Friday, June 09, 2006

Grad School Advice -- Year Four

By the time I had my chat with my advisor at the beginning of my fourth year in the lab, I had finally gotten my first publication out and a review as well. He was happy and I was happy. So what did he have for me to think about/work on this year? He told me, "You need to focus on asking the important questions. You should think of every experiment as a figure in a paper. Don't do anything that you won't be publishing."

The idea behind this statement isn't really anything earth-shattering, and to be honest, I rarely do anything in the lab that I don't think is an "important question" or that could be publishable. At the same time, I have to admit that I haven't always remembered this advice in my day-to-day routine. It's easy to get curious about something, spend a few weeks on it, get an answer, and then realize that you really didn't need to go down that road.

My past advisor (when I was a technician before grad school) used to challenge us to create a mental publication before we did the experiments. Imagine to yourself what the question is, what figures would answer it, what people would want to see, how you would interpret the data, and how you would assign significance to the work. This kind of exercise is helpful, but its extremely challenging (and can be frustrating when things don't go as planned--and they never do).

So, this year I've been trying to limit myself to the important questions. Most of this year has been spent building off of a great result I got a couple of years ago. I seriously thought it would take 6 months to flesh out this project (it seemed so straight forward), but there have been plenty of technical difficulties in the last 6 months, or so, that have really made me tired of this project. I think it will be just be another couple of weeks, and we'll call it complete and submit it for publication.