4 important lessons I learnt in Graduate School that I wish I knew sooner
July 12, 2021
Graduate school is considered one of the most challenging and defining times of your life. It is the time of your early to mid-twenties that you devote yourself to the pursuit of knowledge with a dream of having a better future or changing the world( if you are someone like me).
When I started my journey to get a PhD in Neuroscience, I always envisioned scientists to be the really smart guys in the movies who work with fancy lab equipment and find solutions to all the catastrophic problems within a span of a day (Please don't ask me what bizarre movies I watched).
But when I started working in a research lab things were quite the opposite.
So, are these smart guys not smart? No, they are.
Don’t they find out all the answers? Sometimes they do.
But the reality is quite different from what is shown in the movies or media.
1. Top scorers aren’t necessarily the ones who succeed as problem-solvers/researchers
The first year of graduate school was coursework. I saw brilliant kids around me who knew all the information in the world. They were smart and even great thinkers who could formulate new hypotheses. I felt intimidated and thought I never stood a chance, maybe because I suffer from an immense inferiority complex.
However, once the coursework was done, we had to work in labs and had to complete short-term research projects. Suddenly, the scenario was different. The people who excelled at academics weren’t necessarily the ones who were able to handle the new challenge of solving a real problem whose answer I unknown to the rest of the world. We had to learn new skills in a span of a week and apply those to do the experiments we had to design based on the hypotheses.
It was the ones who were accustomed to failures and hard work in life who were able to think and survive the pressure. This came as quite a shock to me when I realised that brilliance isn't the only thing that is required to be a good scientist.
Science research generally involves people posing a very specific question and finding the answer to it even after thousands of failed attempts. It is not everyone’s cup of tea. Do we become millionaires after finding the answer? Only in rare cases. But do you grow as a human being with a greater admiration for the universe and the people in it? Definitely Yes.
2. Even the most experienced and successful people don’t know all the answers
It was really scary at first to talk to all those brilliant scientists in my institution. Most of them had received various prestigious awards in the country and served as members of various government boards in policy-making.
They sounded brilliant in talks and my future advisor, specifically, was an excellent speaker who seemed to know her shit.
However, after joining my PhD lab my interactions with my advisor and my thesis committee made me realise something.
Apart from the specific focus of their research, they weren't really on top of the entire subject of biology. In fact, due to super-specialization, they always hesitated on teaching an area of biology which they didn't actively work on. This seemed quite bizarre to me. For god’s sake, you are a PhD in the field of biology! Why are you scared of teaching animal behaviour and neurocircuitry if your research is on cerebral development?
Well, this is because academia trains you to feel inadequate and an imposter. That's why the professors face the same challenges as we feel during our PhD. Since they don't teach everything, they don't seem to remember everything they read in school.
But why are they still so great?
The biggest lesson I learnt from them is that you don't need to remember all the information to solve problems or analyse data. These specialized people used to sit at conferences where others presented their work that was completely out of their league, but the underlying logic of the scientific method was the same. Every scientific hypothesis and steps to find answers to it was conserved.
You don't need to be a know-it-all. You just have to pose the right questions and be logical to solve problems.
3. You have to make an effort to build relationships within and outside the workplace which can be critical for your career
Are scientists considered loners and socially awkward? If you trust The Big Bang Theory then Yes. Is their livelihood dependent on meeting and building relationships like the Sales and Marketing blokes? Not really.
Then what is the need for them to build relationships?
Well, believe it or not, scientific research is competitive, and the bigger your team is, the greater your chances to publish that research sooner. Scientists have their small community where they follow each other’s work and sometimes help each other out too.
Some people choose to be isolated and do their work while others choose to develop national and international relations and collaborate to get their work done. You can guess who succeeds more.
But then, why don’t all scientists collaborate? It’s tricky. Most of them have this ego in you that makes them believe they are self-sufficient and the smartest. Sometimes the person you want to collaborate with has an ego. (Smart people have such issues).
It is an immensely tedious task in academia to build strong scientific relationships amidst the competition to publish but we have to work hard to get there nonetheless.
Leaving your ego aside and asking for help/ helping others can be a gigantic step towards your success, but many people seldom realise it.
4. Your research is not going to change the world overnight
Most newbies join academia to discover the cure for cancer/ AIDS. You have big dreams and hopes regarding what you will achieve with your research. Even funding bodies have this bias of funding clinical research way more than basic research.
But has it ever happened that one person single-handedly changed the world with his/her research? Well, you may name Einstein but even he wasn't alone and didn't do it overnight.
Most Nobel Prize winners get awarded for something they dedicated their entire life to. Most of you might not know but that research doesn't belong to the prize recipient alone. Numerous graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, technical staff and collaborators own the prize as it is the labour of all of their love.
Most importantly, the science that changes the world- be it medication to a deadly disease or a new technological advancement, comes from decades of hard work from numerous researchers and technical staff all across the globe.
The feeling of “not doing something cool enough” comes to most of us, but it is important to realise the bigger picture and move forward with the hope that someday this research will prove to be useful in some way or the other.
Be it graduate school or the corporate world, the lessons are more or less the same. We face the challenges first, learn from them and move on with our lives. It is better, however, to be prepared beforehand by learning from someone else’s experiences.
Embark upon your own journey with confidence and honesty towards your goal and that will be enough.
All the best.
