Hello Mars!
a personal tale of extroversion in modern science
C. Cocuzza | August 2017
In a recent chat about career goals, I was told by the P.I.[1] of my lab that I have the makings of a P.I., somewhere down the ill-defined road. My cheeks blushed as I nervously, yet proudly, adjusted my stature to its upright position, like a child receiving a gold star, or a different child responding to their name being called outside the principal’s office. As my story goes, I found myself at-once eager and puffed-up with righteous self-esteem, yet weary and deflated by the mental undercurrent of imposter syndrome[2]. Memories of drug-induced mosh-pits and fits of teenage aggression, baked in vulgarity, flashed before my eyes. I wondered, is he nuts?! How could this loud-mouthed Jersey-girl; this irreverent and secular, capital-B Bitch; this cynical aggressor, ever be someone’s boss? Let alone in a scientific setting, where detached empiricism is King, and self-scrutiny mixed with lifelong introversion is Queen. “Why thank you”, I said confidently as an asymmetrical smirk grew over my face; I remembered long-hauls of sleep-deprivation to get straight A’s; I remembered being the de-facto leader in group projects; I remembered that at the core of my personality sat an extrovert, and I allowed bravado to win-out my internal debate.
It’s strange to be an extrovert in science. All of us, regardless of lifestyle or career, look for role models that are essentially well-refined versions of our selves. Someone who has taken the raw energy of our “personality type” and masterfully chiseled it into something viable; something successful. We hope that there’s a way to play the game without it playing us, so to speak. We look to our predecessors for proof-of-principle. I think about artists who pour despair, trauma, and hidden insecurities into their work. With that degree of public vulnerability, getting some recognition seems to be a fair trade-off. However, the fear of “selling out”, or otherwise exploiting something that should be authentic and perhaps sacred, persists. The artists’ dilemma may plague us all to an extent. How are we to reconcile who we truly are with what our community wants or needs us to be?

If TV programs and movies are to be believed, STEM[3] personalities tend toward the socially-awkward, consistently self-analyzing, and introverted. It’s an open question whether this portrayal is accurate, but as with all stereotypes, even if it nears truth, it likely has a monolithic grain of salt attached to it. So far, I’ve informally observed[4] that personality traits in STEM are more linked to the context of a particular sub-field, than they are to some grand notion of STEM at-large. What I mean by sub-field, at least within the scope of science (or the S in STEM), is what type of science you study, what methodologies you employ to study that science, and moreover, what questions interest you the most. That is to say, an astrophysicist who studies dark matter with particle collider technology may be an entirely different beast than a clinical psychologist who studies incidence rates of symptoms using self-report surveys. Or are they? And where do I (or you) fit in? Will I ever find a role model who is just like me, but better?
Early on in adult life I met a lot of people who could be described as wayward, or displaced. I consider myself one of these people; even if it remains now as a soft influence, like a hard-earned but quiet whisper, reminding me of my roots throughout the day. Like many discontented youth, we met through mutual interests that fall somewhere along the counter-culture spectrum. In my story, these interests were musically-based; music that has frenzied, gut-punching, hostility right up-front. Cathartic, it is; calm, it is not. As stereotypes go, one might expect the people involved to likewise be combative and ill-tempered. While that was true towards societal structures (or authority) at-large, I found myself amongst deeply sensitive and inquisitive people. It was as if underneath layers of sarcasm and malcontent, you’d find what one may call a nerd, adjusting their metaphorical glasses and wondering why they just can’t get their thoughts to be “normal”. But somewhere along the way, the interests of prototypical nerds, like being a mathlete or joining debate club, just did not occur to us, or perhaps we were not encouraged toward them. It would be easy for me to blame this on oppression of my gender, but that’s not entirely accurate either. As it was for many of my wayward crew, I was desperately bored by the status-quo. And not only did I want to stimulate my mind, but I wanted to engage with something bold and raucous. What I take with me from those years is how to advocate for yourself, and how to do it LOUDLY. In the aggressive parlance: to never back down from a fight (that’s worth fighting). I learned how to leverage raw, and sometimes dark, emotion to energize my goals. I learned how easy it can be for an inquisitive mind to turn towards intoxication when the world gets too noisy; and thus, how notions of ‘pro-social’ and ‘anti-social’ are not as simple as we think. And most importantly, I learned that thinking critically about rules and pre-defined expectations is perhaps the most valuable skill one can have. Many of my friends have since pursued careers in STEM, problem solving on a daily basis. I wonder, do they internally debate their youthful indecencies against the seeming propriety of our fields? Do they feel conflicted, like me? Do they feel that one-degree-off loneliness borne of being just slightly different, like molten lava amidst a forest fire…like me?
As many young scientists interested in human behavior and cognition do, I vacillated between what environment (e.g., type of lab) would allow me to query these interests best. I’ve tried my hand working with clinical psychologists, neurologists, geneticists, vision neuroscientists, and physiologists. Variety in personalities abounded, ranging from overly familiar and sensitive, to cruel and almost comically detached. Most recently I’ve found some semblance of “home” in computational neuroscience, where the problems-of-interest appear elegant to me, and the methods for probing said problems are complex and technically-intensive. I tell myself: I am not bored; I am not taking the easy way out. But now, perhaps more than ever, my colleagues’ personality traits wildly oppose mine. Not to mention that I look around and see a room full of men, which is heartbreaking and mundane all at once. This field tends to be made of computer scientists, programmers, mathematicians, and data scientists interested in neuroscience problems. Some hot topics include graph theory, machine learning, neural networks, information processing dynamics, and AI models, to name a few. Do the people who find this particular blend of human-to-machine-to-human science alluring have a stereotypical personality? The jury will be out on that one, but I do know that whatever that stereotype is, I do not fit it. I am shameless when they are demure; I stomp my feet when they prefer a shuffle; I cackle loudly when they chuckle discreetly. Intellectually, I feel harmonious — we care about the same scientific problems; our analytic propensities are similar; and a friendly game of logic is fun Saturday night in. But I don’t know if I’m with my ilk, I don’t know that I’ll ever find that, or if finding that is even important whatsoever. At times, I find myself damping down my predilections by deliberately lowering my voice or abstaining from conversation, so as not to bulldoze the group, which I am inclined to do. I find myself tempering the bigness of my personality with what I’ve mentally devised as the penultimate scientist; someone who is sharp and articulate, but generally calm and easy to be around.

I imagine that classic picture of Margaret Hamilton standing next to a stack of books containing her NASA software specs, clever and gleeful but ultimately quite feminine. I wonder if she ever felt the need to reign it in. I wonder what it even means to be “charming” in a technical setting.
The more time I spend interlacing ‘scientist’ into my sense of self, the more I see that there are no single role models to look to, there is no one-off proof-of-principle. I think: I can come to terms with this, I can be brave. I try to imagine a composite role model, like a stew I’m blending: a bit of my heritage, a dash of energetic iconoclasm, another dash of razor-sharp wit, a dose of charm and compassion, all topped off with a heaping helping of rationality. I think: she’s dramatic and enduring, the life of the party even if she decided to stay at home. I wonder how extroversion shapes my science — it is a human pursuit after all. I’ll leave you, someone perhaps concocting their own role model brew just to make it through the day, with a quote:

“So much the better, study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” — Richard Feynman
Footnotes.
[1] P.I. stands for principal investigator. “My P.I.” is akin to saying “my boss”. Traditionally, the workplace hierarchy goes as such in a modern science lab: intern > graduate student > post-doctoral scientist > P.I. > department or institutional administration > grant-giving body.
[2] Imposter syndrome is a current hot-topic. It’s essentially the feeling that you don’t have the credibility to be a member of a given field; particularly in high-expertise arenas. One of the people who coined the phrase (circa 1970s) can explain it best: http://paulineroseclance.com/impostor_phenomenon.html
[3] STEM stands for: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It’s an umbrella term for technically or computationally rigorous professions.
[4] I’m being nice to myself here by saying ‘informally observed’. More accurately, I’ve ‘anecdotally observed’. What follows is speculation and based off of limited experiences; and of course, filtered through my own perceptions and biases.