What Not to Do in Big Projects
Monday, July 29, 2019
Thanks to Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline pharma blog, I have come across some excellent advice for graduate students in the form of a do-not-do list at the scientific journal, Nature. I should know that this is good advice: I was a grad student myself many years ago.
Probably more important to many of my readers, I think this advice translates well to other projects with a similar multi-year timeframe, hence the recommendation -- which is also a reminder to myself. The article is pithy, elaborating on each of the below for a short paragraph:
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| Image by Plush Design Studio, via Unsplash, license. |
- Compare Yourself With Others
- Blindly Trust Your Data
- Suffer Alone
- Believe That More Work Is Always Better
- Grow Your Records Organically
- Get Stuck After One Failure
Graduate school is no easy gig. Failure is regular and often stings. Seek help and advice from those with more experience, such as senior colleagues, postdocs or your adviser. I've struggled with problems that I could see no way out of. For example, when I switched suppliers for a naturally derived polysaccharide, I witnessed unexpected results. I was lost after days of measurements: how could the same polysaccharide give me different signals? When I approached my adviser, he suggested a technique I hadn't considered, and it helped me to uncover a difference in the composition of the polysaccharides that was behind the inconsistent signals. [link omitted]This list caused me to realize that I have grown out of the habit of seeking out company and advice. I'll be giving that some thought now, for starters.
Moving up a level, this piece has helped me solve a small conundrum I've had for some time: What is the value, if any, of a "Do Not Do List?" I've seen the idea batted around enough that I even have making one of these as a to-do item. In fact, I have had it for so long that I was beginning to see it as a someday/maybe or even as something to prune.
One indeed can't start every day perusing a big list of negatives: That would be overwhelming. On top of that, prohibitions are not positive guides to action, except implicitly, by contrast. Still, they can be useful periodic reminders or spurs to positive actions. In other words, they are useless unless we take encouragement or discover new goals by perusing them at regular (and I would guess, usually widely-spaced) intervals.
-- CAV
7 comments:
Yo, Gus, you quote something not to do: "Get Stuck After One Failure." The short retort is, if you're sleep-deprived enough, you'll never care.
Fuller story: I was doing a field methods course on an unstudied African language; that's where you learn a language from scratch just by talking with a native speaker. The whole class, as is customary, held a two or three-hour conference in which each of us gave a talk on our final project. I did an instrumental analysis of the vowel system of the language; unfortunately, many of the vowels were nasalized; nasalization bollixes up any instrumental results something fierce. I spent four days pounding my head against the wall trying to get something systematic out of it without success. I also got maybe five hours of sleep those four days. When it came time to give my talk, I found out I'd forgotten one of my projector slides in the departmental office, where I had run it off onto clear plastic. The instructor rushed to the office to get it for me. He came back five minutes later, but I was so brain-dead I didn't even notice the passage of time; apparently I just stood there with my eyes closed for the whole five minutes and only opened them when he tapped my shoulder. I then talked for ten minutes, basically saying I had no real conclusions, but look at the pretty scatter plots! I then walked out of the room (I think people were too kind to ask any questions, or maybe they did ask me and I just don't remember the Q&A), went to the nearest campus library, and crashed on a couch until closing. It was a dreadful talk, and I didn't even care. (Still don't mostly, since I can scarcely remember any of it.)
That is excruciatingly funny/painful-to-contemplate. I take it the talk wasn't the major component of your grade -- or that you got a gentleman's F.
In any event, I recommend that you submit your results to the Speculative Grammarian. That'll show'em.
Ideally these lists would boil down to one word: Introspect. However, introspection is a skill like any other, and one that must be practiced to be useful when you need it. You can get by without introspection when things are going really well, but when you're working 20 hour days, getting two hours of sleep, and pushing yourself past your physical, emotional, and psychological limits....it gets hard. A list like this is good practice. "Am I stressed because I'm comparing myself to others?" If yes, you have a concrete action you can take--stop! Easier said than done, yes, but until you identify the problem it's impossible to solve.
It's like a kata in martial arts: Ideally you would never use one in a real situation (they're predictable, which in a fight means you're dead). However, learning them is a useful step because it teaches you specific skills and how to apply those skills. And someone who knows the katas will usually defeat someone who doesn't know them. Similarly, someone who knows an introspection checklist is going to be better able to deal with these problems under stress than someone who doesn't know how to introspect.
Of course, we're all different. My job can be pretty high-stress, physical and mentally. My method of dealing with it? I have a photo of my kids on my desk. This is a reminder of why I'm putting myself through this. I can put the stress in full context. I can't always reduce the stress, but I can change from a weight pulling me down into a mountain I'm climbing up.
"I take it the talk wasn't the major component of your grade -- or that you got a gentleman's F."
I was ABD, so the grade didn't matter--not sure there even was a grade. If there was, it was probably P/F, and it would have been a P, I think, since I did good work in the rest of the class. But yes, it was a far worse performance than my first field methods class, where my final paper was the basis for my first conference paper, which you might remember me giving when I stayed with you that time.
"In any event, I recommend that you submit your results to the Speculative Grammarian. That'll show'em."
Heh, in one of my satires, a Lovecraftian linguistic satire set a century-plus in the future, you have this exchange:
I showed [your paper] to Dr. Gilbreath and he said for me to tell you that he believes SpecGram is still publishing. Does that mean anything to you?”
I laughed and said, “It’s an old linguistics joke. Nobody knows where the term comes from, but it’s what linguists say when someone has a stupid idea.”
The managing editor said it brought a tear to his eye, because he could not imagine a more ideal future for us.
Dinwar,
"It's like a kata in martial arts: Ideally you would never use one in a real situation (they're predictable, which in a fight means you're dead). However, learning them is a useful step because it teaches you specific skills and how to apply those skills. And someone who knows the katas will usually defeat someone who doesn't know them. Similarly, someone who knows an introspection checklist is going to be better able to deal with these problems under stress than someone who doesn't know how to introspect."
Good point. You can use lists like this to learn or improve introspection.
Snedcat,
I need to read that one some time
Gus
Yo, Gus, you write, "In any event, I recommend that you submit your results to the Speculative Grammarian. That'll show'em.'
Forgot earlier, there's also this from a different satire:
“I understand you think you’re being libeled. What exactly has happened?”
“I’ve had several papers published that I didn’t write or even know about.”
I said nothing for a couple of seconds as I chewed this over. “Could you elaborate on this, please? It seems like something most people would view as an unforeseen blessing.”
“I received requests from linguists at other universities asking me to elaborate on analyses in papers published under my name in Linguistic Enquiry and International Journal of American Linguistics, or for further data, or to explain contradictions in my glosses. I had no idea what they were talking about, so I went to the library and discovered there have been three papers published under my name in the last two months that I didn’t write on a language I work on, but filled with ludicrous analyses and faulty data, and all in a long-discarded theoretical framework. There’s no way anyone will take me seriously after that. And then I discovered that a paper I had been working on with real data containing my actual analyses had been published by Speculative Grammarian, so now even my real work is irremediably tainted.”
“I see.” This was serious.
Nice.
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