Tag: reading

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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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Buried Under Literature

I recently learned I could get updates on recently published research of my particular field by creating alerts in Google Scholar.

After “learning” this, I realized I had to have it. What was I doing, did I want to get out of my hole after four years of my PhD and realized I didn’t know where the world was going? That was not the way to go.

I should know what the current trends are in my field, where the research is going, and how many people (and which groups) are publishing work that is identical to my own (also so that I can send them hate mail if they publish something I was just about to submit).

So I did that. I followed some of the most notable names in my field, created alerts for their works, and also for articles related to their expertise. Breezy easy. I now just had to follow through.

The thing is, if you have very famous people, they seem to be publishing something every other day (probably some kind of “you become famous, you publish more, you become more famous, you get published even more” infinite loop). And the mails I receive every other day have something from a couple to around ten or eleven titles. But of course, if you have related people in your alerts, then some papers are obviously going to overlap.

Now I am blindly downloading papers I know I’m not even going to read half of – there are lots of interesting titles that I would like to get to know more, but then again, they are not related to the “core” of what I’m doing, and having so much to read already ensures that I’m probably never going to read most of them. But that does not deter me from the simple act of saving all pdfs to my downloads folder, with arbitrary, unintelligible titles, further decreasing the probability of me ever reading them, or even knowing why I downloaded them in the first place.

The only fear I have, is downloading the same paper more than once. I do not want to have it so that I read a paper twice, despite all my precautions, because I apparently had two copies ( one of which did not land in my “Read” folder after I’d read it).

I do not want to waste my precious time on a single paper, time that I could have easily wasted elsewhere, in more fun manner.

Sigh. I should now get back to my other form of wasting time, cataloging all literature in my computer to see if I have a second copy of something lurking in my hard drive (I seem to only have downloaded papers in the past four months rather than reading actual literature).

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The Internal Dialogue of a Chronic Procrastinator

Today was supposed to be a big day, a day when I would finally finish that review article I had started 3 weeks ago (or was it 4 weeks ago?).

But all morning, I have been displaying classic symptoms of a person who wants to avoid work at all costs.

So to the article… where did I put it? Drat, I even had it lying right in front of me, a constant reminder of my procrastination. Clearly, I hadn’t lost it, despite my messy desk. My messy desk! May be I should just use 5 minutes of my best hour of the morning to straighten my desk out.

All papers sorted out, 55 minutes remaining of my best hour. Still plenty of time to get to that paper, see? Okay, but why in the world is that sticky note lying around? How long has it been, 3 weeks? Or has it been 4? Strangely, it has been fine for all that time, but now I’m 98% sure if I don’t throw it out immediately, this apparently-innocent-piece-of-paper would cause something catastrophic to happen; it is that important that I get up, walk to that dustbin, and throw it in the garbage.

Ah, I definitely had some experiments lined up for today. Are my glass slides fine, that I washed so carefully yesterday and put them safely away in my drawer? They should be, right? May be I should just go and check on them, the lab is, after all, just two doors away.

No, no. Today we were supposed to read in the morning, remember? No going anywhere. Even if something has happened to your glass slides, there’s nothing you can do about it now that you also cannot do 90 minutes later (Okay, it’s 90 minutes now? I certainly have higher expectations from myself).

But it’s like I have this itch in my hand, don’t you see? May be if I were to hold a forcep, or a petri dish in my hand, it’d just go away…

45 minutes to kill now before I can finally declare myself unfit for reading and use the excuse of too-less-time-remaining-for-the-rest-of-my-day-tasks.

But as time ticks by, and you haven’t yet gotten into the frenzy of your experimental procedures, and neither are you letting yourself get up from your seat for a said amount of time, and you have straightened out your desk, then what else do you have left to do… But to read?

And so I took out that hour for long-awaited, piling-up-to-dangerous-levels-now reading. Still didn’t finish that article, but I didn’t really expect myself to finish that today, did I?

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Theory and Practice

I look down at my lab journal. It’s been a long, but a good enough day. Got all those glass slides washed and rinsed thoroughly for the experiment I’m planning to start tomorrow. Basically 2 hours of manual labor (there were a lot of slides to wash), but needs to be done, right? So let’s give ourselves a gold star for that (because there’s no telling which way the actual experiment will go as yet, but from my recent failed attempts, doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any kind of star for that work).

So, it’s a little late, but I definitely feel energetic enough. Great! How about finishing that review that you had started?

Yeah, okay, I could do that. In fact, I have been trying to squeeze in a little bit of reading for the past 3-4 weeks, which is just as important as manual labor in science (in fact, more important, as all that “manual labor” is, after all, designed around the literature in your field).

I mean, how hard can it really be, to just take out an hour – an hour – everyday to read up on questions that have been popping in your head for some time now? You still need to develop, like, tons of understanding of your research area – it won’t come to you in your dreams, you know.

Yes, yes, I get it. Just let me get done with this blog post.

I mean, I have been running up and down all day.  One moment, you are just supposed to follow protocol, do things like second nature, that you don’t need to think twice about. Next moment, you should slow down and sit down (reading time!) – and take deep breaths (not in the lab, mind you, too much fumes). Pick up the paper that you left off five weeks ago (you know where you left it off, right?) And then focus… F-O-C-U-S… Focus! But sometimes, no matter if you repeat the mantra in your head in all caps or in italics, you just cannot get in the Zone.

In science, you are supposed to juggle these two very different mindsets on a routine. Now you are in the lab, now you are not. Now you are in the lab again. I think when you do it better, when this shifting between these two “personas” becomes more and more seamless, you become better at your thing (after all, theory and practice are supposed to complement each other).

After brute-forcing myself to read for the past few weeks (it’s been 4 weeks and no reading done), I’m not-so-quickly finding out that I need to get to this problem more smartly. Like may be try reading in the morning instead of at the end of the day, when I mostly just end up finding a new way of telling myself to focus, without actually focusing.

Having figured out the theory, let’s see how this comes out in practice.