Tell us about that most firey fire through which you have had to walk in your scientific career. How did you overcome the challenge? Did you have help along the way, or was it a solo effort? And what did you learn? Why are you a better scientist given the difficulties that you have encountered?
I'm late to the party, partly because I have found it hard to think of a single event which falls into this category. Many of my challenges are about me rather than external career challenges - the driver for the starting of this blog was my experiences with part-time working as a result of stress-related health problems, which are all about me and my limits (and a little about the problems of being a conscientious academic in a university system that exploits such people to the max - which actually, is not a problem unique to the university). I'm an insecure, grumpy, imposter-syndrome-riddled person, and am still wrestling with demons around the boring stuff of being a brainy woman, a single brainy woman, in a field which is less male-dominated than many sciences but is still predominantly male, and designed to reward certain kinds of predominantly male behaviour, such as Showing Off and being Aggressively Competitive. However, I finally thought of a story to tell, and hopefully pseudonymising my research field doesn't detract from its relevance.
At the start of the final year of my PhD funding, I decided that I wanted to try for a post-doctoral position. I had recently split up with my boyfriend, and my housemates had both got engaged, so I was feeling somewhere between deliciously free of ties and miserably lonely - the perfect conditions to make the prospect of going abroad for a couple of years very attractive. Being a typical monoglot Brit, I focused on North America and Scandinavia as possible destinations, and secured funding for a two year salary in Canada (the lab I went to paid my research costs but I brought my own salary) to work on the one LonelyLittleIdea of a post-PhD research direction that I had come up with after weeks of thinking.
The only way I could think of to collect data on LonelyLittleIdea was by a comparative study - as my area is pseudonymised as Beach Studies, and I've mentioned that I work on sediment-castles (mud or sand) before, I think we'll describe this as comparing the shapes of mud-castles with sand-castles. Mud-castles are relatively easy to sample and study, but Sand-castles are only accessible when the conditions are right - the sand needs to be sufficiently damp to pack well, but not so damp that the foundations are sliding away in a quick-sand. These conditions only happen at a certain time of the year, so I planned my work carefully - I would start my position just before the correct time of year, so that I could sample sand-castles first, and if that went wrong for any reason, I would have a second sampling window at the start of my second year.
The first year, no sand-castles were sampled, due to some unusual weather conditions, but I wasn't too worried - I sampled several mud-castles and got to work learning about a new lab, new methods, new region, and studying my mud-castle data. The second year another freakish set of weather meant that sand-castles in my study region were inaccessible. I know now that I probably could have found a sampling window, but my boss/head of lab was not used to sampling sand castles so was adverse to doing so in any conditions other than perfect, AND he wanted to be present when I sampled, so the combination of his calendar and the rarity of perfect conditions that season meant that at the time it seemed impossible.
So - I was starting the second year of my two-year post-doc with datasets on mud-castles (which could be published in lower-tier journals, but all the real scientific interest was in the comparison) and no sand-castles at all. And I was depressed (I know now that I probably was really clinically depressed, but at the time I had no diagnosis and assumed it was just evidence of my unfitness for the job (imposter syndrome) to feel like I was wearing lead boots on my feet and in my soul, cry every evening, and spend most of every weekend in bed (lack of will power, clearly)). But I had to do something in my second year of lab work, after all I was being paid! And going into lab every day gave me a reason to get up and wash and dress, plus I still felt that LonelyLittleIdea was worth studying, that there was a hole in our understanding. And boss backed me up - boss was really REALLY positive, everything anyone did was GREAT, FASCINATING, SUPERB, WONDERFUL. Which actually helped a lot at the time - I 'knew' that he was wrong and I was none of those things, but I also had no fear of him making fun of me or being cross or sarcastic or disappointed if I messed up anything I did. That, combined with my failure to sample any sand-castles, actually gave me an odd sort of freedom. I spent days in the library, or in a corner of the lab reading papers and books, and writing what I thought of at the time as pointless drivel but I now refer to as 'zero draft' or 'free-writing' and know is a very useful stage in idea development. As I inevitably cycled out of the depression low, I managed to develop a couple of different takes on LonelyLittleIdea, carrying out a meta-analysis of published data and a lot of boss' unpublished data (which got published in a good international journal), and measuring castle-shadows rather than the actual castles themselves, which led essentially to the main research work I'm doing now, 13 years later. Because I felt as if the main project had failed, I was also more open to being involved in other work around the lab, and the second year of that post-doc was much more productive than the first.
So, what did I learn? That bad times pass, that keeping going when things look bleak is better than holing up, that a disaster is not always the end of a project, that I'm good at thinking around problems and coming up with different approaches to exploring questions (I now see my ability to think up half a dozen ways to test any idea as one of my main strengths as a scientist). I also learnt that, for me at least, positive support and encouragement made for a healthy research environment (my PhD supervisor was/is a genius. Seriously. But he only ever commented on gaps or weaknesses or things that needed doing or lacunae in my knowledge. He was shy and quiet and private and awkward around people, and he appeared to have favourites, and he triggered a lot of my own insecurities. I always felt noisy, clumsy and boring around him. I learnt one hell of a lot from him, I will always be grateful that I had the opportunity to work with him, but I was constantly anxious, waiting to be found out, found wanting, publically humiliated (he NEVER actually did this, but for some reason it's what I thought I deserved or expected to happen)), and that shaped my interactions with other post-docs and grad students in later post-docs, the way I supervise, and the way I try to run my lab (and that makes some people think I'm a soft touch. That's another story for another day).
Thanks for sharing!
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