Tag: information

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The Light Bulb Moments

This is what science is made of: Long stretches of I-have-no-clue-what-this-means, but as you go along with it, you might find a light bulb or two (or more like, a couple burning candles)*.

Sometimes, you will go through literature and concepts which make no sense to you. You will go over them again and again without absorbing anything (like when you have to go over a sentence twice just to confirm that it is (indeed) written in English). Did you perhaps miss a lecture in your classes? Missed a lesson life might have been trying to teach you at some point in the past? Or are you just missing the point here? Were you just not made for this? Did that escalate really quickly**?.

You will feel hopeless and a failure and start debating every life decision you have made leading you to this particular research article. But, in time, you will find this is not entirely true. You will realize (at some point) that all that reading and going through concepts, again and again, was actually going through to your brain in some way. And that you are definitely not as dumb as you had started to think you were (not too many self-esteem points, though – you are still capable of dumbness, just not as much as you had begun to believe).

Somewhere along, you see that it has started to make some sense. That definitely this line that you are reading right now, this would have been complete nonsense a couple journal articles ago.

It doesn’t happen all of a sudden, not (at all) like someone has switched on a light bulb. But the vision slowly clears and you can see a little more. It’s like each new paper you go through, you start to understand everything just a bit better than before (in some kind of a cumulative effect). 

That all that wandering wasn’t getting you lost. That there’s still hope for you (probably).

 

*This definition may differ from scientist to scientist.

**The answer is yes.

 

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What Doesn’t Make It To THE Thesis

I recently attended a PhD seminar of a student at the Physics department. One interesting question that came up was: What didn’t make it to your thesis?

After deep thought and much analysis, I have realized this is such a good question. It let the candidate show other things he did and learnt in his PhD that didn’t make it to his thesis, because they may have been slightly irrelevant or might have been disregarded as not-important-enough.

But with this question, he could highlight this stuff because he still did those during his PhD (or more likely, he could highlight this stuff well if he’d been prepared for such a question to come up – this may not be your average kind of opponent-speak).

But hang on, is it just this stuff that doesn’t make it to your thesis?

When I was doing my Masters, we’d always joke about how everybody should write 2 theses: One the more formal, “required” document; the other, a document of “failures”: the questions that we asked, and what we tried in the lab, that then didn’t work out, and that we then dropped… which then obviously wouldn’t make it to the thesis. The kind of information that you jot down in the side margins of your lab notebook, along with angry and frustrated emoticons and hashtags and exclamation marks.

Jargon that only the person who owns the lab notebook may understand – And now I realize how I don’t make much useful or interesting notes in my lab notebook :'(

The kind of information that doesn’t make it anywhere.

Because that information is also useful, although it mostly just tells you what NOT to do (which is quite the time-saving information). But this kind of information doesn’t have much space in the scientific world. Like people in all other fields, we just want to make noise about the best work that we do, disregarding the important stepping stones that our failures were that got us there.

So yeah, a lot of stuff doesn’t make it to the thesis at any level (or any important document, for that matter – except may be some internal lab communication).

There’s also a lot of other stuff that doesn’t make it to the thesis: the hardwork and energy that you put in, how you picked yourself up after repeated failures, how your informal collaborations helped you (and the people around you)…

… Although if you end up doing really good work, the thesis can become a reflection of it.