This week’s around the blogs focuses on lab life and impacts of science on society. That’s a big area to cover, but there are still only a handful of really noteworthy discussions in the last couple of weeks on the topic. Check ‘em out.
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Multi-tasking used to be my favourite way to get ahead.
During my PhD I saw others around me working extremely long hours in the lab and not really having much of a personal life and quite early on I made the decision that this was not for me.
Although I enjoy my work, having a good life outside the is also very important. Also, I found that if I worked very long hours then I tended to be far less efficient overall.
But, I still wanted to get through as many experiments as possible. So I also made the decision that my approach would be to work a regular 8 hour day and be as efficient as possible during that time. My basic recipe for an efficient working day was: Read more »
Do you fear failure every time you do an experiment?
Do you feel constantly stressed about obtaining poor results?
Do you feel personally culpable when an experiment goes wrong?
If you answered “yes” to any or all of these questions, you may be suffering from perfectionism. For a scientist, this is a particularly damaging trait that needs to be recognised and acted on.
What is a perfectionist?
Perfectionists have unrealistic expectations of themselves. They focus on results - often unattainable ones - and are only satisfied if those results are met perfectly. They take no pride in the effort they make to achieve those results, and are highly self-critical if the results are not met.
Pushed towards their goals by the fear of failure rather, than pulled toward them by a healthy desire to achieve, perfectionists are their own worst enemies. But for a perfectionist who happens to work in science, life can be pretty tough. Read more »
Only a handful of people ever become world experts in their field. The rest attain somewhere between a functional and world expert level of knowledge.
So what makes the best better than the rest? Are they born with greater knowledge? Intelligence? Inner strength?
Well, the latter is the more likely. Although some world experts are genuine geniuses, most are simply people of normal intelligence who happened to work harder than anyone else. If you want to be a world expert in your field, this is good news. The ability to work hard and efficiently at becoming an expert is much easier to attain than genius.
So how do you learn to become an expert? Read more »
Amid the misguided rhetoric of some who suggest that the science community cease trying to share their expertise and knowledge with the public, and the all-to-common response to expertise, I came across a thoughtful piece worth commenting on here.
Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young posts on the problem of expertise. He writes:
The problem of expertise is not that this special knowledge is undesirable. Special knowledge is both socially useful and personally satisfying. Rather the problem of expertise is a social problem, namely how those who know better should relate to those who don’t.
Relating to my recent comments on seminars, a beginning grad student or undergrad researcher might wonder why journal club is such a good thing. Or you might not be wondering, since the benefits are more or less the same: digesting, discussing and analyzing research findings. But whether or not you realize the benefits of journal club participation, I’ve noticed that a lot of young PhD and Master’s candidates horribly under-prepared to present a paper. As a result, I thought I would enumerate some of the commonly held expectations of the person presenting the day’s journal article.
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If you’re like me (before I wised up to the search power of PubMed) you probably just type in your topic of interest and press Go. And then you get back about 8 billion results, which—this is just a guess—is far more than you’re likely to read.
Here are a few basic tips to help you get the most out of your PubMed searches without wasting a lot of time slogging through pages of results, thus getting you back to the bench ASAP. Unless, of course, you’re avoiding the wet lab…not that I’ve ever used literature searches and background reading as an excuse to step away from the PCR machine… Read more »
A picture tells a thousand words. So I suppose a movie tells 24,000+ words per second.
Whether you use them for educating, self-study or just for your viewing pleasure, photos and movies of biological concepts and processes are a valuable resource. Here are ten of the best bio flick and pic galleries from around the web. Read more »
Continuing in the same frame of mind as my last post, What Comes After Grad School, I was thinking about something that Alex said:
It reminds me of a bit of advice given to a fellow postdoc by Dr. Richard Hynes - try to attend every seminar. I would also add that in my comparatively short science career I have found that conferences are great as well. You meet people, people meet you, you learn, you communicate, and you develop this type of long distance acquaintance.
One view on the aim of graduate studies towards a PhD is to foster critical learning and thinking habits, much more so than to simply learn facts. You’re supposed to learn how to “think like a scientist,” or develop and mature your intellectual behaviors in the discussions of difficult concepts (AKA, problems).
“Habits of Mind are the characteristics of what intelligent people do when they are confronted with problems, the resolutions of which are not immediately apparent,” (Costa & Kallick, below the fold). Read more »
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