Dumb and Dumber

One of the hardest things I’m finding about my PhD is the constant feeling of stupidity overwhelming me at every turn. All the way through school and my undergraduate degree there was a huge importance placed on getting things right; getting the right answer to a question, understanding theory, reciting facts. The set of skills you worked so hard to acquire during school and your undergrad are almost entirely useless when doing a research degree, when something isn’t working you can’t just look the answer up in a text book.

This hit me the hardest recently when I asked the longest serving postdoc in my group, who to me is the fountain of all knowledge, to help me with a problem I was having. Her answer, that she didn’t know how to solve the problem, astounded me. I asked around the group, no one knew the answer. If this group of highly intelligent people, who had worked in this field for many more years than I had, didn’t know the answer what hope did I have at succeeding? I went home feeling really dejected, why the hell was I putting myself through this when someone who was far more experienced than me didn’t have the answer to one of my smaller research problems. Then I realised, that is the point of a research degree. No one knows the answer, it’s uncharted territory. I am working on a completely new research problem; it’s up to me to find the answer to my own question.

 It took me a while, but after I accepted that no one knew the answer it suddenly became a whole lot easier. A couple of days of wading through papers and trying different things yielded a promising result and I realised that I’m not stupid, but that feeling stupid had helped to motivate me to find the answer. Stupidity and ignorance are feelings that most of us will feel throughout our PhDs, initially I thought this was a bad thing, who wants to feel dumb all the time? But is feeling stupid really a bad thing? Maybe it’s the reason we strive harder to reach the next goal. The person that sums this up the best is Martin A. Schwartz who in 2008 wrote an essay in the Journal of Cell Science about “The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research”.

In his closing paragraph he reasons the importance of being productively stupid;

“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. 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.”

I don't completely agree with this statement. I know some people that bumble along getting it wrong time after time and are fine with that, but these for me tend to be the minority of PhD student. Most of the students I know are working massively hard, but still getting it wrong and feeling absolutely rubbish about it. 

I’m very lucky, having completed an undergraduate degree in engineering I have been schooled in creativity, problem solving and iterative understanding. Engineering takes known and clearly understood facts and applies them to a problem to solve it; this is essentially what we are doing in a scientific research degree. However the sheer amount of things that go wrong in science depresses me. When you have taken clearly understood facts, applied them to the problem in a meticulous and informed way and it has still not worked, that's when the feelings of ignorance and futility overwhelm me.

However I do have one story of where my potential ignorance helped me with a problem. In my final year project we had to design a simple, cheap water filter. I chose to use demin as a filter, simply because I did not know that other professional water filters existed.. In this case my ignorance paid off, I discovered a much cheaper filter material, and my design worked. But more often than not the experiments you design don’t work, and the feeling of ignorance and stupidity persists. But hard as it is, I am trying to embrace that feeling. I don’t know the answers to all my questions, and maybe never will, but I'm trying not to let it get me down. However I don't think I'm ever going to stop feeling the most stupid person in the room.

Making Sense of Science

As a PhD student I'm always worrying. I worry that I'm not doing enough work, that I should be getting in earlier, that I should be working "smarter", that my experiments aren't working, that I must be doing something wrong because they should be working by now..... you get the point.

Some time during my first year I thought to myself 'there must be other researchers out there who are worrying about the same things that I do'. Like all good researchers who don't know the answer to a question I turned to google to see if I was right, if there were other students out there who were worrying as much as I was about everything PhD related. Much to my relief I came across a whole host of blogs dedicated to people that felt exactly the same as I did! PhD students who weren't sure research was for them, students who loved researching but had an unshakeable feeling that they weren't good enough, students who were questioning why they were doing a PhD.

It was an amazing feeling, I wasn't alone. Other people were having the same problems as me, but even better, they had advice for how to deal with these problems. I found one blog dedicated to writing a thesis in three months, I found another on how to deal with a difficult supervisor (not that my supervisor is difficult I would like to point out!) and another on finding jobs outside research after your PhD has ended. I found more blogs then I could mention, written by struggling PhD students on their experiences in research and academia. These blogs all helped me to make more sense of my PhD. I could relate to what other people wrote and look up ways of coping with PhD stress and expectation. I started to realise that sometimes I enjoyed reading these blogs more than I enjoyed my PhD, but still I didn't nothing about these feelings, I just got on with my research while moaning to everyone around me who would listen.

After going through a particularly bad spell of results a few weeks ago and really questioning whether this was what I wanted to do with my life, a friend approached me and told me about a media course run by Sense about Science, a London based charity whose aim is to equip people to make sense of science and evidence. I have been on a few media courses before, one very enjoyable course run by Imperial, but this was different.

We got to quiz a panel made up of both researchers and journalists on their experiences with science and the media, including (to name a few) an assistant news editor at nature, an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist in the World Health Organisation and a freelance journalist who writes about the science behind the beauty industry. We were told not to be afraid of the media when it comes to our research, by doing a PhD we will automatically know more than most people about our fields and we shouldn't be afraid of using the media to promote our research. A valid point. I for one would worry that my opinion was not 'expert' enough. The panel also advised having three points and sticking to them - even if that's not what they have asked you, a good point for any form of communication really, I left wondering if that would work in a viva!

The journalists shared how they put a story together, including what they would need from scientists. For example they need someone who would be readily available to give a quote and that the quote would be easy to understand. Finally the day was rounded off with a Research Media Officer giving us some tips on how to get involved in science communication. One of the common themes of the day was to get involved and make your voice heard. We were told unequivocally to join Twitter and another piece of advice I really took to heart was to start a blog. I had toyed with the idea before but the Voice of Young Science media workshop really gave me the push I needed to get started - and here I am!

I hope to use this blog to explore the problems facing researchers and PhD students in academia. How can you get your voice heard? How can you motivate yourself when you research just isn't working? What if academia just isn't for you? I will attempt to answer one of these questions once a week, interspersed with interesting science and events I see happening around me. I loved the media course and want to use what I learnt to do something else that I love, talking to people about research. Hopefully this blog will start me on the right track.

 (Panelists at the Sense about Science media workshop.)

(Communicating science to a number of other participents and organisers.)