Scientists don't have feelings

[liv]

Wow, Three Weeks for Dreamwidth went by fast. I have run out of time and haven't even come close to posting all the stuff I thought I was going to talk about. However, I obviously still want to carry on creating content after the fest is over, so I will work my way down some of the queue. I made 8 substantial posts I think I wouldn't have made otherwise, plus another 4 long thinky posts which I didn't tag as belonging to the fest since they were more personal than I quite wanted to promote to strangers following the site-wide tag.

So that's a dozen "big" posts in three weeks, which is verbose even by my standards. It has felt a bit like DW has consumed more of my time than usual during the season. Then again, it's a time of the academic year which is relatively quiet for me. And I've had a blast, met lots of cool new people and got some really lively discussions going; I'm going to carry on exploring some of these things in the comments.

Anyway, one of my Three Weeks posts was a discussion of why I'm interested in the research I do. forestofglory quite rightly pushed me on talking about my feelings rather than just abstract factual things. She says:

I'd still like to hear more about how you feel your research is going. I know scientists aren't supposed to have feelings, but I want to know how you are doing as well as what you are doing.

This seems a very reasonable request, and although I do most naturally talk about more abstract things, I've often got some good out of being a bit confessional here.

I have thought for a long time that academic scientific research is an awesome job but an atrocious career. The further I progress in it the more that is true, and honestly I'm one of the lucky ones because I have managed to land a faculty position with job security and a decent salary.

My absolutely unfiltered honest initial response to being asked how I feel about my research is excited. I find it endlessly interesting doing experiments to find out things that literally nobody ever knew before I poked at some particular detail. I was also really lucky that I had a pretty clear idea from a young age what I was interested in, and I've been able to pursue that interest through university, post-graduate training and beyond. I probably could have succeeded at research into other topics than cell biology, but I have found something I really really care about and genuinely want to know every possible tiny detail of.

The other thing I really love about research is that I can carry on learning. I was very good at being a student, and a lot of what's wonderful about this career path is that in lots of ways I haven't had to give that up. Every time I read new articles or listen to talks from other scientists, I learn something new and interesting, and although I don't get the immediate reward of a high mark for reproducing it in an exam, I do have to recall and synthesize this information in order to understand my research data. It's hard to describe how much I enjoy that. The new information, the new parts to an endlessly complex and interesting story, yes, but also the challenge of my future depending on being able to learn it, not just note that something's interesting and then forget about it and move on.

My conversation with forestofglory was in the context of talking about being a PhD supervisor. Back in January, I wrote that post, because I had a moment of despair that kind of corresponded with PhD application season. I don't know what the hell happened, but the post made Hacker News and got 60 thousand hits within the first 24 hours of putting it up. There's over 200 comments on it here and another 200 at Hacker News, and it got discussed extensively on Twitter and when I turned up at Eastercon total strangers came up to me with, oh, you're the person who wrote that PhD post! The thing is, even though I think the apprenticeship-style system by which we train academics is incredibly broken, it's the system we have, and one of the things that's expected of me as a PI / Lecturer (US equivalent: Associate Professor) is that I supervise PhD students. And given that's what I'm expected to do, I really hope I can do so to the best of my ability and provide a useful, non-abusive training for future scientists.

I have a lot of different feelings about this, and tentatively I'll start talking about feeling committed. In some ways I've been extraordinarily lucky in that my first ever PhD student is particularly able and particularly well suited to me. I don't have much to sell to really brilliant students, since I'm working in a small provincial university with a shoestring budget, and I don't yet have much of a research track record because I'm at the beginning of my career. However, the way it turned out was that my Minion, for her own personal reasons, positively wanted to be in a smaller, more nurturing environment, and is also really really excited about my research. And she missed a First Class degree by one mark, and these days PhDs are so absurdly competitive that it's hard to get into the top places with a 2:1.

Minion is really unusually mature compared to starting PhD students. She's organized, dedicated, hardworking, and has a really good long view of the ultimate point of what she's doing, both to progress her own career and to contribute to the field. She is technically very good, partly because she had a year in industry between finishing her undergrad degree and coming to me, but also because she's meticulous and careful and has a talent for the kind of fiddly things that are involved in molecular biology research. She's a tortoise where I'm a hare, in that she works steadily and carefully and I procrastinate with occasional flashes of brilliance; fjm argues cogently that tortoises do better in the PhD system. I hate to say this, but the fact that she is a native speaker of English and was educated in a UK university also makes my life a lot easier; we share a common language and a common culture, both in general social terms and academically. When I take on more students in the future, I am going to have to work very hard not to be biased in favour of UK based students, because I really do not want to be racist or xenophobic. But for someone coming to this incredibly complex responsibility for the first time, having someone-like-me to work with is a real bonus.

I really enjoy working with Minion. Every time we have a meeting (which I insist happens weekly because one mistake I don't want to fall into is abandoning my student for months at a time with no guidance or contact) I come away from it feeling energized and excited. I love discussing her research in detail, looking at this particular image of a cell or delving into the numbers, troubleshooting, thinking of more rigorous ways to test our hypotheses. And we are building what seems to me like a pretty good working relationship. I was a bit scared that because Minion is quiet and somewhat deferential, and I'm loud and extroverted and domineering, I would end up bulldozing over her and not giving her a chance to develop intellectually. But actually, no, she is more than prepared to stand up for her own views, and six months in she's starting to take intellectual charge of the direction of the project. The things she's most interested in are not necessarily the same things I'm most interested in, but that's more than ok, even though I jokingly refer to her as the Minion I actually see her as a colleague, not a slave, and I think her vision for the project is really sound, even though it's not what I imagined would happen when I was planning it.

In some ways I'm more cut out to be a supervisor than a bench researcher. Because honestly, I have the intellectual chops for research, but I'm only middling good at the practical stuff. I'm somewhat clumsy and somewhat slow, and I'm never the person with the magic touch who makes the tricky temperamental equipment work. That's ok in that modern research is very standardized and almost automated, so you don't have to be a mechanical genius to be a successful biochemist. But it's still better if you are a mechanical genius!

The reason I'm not in the lab at the moment is mainly financial; I only barely have enough money to pay for the consumables for one person, and that's got to be Minion ahead of me. On the one hand, if I really passionately wanted to be pipetting and tending cells and all of that, I would probably have found a way to make it work in spite of the financial barriers. On the other, it's not entirely a good thing. At the moment it's fine because I happen to have a very technically competent student who doesn't need me, and I'm sharing a technician with my collaborator, and he's doing fine at teaching her the day-to-day practicalities of actually doing experiments. But this isn't always going to be the case, I might not have access to a good technician and I might have a student who needs more handholding than Minion does. So I do need to keep my own bench skills up, and it's worrying me that I am not in a position to do that. When you get to a very senior level, you're expected to spend your time doing admin and management and delegate the bench work to more junior people, but I'm a bit aware that it's rather early in my career for me to drop out of actually doing the day-to-day experimental work, and if I carry on not doing that I won't have the CV to get to a senior post. Because in the end, you can never quite "own" an experiment if it's carried out by someone else according to your instructions, you have to have seen things with your own eyes to be able to analyse results, just having numbers and error bars doesn't cut it. You have to actually be on the spot to see the unexpected thing that you weren't looking for that opens out a whole new aspect of the system.

In some ways I miss being a working scientist, in other ways the actual physical manipulation of cells and reagents has never been my favourite part of this job. I used to like it because I felt it gave variety to my life; sometimes I would read papers and think and plan or interpret experiments and do intellectual stuff, other times I would do near-mindless (but concentration-requiring, so often good for flow-state) experiments with my hands, and that was much better than spending all day every day doing either one or the other. But now that I have a proper teaching position I have plenty of sources of variety in my life and I am secretly happy to have dropped the aspect that honestly, I found least stimulating. So I guess what I feel about only being a supervisor, not a researcher in my own right, is frustrated (but a tiny bit relieved).

This is where I get sharey and personal. When I think about my career, rather than the specific experiments I'm running right now, I feel intensely anxious. The having no money is awful, partly because it really restricts what I can do, but also partly because it makes me doubt myself, surely if I were good enough to have an academic career I'd have attracted at least some funding by now? (The tiny bit I have comes from the university, so while I'm very grateful for their support, I didn't obtain it in open competition.) And because I have no money, I haven't published since 2009, and 4 years of CV gap means that there's a high chance I don't have a future, even if from today everything goes completely brilliantly.

The thing about being an academic scientist is that you can't be merely competent, you have to be brilliant. It's such a steep-sided pyramid, and there's almost no place for scientists who aren't good enough for promotion. The funding situation is that a charity or research council has enough money to fund maybe 10 or 12 projects each year. And they get a hundred applications, and 98 or 99 of them are good enough to fund, they can't be rejected on technical grounds. So you have to be in the top decile, effectively, or you get no money at all, and the competition isn't everybody in the world, it's people who've already got to the top of the highly selective and competitive process of becoming a lab head in the first place. And of course one of the criteria that will be used to tease out the top 10 proposals is whether the PI has a "track record" of making good use of the money they've received in the past to generate interesting science. If, like me, you've never received any money in the past, it's a big risk for anyone to invest in you just because you have a good idea. And because I've been desperately trying to get money ever since I moved to my current post in 2009, but haven't yet succeeded, I've more or less aged out of most of the schemes that are designed to give a leg-up to people starting out in their careers. This means I have to compete for funding not just with my peers but with people who have ten or twenty years more experience than me.

I am going to sound arrogant here, but I am pretty sure that the problem isn't that I'm not intelligent enough. Intellectually, I can hold my own with scientists with the most glittering CVs. The problem is that I'm not hungry enough. I haven't put every waking hour into trying to get funding over the last four years. I've invested the great majority of that time into teaching and educational stuff which is the other half of my job. Besides which, I've taken time off most weekends and rarely worked more than 40-50 hours a week, and I have a work-life balance which includes a lot of time for community volunteering and a fair amount of time for socializing either on the internet or in person. That's not what the picture looks like for most of my colleagues who have been successful. I don't think it's that I'm lazy, or not entirely anyway, it's that I can't bring myself to gamble everything on an attempt to be one of those who make it to the top, when there's such a high chance that I still won't even if I put in every waking hour to trying. But that comes straight back to the problem that there aren't really any jobs for people who are reasonably able and reasonably hard-working, only for people who are outstandingly brilliant and almost inhumanly dedicated. And really lucky; even among those who are brilliant and dedicated there is still a fierce competition for tiny scraps of funding.

And the truth is, I have a real vocation for teaching in a way I just don't for research. But I do believe that teaching at university level ought to be carried out by people who are research active, otherwise what they teach is stale and unlikely to inspire the next generation of academics. And most of UK Higher Ed believes that too; there are very few decent jobs for even the most talented teachers, if they don't also have a regular stream of peer reviewed publications in good journals, which means regularly succeeding in getting grants, and it means being much more effective than I am at the aspects of a research career which go beyond designing and carrying out experiments.

So one possible direction for my career is that I carry on as I am, keeping my head just above water, doing just enough research not to actually get sacked for incompetence, but always worrying that I won't quite make that minimum level. This pretty much means staying in my current institution though, because at this level there's not really a reason for anywhere else to hire me. If I'm lucky, I rise above that minimum level and make a discovery that's important enough to establish a reputation. Even then I'll have to justify what on earth I was doing between 2009 and whenever I get my lucky break, but I might then have a chance of a "traditional" academic career, the thing I thought I was going to do when I was a high-achieving student, eventually getting a professorship or perhaps even a Chair.

An alternative is that I build up the education and management side; I'm enjoying the latter a lot more than I thought I would. That might allow me to get a job doing something like running the biology department in one of the universities from the bottom half of the league table, where they would like to be engaging with research but realistically can't compete. I think I would really enjoy this in some ways, but at the same time, it feels like it's not really the kind of contribution to society I want to make. At the back of my brain for the past couple of years, I've been poking about trying to come up with ways of being creative about where I go with my career, some way of doing something that is science-related and probably within academia because that's the environment where I feel most comfortable, but that uses my skills and enthusiasm for teaching in some way that would be both satisfying personally and meaningful. Or else I simply desert the whole sinking ship that is the UK Higher Education sector (outside the really major institutions like Oxbridge, Imperial and Manchester) and start from scratch with a new career.

Even with all the negatives I've written in this post, I still feel extremely reluctant to let go of my dream of being a researcher. Partly because I want to know, dammit, I don't want to abandon the story halfway through, I want to find out what happens. And just reading journals isn't enough, you have to be embedded in the research community to really be abreast of what's going on. There's also the gender issue; I can't help thinking that if I move sideways or leave academia altogether, I'll be doing exactly what people stereotypically expect women to do. I'll be admitting I'm not able to hack the pace of real research, I'm not obsessively dedicated enough, which it what everybody says is the problem with women scientists. In some ways I want to prove I can succeed while also maintaining a work-life balance, being interested in everything, giving a lot of time to volunteering etc. And goodness knows that as a childfree woman I have it a lot easier than my peers who are struggling with all this plus parenthood.

So there you go, that's what keeps me awake at night. I do welcome advice but please be a bit tactful; if there were an obvious answer to this I'd have figured it out by now!

Comments

[kaberett]

Thank you for writing about this. ♥

[liv]

Aww, I write about my feelings and I get hearts! If I'd known you were interested I would have been just as happy to tell you as forestofglory. I never really expect people to be interested in this kind of navel-gazing stuff.

[ptc24]

Bench stuff: the big conclusion of my first year was that I didn't have the bench skills for synthetic organic chemistry. Fortunately, there was enough other lab work for me to do, which mainly involved making up solutions, maybe leaving them to sit, then feeding them to big machines and reading the spiky graphs, that I could put together a thesis on the basis of lab work I was competent to do.

I remember sitting in a lecture (one of those training things you could sign yourself up for to use up a budget of training days) about programming for scientist. When I was listening to it, I noticed one emotion the lecturer displayed quite a lot - disgust. It was as if he looked at every little thing that could trip you up and cause problems later like it was rotting food or an infected wound.... except it came across more as angry-disgust rather than fearful-disgust. Which got me thinking about just how fine-grained the role of feelings could be.

[liv]

I'm glad your PhD had that room for flexibility. I'd actually forgotten that you used to be a wet chemist!

I do think one way that gender has influenced my career is that if I'd been a male teenager with my sort of personality and aptitudes, I'd very likely have been a hobby programmer by the time I got to university. In fact I did program quite a bit in the 80s but was really discouraged at secondary school. If I programming, that would have allowed me to go down a more bioinformatics or other academic-related programming career route rather than bench science. As it is, my side-skill is teaching, which so far has been enough to keep my career buoyant.

The story about the programming lecturer finding potential trip-ups disgusting is really fascinating.

[forestofglory]

Thanks for letting me push your boundaries a bit. This was what I wanted to know when I first asked how your research was going. I'm really glad that things with your student are going so well.

I'm also feeling quite worried about my future career. I will be finishing my degree next December and looking for a job. In theory the job market is improving and lots of people want to hire planners. However I have a bit of imposture syndrome. Also there are just so many things I'm interested in, and I can't image a job that lets me do everything. I'm thinking about doing some freelance environmental history on the side, but worried that I don't have the dedication to make it work.

Anyways I am sorry you are having so much trouble getting funding. Also I don't think you should worry about letting the feminist side down. As feminist I want to remove the systemic barriers women face, but at the same time I think individuals need to do what will be best for them. It doesn't make you a bad person. It makes it a bad system. Also I want to say that teaching and management are both very important skills that are undervalued, in part because they are thought of as women's work.

[liv]

It's good, I think it did do me some good to write this post, and I've got some helpful comments from it. My main hesitation was not that it's too personal but that it's potentially too identifying. I hope I picked an acceptable balance.

Good luck making career decisions. I don't know if it's possible to find one job that fits all your interests; that's part of the reason why I do community stuff as well as my paid job. I don't suppose you college has any kind of career counselling?

I do think teaching and management are important, definitely. I don't think it's unfeminist to be good at them. The area where I have doubts is that over here, the only places where teaching is really rewarded are low-ranking universities, and I'm not sure that they are a worthwhile thing. Most of what they do is give middle-class kids a passport to get into middle-class jobs. We don't have good Liberal Arts colleges like in the States, for example.

My feeling, and it's unfocused and possibly informed by snobbism and internalized sexism, is that if I'm going to step away from traditional academia, I'd like to do something more, well, socially worthwhile than teaching at a mediocre university. Maybe further education rather than higher, even adult literacy type things, something that actually gives a boost to people from complicated backgrounds rather than being essentially a finishing school. (At the moment there's no doubt that most of my students are middle-class, but they are exceptionally academically able and most of them are going to contribute to society by becoming doctors. So I feel ok about that.)

[forestofglory]

There is a career center here -- I'm not sure how helpful they are at finding oneself, or even at finding jobs out of state. I supposed I better get over there next fall and find out.

I don't really a good sense of what it means to be a low ranking UK university. (I have very little sense of what university have what reputations anyways.) my image of lower ranked university is one that accepts a fair number of disadvantaged students, but doesn't really have much to offer them. (Though I've seen some stat that suggest many university aren't offering these students enough support.) Though come to think about it I'm kind of uninspired by most of the undergraduates here -- not because they are mostly rural midwesterners using college as step to move to a coastal city, but because they just don't seem to be very interested in their classes. Admittedly, most of the classes I've TAed haven't been that good. But I can see why you wouldn't want to teach people who just see uni as necessary step in life.

As a person with a complicated background I think it's great that you are considering ways to help people like me. (I'm still not clear on what the options are in the UK for someone who wants to study science but doesn't have the right A-levels for what ever reason.)

[403]

There's also the gender issue; I can't help thinking that if I move sideways or leave academia altogether, I'll be doing exactly what people stereotypically expect women to do. I'll be admitting I'm not able to hack the pace of real research, I'm not obsessively dedicated enough, which it what everybody says is the problem with women scientists.

A while back, you mentioned how the incoming class of medical students was racially diverse and reasonably gender-balanced, but the ones who graduate into the same field still tend to be predominately white males. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't tell anyone thinking of leaving the degree program that they're obligated to suck it up and deal with the broken system for the sake of the Grand Cause of Equality. I'd just like to point out that you don't have to, either. Deciding that a system is too broken for you isn't letting down any ideal or movement. Do what's best for yourself.

[liv]

That's completely true. It's not that I feel like I would be letting down The Cause if I move my career away from the traditional, highly competitive, research route. It's that when I think about doing so I feel a deep sense of personal shame. I guess... since I have been lucky enough so far to have jobs that I genuinely believe are meaningful, I don't know if I could bear to switch to a job that was merely personally agreeable, but wasn't making a contribution to something I believe in.

[siderea]

Wow, that sounds like a scary situation.

The problem is that I'm not hungry enough. I haven't put every waking hour into trying to get funding over the last four years.

Out of my own curiosity, if you were putting every waking hour into trying to get funding... what does that look like? What would you be spending that time on? Writing more numerous grant proposal? Networking? What does money-getting entail?

(It is useful for me to know more of the work-life experience of scientists, so I inquire.)

I don't think it's that I'm lazy, or not entirely anyway, it's that I can't bring myself to gamble everything on an attempt to be one of those who make it to the top, when there's such a high chance that I still won't even if I put in every waking hour to trying.

Hmm. Does that mean if you knew for certain you would succeed, 100% guaranteed, you'd be okay with spending some number of years making work/life balance sacrifices to get there? Or is it that you dread succeeding, and maybe, from what you describe above, getting stuck at a bench somewhere for a while before getting enough of your own minions to stick to the fun parts?

[liv]

Thank you for commenting; I do appreciate an indication that people are paying attention when I babble about my feelings.

OK, so anything I bitch about in terms of the unpaid labour that's expected from scientists and uncertain funding climates and so on is ten times worse in the US. I don't think I ought to have been writing more grant proposals, not really, that's the one thing I have been keeping on top of. But in order to boost my chance of writing successful grant proposals, well.

For one thing I made some bad financial decisions. In that the university promised me £10K as a start-up fund when I took the job, and when I got there they kind of bait-and-switched me and said, oh, actually, that was when we first started the Medical School, we don't really have any money any more. And I argued about it because I had after all been promised the money, but I also let myself be talked into getting a much smaller sum, probably through the obvious psychological manipulation of letting me expect I might not get anything at all. I didn't hold out for £10K, which would have been enough to run a lab for a year and generate some preliminary data which would have put me in a much stronger position to apply for grants. And then I had a scarcity mentality and I didn't really want to spend my money because I had so little of it, I wanted to be sure I was doing exactly the "perfect" experiment, so I never really got started at all. Plus not having any money meant for complicated university politics reasons I didn't have any space either, and I felt reluctant to try to start experiments when I would have had to perch on the end of someone else's bench and borrow the student facilities.

Ways people in a similar position to me got round this: they funded their preliminary experiments out of their own (personal) money. They cleared out disused labs in a part of the hospital slated for demolition, and equipped them with semi-obsolete equipment salvaged from fire-sales, abandoned store-rooms and even skip (= dumpster) diving sometimes. They called in favours with the labs where they'd worked as post-docs, basically making return visits to use the sophisticated advanced equipment already in place there, and continuing to publish stuff jointly with their previous colleagues in order to bootstrap things. They did their actual experimental work nights and weekends so that there would be space free in the over-crowded communal areas.

I didn't do that, partly because I was optimistically hoping my ship would come in, I'd get a small starter grant from somewhere and I might as well wait until I could get started properly. And partly because some of those routes weren't actually available to me; my previous lab was in Sweden and anyway the whole department closed down a few months after I left. I don't have the mechanical skills to build a working HPLC out of salvaged parts, let alone one I could rely on for precision experiments!

Also part of my problem was that I was really excited about the teaching, I took on lots of interesting extra bits because I thought I might as well while I was waiting to sort the financial thing out. So I ended up with my theoretically 50% teaching job taking up about 4 and a half days a week. With the bit of time I had left, and I do admit a bit of working beyond my contracted hours and taking work home and stuff, I did a little bit of networking and trying to set up collaborations with labs (either within my institution or externally) that were already up and running, but in the end I didn't pursue that as tenaciously as I might have. Another thing I could probably have done is write reviews so that I wouldn't have quite such a huge publication gap. The main reason why I didn't is a bootstrapping problem, namely that most of these sorts of activities kind of depend on having some kind of ongoing experimental portfolio, at least if you're going to be successful at them. If anything I've put too much time and effort into writing grant applications which in hindsight were doomed to fail, because if I didn't have any data my proposals were just pie-in-the-sky.

Now that I do have a project running, which depended heavily on finally finding a collaborator who is supporting me by lending lab space, equipment and the clout of having a full Professor as co-lead on the project, there are things I could be doing and I'm not. Working alongside the Minion so that we have at least one and a half people working on the project and things could go faster. (Though money is an issue, still.) More aggressively pursuing networking and collaboration opportunities on her behalf. Living-breathing-dreaming her project while my own is in abeyance, basically.

I think you're right that I'm also a little scared of success. Because the truth is that once you're on the treadmill you never get off, it's not a matter of sacrificing a few years, once things get going I'll likely never have a work/life balance. I'll always be chasing the next grant, I'll always be trying to keep up my rate of publication. If nothing else the government judges the university, and therefore the university is compelled to judge me, on how often I publish. And there's no account taken for the fact that you can't actually predict in advance which experiments are going to work or yield interesting results enough to publish, if you're unlucky you fall out of the ridiculous competition for tiny crumbs.

Would I do it if success were more certain? The thing is that when I'm actually absorbed in an experiment, when I'm finding stuff out, there's pretty much nothing else I'd rather be doing. I don't mind working through the night to get that crucial 18-hour time-point. As long as I get enough down-time to maintain my physical and mental health, I find actual research more satisfying than the great majority of things I do with my leisure time. But once you're an academic rather than a trainee, you don't really get to be completely absorbed in discovering exciting new things, you are always chasing money and publications and a whole cruft of annoying bureaucratic stuff in order to be able to do the experiments.

[shreena]

I have no idea how one goes about doing this kind of thing but I think you'd be really good at writing "popular science" books because of your enthusiasm for science, knowledge and writing skills. Perhaps also educational materials/books on science for children?

Similarly, I hear lots of scientists on the radio doing - I feel - a much less cogent job of explaining things than you would.

Of course, I have no idea whether that sort of thing would interest you at all.

[liv]

Thank you, Shreena. I would very much like to write popular science or get involved with science communication related stuff. The thing is I strongly doubt I could make a living doing that; it would always be a sideline. It would be good for my CV to have some public engagement experience, but I am not sure right now I can afford to invest in what would always be a hobby.

Though that does remind me that I ought to get round to sorting out the byzantine bureaucracy of getting a CRB check so that I can in fact sign up for outreach programmes working with kids and teenagers.

[atreic]

*hugs*

Academia is hard.