Hello my dear biologists and others who have clicked on this newsletter for different reasons,
I want to briefly reflect on my past 2 months as a Ph.D. student at EPFL in Switzerland and share something potentially useful with you.
The past two months have been nearly perfect: my group is lovely, my professor is supportive and the project is cool.
To all of you who are unfamiliar, I am using the fruit fly to genetically figure out the immunity of the brain. Innate immunity, given that flies aren’t the most complicated of brains out there and don’t have an adaptive immunity.
At leasts that’s what major review papers are saying.
Though my stay here so far has been incredible on the outside, on the inside, there were already moments of despair and crippling self-doubt present.
It’s been a while since I’ve been in a lab, so having a bunch of experiments fail has become an unfamiliar feeling.
After multiple experiments failed, my mind started catastrophizing.
“I’ll probably fail at everything, and won’t discover anything important, ever, and I am just an idiot who came here by chance or luck,
or by being incredibly handsome.
When my mind went here, it lasted, not one day, but many days in a row.
I didn’t want to go to the lab each morning. I’d have rather stayed home than embarrass myself.
Idiot.
Idiot.
IDIOT!
Very handsome idiot.
STILL AN IDIOT!”
But, that wasn’t an option, given that this is a job, and it is making me a living, and not going would risk getting me fired.
So I faced more experiments, tried to set them up more carefully, and eventually, I made an interesting observation, which, if I manage to repeat, could be a basis for a super interesting immunity-aging paper.
WHOAH, what the fuck just happened here.
All of a sudden, this small victory (a one-time observation) lifted me out of my catastrophizing and helped me work much more enthusiastically in the following days.
The following days were much more productive, and I managed to set up double the number of experiments I did in the previous period, simply because of getting excited about research again.
I find this piece of psychology fascinating.
How can just a couple of days of failure put someone in a huge self-doubt crisis?
And how can one simple (not even verified) observation lift one out of it?
And what will happen if I don’t manage to verify this observation?
Will I fall in despair again?
Here’s what I take out of it.
I think this probably relates to dopamine or some other podcaster’s favourite buzzword.
It seems that it has everything to do with setting optimal anticipation of a reward.
I initially expected quick rewards, and having them not come was painful.
After that, I worked expected almost no reward and focused all mental energy to making my experiments properly set.
Then a reward came (an interesting observation) and it fuelled my work for days.
Will I now get doubt-crippled again if I see my observation was noise?
I don’t think so, because my expectations have now been recalibrated.
I expect it to be noise, because almost all observations are noise (okay maybe this is much too self-defense mechanism at play, but you get my point).
The main lesson to me here, is to nail the expectations game, and endure through failures with an honest work ethic.
Rewards come at random, but the more you work, the faster you might encounter them.
Fun little game of sweet torture.
I consider also that what I consider a reward should be different:
The focus probably should not be on the reward of discovery, but on the reward of my experiment answering my question, because the experiment was set properly and executed flawlessly.
Well, that IS discovery.
Just because it’s a non-publication-worthy discovery, doesn’t mean it’s not one.
It answered a question.
Maybe a dumb question with an obvious answer, but it allowed building on top of it.
That should make it easier to not trap oneself in the haunted house of expectations ghosts.
That’s all I got for today.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
I’ll try to be more consistent in the future with writing to you.
I have a bunch of interviews with cool early-career scientists coming up, so stay tuned and move my emails from spam if you want to read them.
Until next time,
Kenan
Dear Kenan,
thank you for sharing!
Now I know that I am not the only one idiot :D