Pages from an experimentalist’s diary…
While pursuing my PhD, I noticed a pattern amidst the chaos that swirled through my journey in the lab. I call this phase of my scientific life a ‘journey’. Let’s put aside all the mental exhaustion that comes from consecutive bad days and it’s encroachment into your (lack of) social life. A PhD is a beautiful ‘ I-will-hold-my-own-hand through-this’ journey that implants life skills in you that no self-help book can teach you.
From becoming an expert in a certain technique to painstakingly delivering a thesis (a dissertation or more popularly, your ‘baby’) that pours out the pain and miracles of your experimental endeavors, a PhD makes you stubbornly independent. I say ‘stubbornly’ because you believe you can find a solution to ANY problem — with fair logical reasoning and a sprinkle of belief in your abilities. Reflecting on all the small and big things I learnt from my own experiences and through interactions with colleagues, here are a few pointers from an experimentalist’s diary :
- Experiments fail most(all) of the time
Let’s face it, some days you just get up from the wrong side of the bed. A protocol that worked perfectly last evening might give in and you will most likely spend days (weeks or even months) on troubleshooting and mapping out what went wrong. Was one of your buffers contaminated? Was the chemical reaction occurring at a different pH or concentration? Was your protein denatured ? Was your instrument not calibrated correctly? Were the stars not aligned in your favor? While it is easy to give up and whine as a novice, the more you grow into it, the more of a lab- rat you’ll become. You start noticing how much you enjoy answering these questions, how easily you can come up with possible solutions for yourself and slowly but gradually, you secretly embrace the idea of failure.
An experiment that fails 99 times teaches you 99 ways things can go wrong than a first-time success that gives you a false sense of hope for your next (more complicated) experiment. As my advisor says “In Science, no idea is too crazy”.
2. Go big or go home
Experimenting in a lab (It rightfully deserves its own verb, I like to call it ‘labbing’ !) is equivalent to cooking up a feast in a kitchen. It requires tremendous organizational skills and an ability to multitask. Lay out your tools akin to a Chef’s Mise en place and with the right focus and self-discipline, you’re ready to cook up a storm! Sometimes deadlines are closer than you think — You’ve a conference in a few weeks where you want to present an engaging poster, you promised your supervisor that histogram for your next lab meeting, or you set goals for your own project to translate into a manuscript. This means spending endless hours in the lab behind a single pursuit. As the First Lady of Physics, Chien-Shiung Wu said, “ There is only one thing worse than coming home from the lab to a sink full of dirty dishes, and that is not going to the lab at all!”
3. No two days are the same
The greatest irony of a scientist’s life is the lack of monotony in your daily job being the very reason for your scientific frustration. That is just the nature of the job you sign up for — every experiment is a trial whose outcome, even though you solidly believe in your hypothesis, is unpredictable. This is a fundamental cause of debate between theorists and experimentalists — A theorist will always speculate the most ideal parameters in his Gedanken (thought) experiment or model, but such experimental conditions are not likely to be achievable in reality. With every eventful day spent in the lab, you’re moving one step closer (on some days, two steps back) towards a common larger goal — be it the research focus of your lab group or an unexpected discovery that trumps all your perfectly modeled hypotheses. The bittersweet truth of your career lies in every day bringing its own challenges.
4.Show your equipment some love
A lot of careers(hence, lives) in the lab — be it graduate students, technicians or postdocs rely on measurements from well-functioning instruments. These expensive equipment were built or bought through months of grant writing and proof-of-principle experiments devised by principal investigators, assembly and calibration of every screw by researchers and with a pure intention to learn new things from experiments conducted using them. With the endless hours spent in labs making it a holy shrine of sorts, instruments form a make-or-break deal with us. They demand and deserve all the respect and love to drive you to become a successful scientist, so handle with care.
There are of course, many more nuances that go into your pursuit of becoming a good scientist -
5. Trust your data and always keep an open mind.
6. Look out for your colleagues — Sharing knowledge is always a good thing
7. Back up all your data, especially those control experiments that led you to your star results!
8. And the most important of them all — Have fun, otherwise it’s not worth it.
