check your ego at the lab door.
