It’s a funny thing. I stand by what I wrote recently about the painfulness and lack of reward that often characterises the life of the research scientist. With a new beginning, new lab, new projects, I am feeling hopeful now, but I know I will visit those dark places again – if I choose to continue on this path. And yet, I still want to do it.
What do you make of that? Crazy, perhaps, stupid, some might say, hopelessly optimistic, probably. But for now I am going with it.
I’ve let the blog slide for a while, partly because I’ve got better at saying things out loud, face-to-face, to people around me. But today I am feeling a need to put my thoughts on paper (figuratively, at least) and this seems like as good a place as any.
Today was the last day of my current postdoc position. I mean the very last day; you may have noticed that it is Sunday, 31st July. My supervisor’s funding runs out at the end of this month, and with it my job. Thankfully I was fortunate in getting a position in another lab at the same institution, in the same field. Very fortunate, actually. I start tomorrow and I’m looking forward to it, although I haven’t had much time to contemplate it until now.
I had hoped to spend my last week revising my papers, updating my lab books and organising all my things, but of course I ended up doing experiments until the very last minute. There was one really key experiment that a reviewer wanted that, because of the timing, I couldn’t finish until today. So, there I was in the lab on a Sunday, finishing this experiment and finally starting to let it sink in that I was leaving. I threw away reagents, washed up plasticware for the last time and packed my radio and desk lamp and tea bags into an empty box of printer paper. I dreamed of a big exit for myself, a happy ending where I would get this last piece of great data, rejoice in the fact that I hadn’t been chasing a dead end all this time and that my hypotheses were correct, gleefully share it with my supervisor, resubmit my paper and waltz off into the sunset finally feeling good about myself as a scientist. After all this time, I should know better, right? The result was negative. I looked at it a million ways but there was no avoiding the screaming lack of any positive data whatsoever.
I was disappointed, but not really surprised. It fit with the pattern of most of what I have done for the past several years. I put my heart and soul into a project, work my ass off, believe that I have something, and then am let down. I say this not with bitterness, but with a dawning acceptance that this – it seems – is the way it goes in this business. Science takes all you’ve got in terms of effort, dedication, persistence and cunning, and gives you very little in return. Perhaps everyone, except the few who are lucky or blessed with genius, comes to terms with this at some point. When I think about this reality of the life of the scientist, I feel an intense sensation of pain deep inside me. It is a painful truth. I do not mean to be melodramatic when I say that there is something inherently tragic about the whole thing. I wonder if there can ever be a happy ending.
So it is with mixed feelings – of relief and regret, of pride and humility, of hope and resignation – that, late this evening, I finally pick up my box, shut the lab door behind me and walk away.
I’ve been searching for some kind of positive spin to put on my recent experimental ordeal, some message to take away, and I think I finally found it. Friends had said to me, well at least you understand this technique better now – but I have been doing this technique for nearly 10 years and in my previous lab I was considered the expert on it, so that was not much consolation. From a scientific standpoint, all I have managed to do is get the damn thing working again. I still don’t have the data that will hopefully say, drug X has effect Y and we can save the world. I had sighed and said jokingly, I guess whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Well, today I realised that was true. I am stronger. I was talking to Fellow Postdoc #2, who is struggling with a project that would be challenging for anyone, let alone a new postdoc with limited experience. She was feeling pretty discouraged about it all. Don’t worry, I told her. It’s a process. You’ll get there. I was able to say that with one hundred percent honesty and conviction, because I’ve been there and it’s true. I think for the first time in my scientific career, even though I was on the brink of despair, I pushed on through until the end. Science brought me to my knees, but I just kept crawling. And now I’ve been through it once, I will never be so afraid of it again. I have a deeper sense of self-belief. I have been saying this to others for years, but this really is the nature of research. It’s incredibly hard and it takes a really long time and sometimes it doesn’t seem to make any sense whatsoever. We are all grappling with this, not just me. As we left lab meeting today, I heard Fellow Postdocs #1 and #3 discussing a problem they were having. ‘There’s just no reason’, FP#1 was saying, ‘for it to have stopped working now when it was fine before’. I smiled to myself, knowing that they will work it out, just as I did, just as we all can do if we persevere and keep the faith that we can make it.
It worked!!!
Thank you Universe 🙂
I am going home now.
Good day
Yesterday, I wandered out at lunchtime and sat on a bench in the middle of campus to eat my bagel. It was a perfect sunny autumn day. I noticed the way the light fell through the leaves on the trees, which were just beginning to turn, and made patterns on the path. I observed the people walking by, tuning into snatches of conversation, and I thought, we need this. We need these pauses, these spaces in between the things that are our lives. We are such reductionists, we scientists. We know that spending time in the lab and performing experiments lead to results, publications, and all good things that we desire, so we assume a linear relationship and think that the more time we spend, the more experiments we do, the more results and publications and recognition and success we will have. But it doesn’t work like that. Our capacities are not limitless. We are not machines; we are so much more than that. Of course hard work matters, but I say what matters more are those moments of clarity, of inspirations, when we think ‘I wonder if…’ These are the things that true progress is made of, and it is no use expecting them to come when we are overworked, stressed, exhausted, burned out and want nothing more than for the next day, week, month to pass. We must take a more holistic approach, taking good care of ourselves physically and emotionally, to be ready for these insights to strike.
Bad day
Apparently, things have been too easy for me lately. (For details on just how easy things have been, see previous two blog posts). With only one of the two key experiments needed for my resubmission in a state of abysmal failure, I was dangerously close to actually being able to submit the manuscript some time this year. To rectify this state of affairs, the Universe decreed that the CO2 tank for the cell culture incubator should run out shortly after we all left for the night, and that the inner door should be accidentally left just a crack open so that all the CO2 would escape and we would arrive in the morning to a screaming alarm and an incubator full of dead cells. There goes my work-plan for the weekend. My only consolation is that with everything that has happened lately, there really can’t be many things left that could go wrong… can there?
I was talking to my housemate in the kitchen this morning about my frustrations over my work and how my experiments are not working even though there is absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t, and how I might reluctantly have to hand it over to one of my coworkers to have a go. She smiled and said maybe that’s the whole reason for this – you have to let go control of it. My immediate reaction was that this was a pretty stupid hypothesis for why my experiment doesn’t work. But then I thought, well, at least she has a hypothesis.
Partly inspired by this, I did something that doesn’t come easy to me, and asked for help. I swallowed my pride, stubbornness and incessant need to do everything myself (it was quite a mouthful, believe me), and asked my most trusted/experienced fellow postdoc if he could try running one of the experiments for me next week. He very kindly agreed to fit it in around all the other stuff he has to do. Even this made me feel comforted – I am still working on fixing the problem myself but now I have a back-up plan. Plus, it’s good to feel that I have someone who is willing to help me out like that.
Cross your fingers for me!
Today is a good day. This evening I will be setting off on a two-week vacation, for the first time in about 3 years. OK, it’s not that I haven’t had any time off for 3 years. But, apart from some long weekends locally and a trip to somewhere a bit more exotic for a friend’s wedding, I have been using my (meagre) vacation allowance to go home and see friends and family, and while that is wonderful, it is not the same as going on holiday!
I don’t want to get into too much of a rant when I’m in such a good mood, but US vacation allowances are one of my favourite grievances. I come from a country where it’s normal to get about 25 days off a year, plus holidays (plus more or less unlimited sick days, because people don’t choose to get sick; but that’s another topic). My postdoc contract officially allows me 5 days off plus holidays. 5 days! It would be miserable even if I were from here; since I’m not, it basically means I can just about get home twice a year but don’t even think about trying to do anything else. Luckily, my PI is little more flexible than my contract, so I do take more time than that, but it still feels restricted. At home, I would probably take all of my allowed time off and no one would think anything of it. Here, I wait with a mixture of guilt and trepidation to see if my boss feels like I deserve a holiday this year. Travel is one of my passions but pretty much the only way I can pursue it is by only seeing my family once a year. I don’t believe that taking more time off would make me less productive either. In fact, it would probably make me more productive.
My boyfriend thinks that my situation is not typical. I say most people I know in my field in the US take even less time off than I do. He says his experience has been that research scientists take more time off than I do, especially the ones that come from overseas. Any thoughts?
Anyway, I see I have been somewhat unsuccessful in avoiding a rant, so I will leave it there and go back to feeling excited about my trip. I have been running around like a maniacal headless chicken all week trying to finish up experiments, so it is only now sinking in that I am off for two weeks of pure fun! I can’t wait. See you in two weeks.
My yoga teacher talked recently about the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. That is, that people often give up on ‘what’ they want because they don’t know ‘how’ to get there. In her words, if you can just identify what it is that you want to achieve, the Universe will provide the means to get there. You just have to be open to it.
Whether or not you would frame it in this vocabulary, it makes sense that you are more likely to be successful and to recognise opportunities to advance towards your goals if you first define for yourself what they are. I decided to try to make a list of my ‘whats’. After some initial scribblings, many relating more to things that I don’t want, I came up with this statement: ‘To be focused, engaged, productive, creative, generate ideas and do the best work that I can do’.
I realised that I had defined what I believe I need in order to be both successful and happy in whatever I do. This is the state I am in on my ‘good days’. I often reflect that if all my days were good days I could rule the world. There is nothing that I would not be capable of.
Underneath my ‘what’ I wrote a question: ‘How is this place reached?’ I do not know the answer to this yet, and I suspect it is complex. But I would like to know what you think. What are your ‘whats’ and wishes, and how have you found the means to achieve them?
The Human Scientist 