Learning to be a Screw-up – The Paradoxes of Postgrad Science

If you’re a current Science student looking to go further and try postgraduate training and research, you’re probably a clever cookie. You get the right answer more often than not, you know lots of stuff, and you’re curious and passionate about learning more.

But, paradoxically, being a Science postgraduate turns all that on its head. In many ways, it’s about dealing with failure, being stupid, and having a strategic disinterest in your passion. Which is to say that, sometimes, mastering postgraduate science means learning to be a screw-up. This is all part of the transition, and knowing what to expect can help with your journey into postgraduate Science.

Probably the main reason that you got into Science, in addition to finding it interesting and being passionate about knowledge and discovery, is that you’re good at it.

Unlike the Arts and Humanities, Science almost always has a right answer. And getting that right answer feels great. At school and at undergraduate level, there are lots of questions and tests, and if you get the answers right you get rewarded. You got strong marks, high grades, and sometimes a ‘well done’ sticker (by the way, how great were stickers?). You were probably top of the class, and it felt good to be good at Science.

But, taking this mentality into postgraduate Science is a little naïve. You’ll learn fairly quickly that being a good student is not the same as being a good researcher. Many of the things that make you feel good about Science start to disappear, and you’re left feeling like a screw-up.

This is kind of the purpose of scientific research, though. It’s full of paradoxes. Somehow, you need to embrace the things that traditionally feel like failures and turn them into breakthroughs.

As a scientist, you’ll spend more time getting stuff wrong than right, and that can be really disheartening. You find out that you don’t know something, or an experiment doesn’t work, or your hypothesis was wrong.

However, a key tenet of Science is falsification – essentially proving things by disproving the alternatives. So, it’s no great surprise that getting stuff wrong and failing is such an integral part of the scientific process.

And you’ll need to embrace this failure in order to eventually succeed in postgraduate science. In addition to intellect and critical thinking, a postgraduate scientist needs to develop a kind of doggedness – resilience, persistence, commitment and independence. A tough skin and single-mindedness are needed to turn those failures into discoveries. Sometimes, you don’t know if something will succeed until the very end when it finally does.

Undergrad Science is about what you know; postgrad Science is about what you don’t. Being at the forefront of discovery means that you are surrounded by stuff you don’t understand, and by questions you can’t answer.

This can be discouraging, especially when you’re used to feeling clever. That feeling of stupidity and ineptness can make you lose faith in yourself and your research.

But, this is the whole point of scientific research! Nobody knows the answer! It’s only by seeking out opportunities to feel stupid that we find the questions that need answering.

Scientists are sometimes described as being immature or childish. They can be a bit odd or silly compared to most people (the phrase ‘mad scientist’ says it all). But feeling unintelligent and asking stupid questions can lead to interesting and creative solutions. Albert Einstein is renowned for being an advocate of asking stupid questions - his theory of relativity came through questioning what it would be like to ride a beam of light through the universe.

Being a postgrad scientist is about harnessing productive stupidity – be liberated in understanding that there are an infinite number of questions to which we don’t know the answers.

Well, sort of. Having a passion, curiosity and interest in your research is really important. But, having that emotional attachment to your results can be harmful.

We all want our hypotheses to be correct – it means that you were right, and that you’re smart, and you can go on to publish your results. So, getting ‘negative’ results can feel bad. But, it’s the investment of hope and desire that causes the real gut-punch. Plus, it can lead to some ethical problems, like data fabrication.

Sometimes, you need to take yourself out of the equation in order to think clearly about the results and data. This is really difficult – Science is weird in that it’s a subjective discernment of the objective universe (sorry, I really wanted to get a pretentious phrase in somewhere).

However, focussing solely on the data and what it tells you, and not just about whether or not it is a ‘positive result’, can change your hypothesis or bring about a fresh idea that could completely transform your research. Doing this is also useful for deciding whether or not to commit to trying to reproduce a result that doesn’t seem to want to be reproduced – should you keep going and optimising, or call it off?

This emotional detachment is good for keeping you sane, too! It’s worth remembering that ‘negative’ results are not a commentary on your ability or research. A PhD student who used to work in my lab had a poster above her workbench with the mantra: “Be ruthless with your data, be kind to yourself”. It takes a bit of mental gymnastics, but achieving a passionate disinterest is a useful skill in scientific research.

The transition into postgrad work is a big one, and many talented and bright students struggle with the step up. If you’re looking for a postgraduate degree in Science, or are currently doing so, you might want to think about juggling these paradoxes – it might be an important step in your future success.

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