Ideas Are Probably Overrated, But Happiness is Not
The idea of what makes a scientist “successful” is a controversial one among my peers and colleagues. A university-based, tenure-track professorship? A high paying job in industry? Related to this question, I read a recent post from my friend and scientist Scicurious with interest and a little bit of a heavy heart. Scicurious is one of my real life hens and hearing that one of my sisters feels hurt or wronged makes me want to take my earrings off and draw my eyebrows on.
In her post, Scicurious reflects on her training as a scientist and writes that the academic system failed her by not kicking her out of grad school sooner because she allegedly lacks the capacity to come up with new, creative ideas. Sci says...
Scientific ideas. I don't really think I've ever had them. I'm very creative when it comes to expressing myself, writing, giving talks, teaching. I love hearing about other people's ideas, communicating them, making them interesting to other people. But while I often wonder WHY things are the way they are...I don't really get the ideas. And when I get them, I don't refine them into the tightly honed scientific plans that characterize grants.
And I often wonder why on earth no one noticed this early on. After all, I have been in the lab from day one! I did research in college, I wrote a grant for my PhD research, wrote several for my postdoc. But the reality is that in grad programs in biomed (at least the ones I was in)...the vast majority of grad students don't come up with their own ideas. They pursue a project that they help develop, sure. But it's with a great deal of guidance. No one just plunks you down and says "come up with an idea for your dissertation." Instead it's "take on this project, and take it the extra mile." My idea deficiency was therefore kind of hidden until I hit the postdoc, and I began to realize...my ideas were pretty lame.
The central idea of Scicurious's post is that her university failed her by not identifying early that she lacked some quality that she believes is crucial to the scientific endeavor. While I believe that she is wrong about how the system failed her, I do believe that she was wronged by the scientific training process. Here’s why…
Science is more than ideas and there are few high-stakes events.
Graduate education in the United States is structured such that advancement is predicated on success in a couple of high-stakes events. As a student, I took a qualifying exam in my second year and it tested my basic knowledge of my field. I took another exam in my third year which tested my understanding of the scientific method and process. At the end, I defended my thesis. At the time, each of these events felt like they could make or break me; if I failed, my career was over and there was no redemption for me. In retrospect, having now been on the other side of this process, I realize that there was enough investment in me that I was not going to be allowed to fail miserably. I was too clouded by the idea of failing a test to be able to see that.
Structuring graduate education as a series of high-stakes events is problematic. There are few events in my career that feel high-stakes anymore. I submit an article to a journal, it gets reviewed and rejected. I take the reviews, revise the paper, and try again. I write a grant. It doesn’t get funded. I revise it and submit it again. Or I submit another one. I teach and get some negative feedback. I incorporate that feedback into my lectures next term. Short of complete and total incompetence, no single event really has the potential to end my career. With each thing I do, I learn and I keep plugging forward toward my goals. I surround myself with mentors and more senior scientists who objectively and routinely evaluate my career and provide me feedback.
So, what value do these experiences have in graduate school? As a senior scientist, sitting on a committee allows me to evaluate a student’s progress, but that’s often limited by how damned nervous they are. It’s hard to tell what is a fatal flaw in someone’s training and what is simply nerves as you watch a student sweat through their poorly-tailored suit jacket. It’s easier to tell in casual conversation. I don’t know that I could identify the type of deficit that Scicurious believes that she has in one of these high-stakes interactions and, often, my interactions with graduate students as a committee member are limited to these types of events.
We need to make sure graduate students know why they are dumbasses. Ideas come from infrastructure, experience and luck.
Almost every graduate student I know thinks that she is a dumbass. They are, but not for the reasons they think. When I was in graduate school, my primary research mentor retired. Although this made my education more challenging, I still idolized my mentor. I remember him telling a joke at his retirement dinner about an old, retired engineer who is called back to his plant to repair a piece of equipment. He repairs the equipment by turning a single screw and then bills the plant $5000 for the repair. When questioned, he itemizes the bill. $1 for the 10 seconds of labor. $4999 for knowing how to fix the problem. His value is really his experience.
As a scientist, a fraction of what I know comes from formal didactic education. The majority comes from experience. My lab recently completed some experiments that have yielded some very high-impact findings. The idea for these experiments originated because of serendipity and my experience in my field. I saw some data and recognized something unusual about it. I wouldn’t have had enough experience with these sorts of data as a graduate student or postdoctoral trainee to have realized what we were sitting on. Because I have developed a strong network of scientists over the years and knew which had expertise in this area, I was able to take my ideas to them. The idea and research plan evolved through conversation. Science is an iterative process and most people don’t have single ideas that yield a Nobel. They have a mass of an idea that they reshape and remold until it takes its final form. How quickly we generate these ideas is a function of our tools and connections, and these are developed with time and experience.
We need to redefine our definition of “failure.”
I will admit that I am frequently baffled by the meme among my biological scientist friends that anything other than an academic career is a failure. While I admittedly have an academic career, I also trained in an engineering department. For my peers in engineering, an academic job was not the goal. They knew that a job in industry would come with a higher salary and most of them went to work for pharmaceutical or chemical companies. In support of this, our department allowed students to take 6-12 months off from their graduate training to complete paid internships, without extending the overall length of their training. Students explored different fields and opportunities. They learned important professional and scientific skills in the process. There was infrastructure to help them find these internship and many translated to careers after these students finished their degrees.
This is not typical in the biological sciences, leaving students to aim for what they know. They see faculty and they assume this is the next logical step. Most faculty only have the expertise to guide students on the career path they know. To not make (or want) that step is a failure and I have heard a lot of talk recently that the job market for PhDs is “bad” because academic jobs are less plentiful. This is simply, factually untrue. While only 23% of PhDs end up in a tenure-track position, the unemployment rate for PhDs is only 1.7% and having a graduate degree enhances earning potential. Getting a PhD and not becoming a professor does not make someone a failure, but we are failing these PhDs by not helping them realize the breadth of careers available to them. We fail them by not making clear that the skills they learn as graduate students — problem solving, technical skills, statistical analysis, presentation skills — are highly attractive to industries outside of academia. We should be building infrastructure to help students explore and find careers that are fulfilling and congratulating them when they find happiness.
Students need to stop “kerning” themselves. (Also, knock it off, ladies. Just knock it off.)
In 2010 cancer researcher Steven Kern wrote an article called “Where’s the passion?” in which he chided trainees for not working hard enough or being motivated to cure disease. He lamented that he didn’t see students in the lab at night and on weekends and claimed that, if they were serious about their science, they would be working harder. Many of us have taken to calling this “kerning” one’s students (see #k3rn3d on Twitter). Although there is no doubt that many academics kern their students, my experience has been that students often kern themselves much harder. One of the graduate students in my group is a hard worker, beginning work toward her PhD this year while also being a single parent. She recently returned from seminar in tears and told me that she had heard that her life was “over” now that she was a graduate student and that there would be no time for anything else, including her daughter. I was shocked and was already composing the angry email to whatever faculty member had told her this, when she confessed that it had been the other graduate students in the program. I was able to point out to her that, perhaps, she should look to the examples of women around her that had careers and families (myself included) and not listen to a group of people who don’t know dick about the world yet. Some amount of drive is productive; telling yourself that your life is “over” because you have become a priest for science is not.
Scicurious writes that the system failed her by not recognizing that she lacked qualities that would make her a successful scientist.
But in the end, I didn't have the ideas. In that way, academia failed me. It should have kicked me out years ago.
Scicurious says that the system failed her by not recognizing that she was not talented enough to deserve her degree. In the end, she still places the fault in her own court. It has been pointed out to me how language differs between women and men and this concerns me. When men fail to obtain the academic position that they believe is the benchmark of success, the system failed them but they are still brilliant. They were exceptional scientists and the system failed to recognize this and give them what they deserve. When women fail to achieve these positions, they were not sufficiently qualified or successful and the system only failed them by not recognizing this soon enough. This is nonsense. With funding levels at a record low and academic departments contracting, even the exceptional scientists who might have secured academic jobs in the past are not able to find tenure track positions — it’s not simply an issue of “not good enough”. It’s an issue of too many mouths at the academic trough and not enough to go around. Yet, a graduate degree remains a smart investment. In contrast to an undergraduate degree, a graduate degree is usually subsidized (and usually cheap-as-free), students receive stipends to live, and they end up with a degree that translates to a low probability of unemployment.
At the end of the day, I find myself feeling concerned for my friend Scicurious, mostly because I worry that she’s been fed a false image of what “success” in science looks like. She’s a talented young scientist and has translated her skills to a career in communication that I am confident will bring her success. I’m proud of her and hopeful that others will see her as an inspiration for the types of post-graduate careers they would like the pursue.
