Tag: blogging

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Other Stuff

A while back, I came across this post about how science can make you feel stupid.

I shared it, thinking I understood perfectly what it meant and felt like. I actually didn’t then, because now I know what it means and feels like. (And yet, I am not exactly sure how it feels like. Stupid can take so many forms).

When I started off my PhD, I was like any normal person, motivated about starting a new “project” that they are excited about. It’s just like new year, and we all know how that goes:

1) You start off with a long list of resolutions;

2) You start following through on almost all of them immediately;

3) You feel so good that you are following through, and how this year did not turn out like last year (and we all know how that went);

4) You start realizing how by starting everything, you broke all rules of developing new habits, and how this is not sustainable at all (did you really even want all of this?);

5) You start going back to your normal routine, and your resolutions start feeling less important to you now;

6) New year, and you have almost forgotten (almost) how last year went and are ready for a new cycle of highly-motivated-to-back-to-“normal”.

But of course, everybody knows these stages, everyone has new-year moments. And when I started my PhD, I knew I’d face some kind of a slump some of the times. People-on-the-internet told me that the PhD dip is inevitable, and it is not a question of if you will come across it but when you will actually experience it (although they also told me that this phase comes sometime around the second year and I am still in my first, so am I just going through a trailer for the actual movie that will be officially opening in months to come?).

The thing is, despite knowing this, I didn’t really plan for this time (that is another kind of stupid right there). Because, like any normal person motivated about starting a new “project” that they are excited about, I wanted to be laser-focused on my PhD and on things that would take it forward.

So if I needed a break from lab work, I could read or catch up on literature, and if I needed a break from reading, I could take some online course. I did like doing other stuff, but all of that could wait until I had my PhD a little more on routine (a thing, that I am finding out only now, was not as easy as I supposed it was, but that could be for another time).

And this is the importance of comparatively-dumber-sounding other stuff.

Because when you are doing something as crazy as a PhD, where you can go months running around in circles finding your way back to square-one’s, feeling-stupid does become inevitable. And when you see it’s been a while since you last made progress, or learnt something new, or developed a new skill, or added something to you, yourself, as a person, that can be eexxttrreemmeellyy demotivating.

But other stuff can help you here.

Because if you have a little something going on the side, like learning a new skill that may not be completely related to your PhD, it is some progress that you can, at least, show to yourself: So, yes, I still haven’t been able to decide if zinc chloride is better or if I should go for zinc acetate for my solutions, but I have completed six-hundred-and-eighty-five blog posts! That should be a milestone!

So that’s why I have started to think about starting other stuff this new semester. Like taking a language course (I have always wanted to learn another language and now might be a perfect opportunity), or starting to draw (I have some half-developed scripts for a comic on how my PhD stuff is going), or taking up other random workshops and activities where I can just change my environment and see what else is up in the world.

And there is another reason why the other stuff can be so complementary to your PhD: so now when you are moving about progress-less, you can blame it on the other stuff, and how, because of other stuff, you probably have not been able to focus on your PhD.

But the other stuff was your stupid idea, wasn’t it?

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Storry Telling – Part I

When you are a scientist, there’ll be countless times when you’ll be required to “communicate your work”. It’s necessary, it’s woven into the current system, and it makes sure people don’t have to reinvent the wheel (or at least that’s the point).

But sciieeeence… is too technical for good communication. And when it gets too specific (as in a PhD research), then it appears very far off from being relevant to general life. This means that often when science IS being communicated, it may not be reaching the ears it should be reaching.

Now that doesn’t matter in a lot of cases, because, after all, it is science and not a novel that we want to sell a 100 million copies of. It’s for other scientists, more specifically for those who are related to your own field of work… And even in there, people who really read your writings will be people who are almost exactly working on the same thing as you (how many people in the world does that mean, especially for a junior scientist? 10? Maaaay be 20, if they find your article)… And even they will not be reading it word to word, but mostly just skimming it, and extracting those precious couple of sentences that they’d find most relevant for their own work (and that you, by the way, spent months working to get).

So yeah, it is okay if it is boring and technical, because it is not meant to torture a whole lot of people (just the ones who might really need to read it).

Now this may seem sloppy on behalf of a scientist (although most of us are making a sincere effort to put forth that gibberish-to-your-ears in the most understandable way possible). And then, of course, we need to interact with people from other disciplines of science, and no matter how big of a scientist you are, it still helps that people from other fields can break their stuff down to bare basics for you to understand.

So good communication is still the king.

One of the key ways of communicating effectively is to tell it as a story (and this fad has been going on for a while now). And the thing, which I have always had a hard time understanding, is: how do you tell a scientific work as a story?

Story telling has so many elements, and so many styles: so which one is most suitable for the communication of a scientific work?

Okay, so you can give a good introduction. Start off by introducing the theme and “characters” of your story. If you give your audience (or readers) a really good introduction to ground them in understanding, it becomes easier (on both sides) as you progress.

Another aspect of this can be to tell your story with the story of your work. So you tried something, and it didn’t work (or, surprise!, this time it did work), and that’s how you jumped on this new idea that you’ll be telling people about (but hang on! you shall not overdo it, because, after all, thou shalt talk about science more).

Because story telling involves a lot of elements that can directly affect the integrity of your science. Like exaggerations. Or sometimes unnecessary and frilly details. It often also requires knowledge of the complete picture (which you never have in science until may be after you have gone through everything).

 

In science communication, I find this quite interesting as a scientist myself: What limits can you test and how far can you push the boundaries of science communication by applying principles of story telling?

(And how sorry should you be if you fail at it).

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The Finnish Doctorate

In the 3 months that I have been involved in a PhD at Åbo Akademi University, I have come to the conclusion that just the act of pursuing a PhD in Finland warrants keeping a blog about it.

Because Finland is right on the opposite end of the spectrum of all cultures I have experienced so far. This inevitably also shows up in how one organization, or one group, does research. I find it quite interesting how these “cultural” differences can dictate how you approach a scientific problem, and how you interact with the system and people around you.

This can make for topics interesting enough to make it worth it to drop the research process once in a while to document the experiences.

But then again, the PhD process itself can be full of ups and downs, and well, blogging is the obvious way to go about it for me.

So here’s to doctoring through a Finnish PhD, and writing about it.