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Fear of Failure

Do you see the tiny green film at the bottom of the beaker in the picture above?  This extremely small clump of green stuff is a diatom sample weighing less than 20 milligrams that I need to carefully process and guard with my life for carbon isotope analysis. If I lose any of this sample or ruin a procedure, I will likely have to spend several weeks waiting for a new culture to grow and start over again.


Thoughts that have been running through my mind recently include:

• What if I lose any of my sample while transferring it between beakers?
• What if it spills?
• What if a piece of hair lands in it? (note: things like hair and dust can ruin stable isotope samples)
• Despite how many methods papers I read, I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. What if I dry the sample too long, or add too much acid or completely miss a secret step that isn't described in any journal articles?
• WHY IS THIS FILTER FALLING APART? WHY? NOOOOO!!!!! 

Failure and data loss can happen at all stages of the scientific process. Maybe a storm destroys your field equipment, maybe someone steals a field instrument to sell it for scrap metal, maybe a boater decides to move that heavy metal box they found that happens to be collecting your data, maybe your computer crashes and you lose months of data analysis... and maybe, just maybe, the worst thing that could possibly happen occurs: you give a horrible thesis or dissertation defense.

Although science (and academia in general) demands perfection, failure does occur. It's likely the reason why journal articles published in 2010 can be about studies conducted in 1998- some sample was lost along the way and work needed to be redone. As scientists, we are expected to quickly move on from mistakes, learn from them, and start over again, whether the starting over sets us back days or years.

For now, I will hold on to these backup "diatom leftovers" that probably aren't usable but give me a false sense of security.

Grad Students, Scientists and Researchers: What is the worst lab mistake or scientific failure you ever made? What was the strangest way you have lost data or ruined samples? How did you get over these mishaps?

Writing for Science Blogs Versus Journal Articles

This guest post was written by Deanna Conners, an environmental scientist and freelance science writer who holds a MS in Environmental Studies and a PhD in Environmental Toxicology. Deanna is a frequent contributor to EarthSky. You can follow Deanna on Twitter  and Google+.

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Image courtesy of Dwayne Bent via Flickr 

I’ve heard many people say that they enjoy science blogging. I agree, it’s fun. I’ve been blogging now for almost two years, mostly about topics in Earth science, and the science I write about never ceases to amaze me.

I’ve never heard any scientist say that they enjoy writing journal articles. For myself, and I imagine for a few others, the joy associated with writing journal articles comes not from the act of writing per se but from seeing good research get published in good journals. The act of writing for journal articles involves a heavy dose of delayed gratification.

Nevertheless, journal articles are the mainstay of scientific progress. Blogs? Well, at this point in time I can’t say what role blogs may play in furthering the scientific profession. I can say that science blogs are becoming much more common, respected and valued communication tools. Also, I can hope that science blogging will inspire and encourage more people to enter into STEM careers.

I was honored to be asked to contribute a guest post to Wading Through Research, the new science blog network created by graduate students working in the Florida Coastal Everglades. Since I was given the freedom to write about whatever I wanted, I thought I would use this opportunity to reflect upon and share some of what I’ve learned about writing for journal articles versus writing for science blogs.

On goals. Obviously, both journal articles and science blogs should strive to convey clear, accurate and compelling scientific information. When writing journal articles, however, one important goal to keep in mind is that the science you are describing needs to be repeatable. Hence, write in the most exquisite detail about your methods. When writing for blogs, readability trumps repeatability. Many readers won’t care how you preserved your phytoplankton or how many fish you sampled. One goal of blogging is to make the science more accessible. So go ahead, lose the methods section (when appropriate) and tell us more about those pesky mosquitoes.

On titles. My well worn copy of “How to write and publish a scientific paper” by Robert Day urges writers to chose their titles carefully. More people will read your title than any other part of your paper (or blog). Day recommends that titles written for journal articles should describe the contents of the paper in as few words as possible. Not too short but not too long either. When writing a title for a journal article, you need to ensure that your colleagues and abstracting services can recognize what your paper is about. I highly recommend Day’s book to all graduate students. When writing a title for a science blog, while it’s also important to give a brief, accurate description of the contents of the blog, you also want the title to be “clickable.” Clickable titles help to drive internet traffic to your blog post. Titles that include words such as Top, Why, How, Will, New, Future, Your, Best, Worst tend to be highly clickable. There are a ton of other tips on how to write good blog titles that you can find online.

On style and format. Science journals have been around for a long time. The first journal devoted exclusively to science, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was first published in 1665. The prestigious journals Nature and Science were first published in 1869 and 1880, respectively. Overtime, science writing for journal articles evolved into the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) format, and the writing style has become formal and objective. These conventions have served science very well. They are unlikely to change anytime soon. When writing for science journals, stick to the conventional format and style guidelines, you likely won’t get published if you don’t. Science blogging began in the late 1990s and it is still evolving. Blog formats are diverse and writing styles range from the formal to the informal. The blog aggregating websites “Science Blogging” and “Alltop Science News” are a great way to explore the myriad of different blogging styles that exist. One reason I’m particularly fond of science blogging is that if you think some scientific fact is really cool, you can go ahead and say so.

On illustrations. Much scientific information is best communicated by the use of tables, figures, photographs and other types of graphic illustrations. Unfortunately, the use of graphic illustrations in journal articles is expensive and you are often limited in how many you can use. Not so for blogs. Feel free to illustrate away.

Congratulations to everyone at Wading Through Research for creating a science blog network for graduate students. You’re so ahead of the curve. A+.

What's next?

I'm just going to go ahead and say it: graduate school is great (though The Simpsons disagree). We're given 2-9 years (depending on whether you're a masters or doctoral student and the scope of your research) to live in a cozy academic bubble surrounded by like-minded peers doing research on things we think are interesting and important. We teach, we write, we think, we analyze, and we get to explore new places and meet really smart people. We don't have tons of extra responsibilities like kids (usually) and onerous administrative crap, and we're given some room to fail every once in a while (the most important part of the scientific process). Sure graduate school can be frustrating, annoying, and just plain idiotic at times, but that's pretty much a definition for life. Let's not get bogged down in the mundane. But the question I've been asking myself recently is, what's next?



What comes after graduate school? I'm planning on graduating with my PhD next summer and there are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made and time that needs to be managed efficiently. Here's a brief synopsis of my scientific to-do list for the next nine months: Finish writing my dissertation (5-6 chapters, likely somewhere north of 200 pages when all said and done), try to publish each of those chapters in scientific journals (two down, 3-4 to go), continue networking and building collaborations with other scientists to expand my future research opportunities, and apply for multiple post-doctoral research positions and hope that one comes through.

This last bit represents a very interesting part of the multi-faceted scientific life: we have to always be looking forward and backwards at the same time. For example, I am currently writing two brand spanking new research proposals for two different post-doctoral opportunities while at the same time writing papers based on my alligator research that is already complete. Half my time is spent looking back at the research I've done, trying to make sense of it and fitting it into the current scientific discourse, while the other half of my time is spent trying to get funding to do future research and predict what kinds of scientific questions are going to be important over the next few years. It's not like this is unique to me (all scientists do this) but as a young scientist it's still quite a challenging balancing act.

Also, I have to start thinking about what the "goal" of all this is (as if there is a concrete one out there somewhere). After my post-doc, do I want to try and get a job as a scientist with the state or federal government? What about an environmental NGO? Or a job applying science to public policy? Or a job at a university, and if so, what kind of university? Some of these options require different kinds of post-doc experience, so choosing the "right" post-doc can have big implications for your career path. I've attended lots of job panels at science conferences around the country where scientists from all the different job sectors come together and talk about what their jobs are like, how to get a job in their field, and on and on. The message from each panel has been clear: it is not always easy to switch from one type of scientific career to another once you've started down a certain path, so do the legwork now to set yourself up for the type of career you want. That is, if you know what type of scientific career you want.

Through this whole convoluted process I've found encouragement from some advice given to me by a man I met in Belize many years ago: I was 18 and working on a research project studying manatee ecology and behavior off the coast of Belize City. One day we went out to a coral reef to track manatees and do some spear fishing for our dinner, and while we were swimming around a huge catamaran pulled up near our little boat. I swam over to the boat to see who was on board and was warmly greeted by a wealthy middle-aged California businessman on vacation with his wife. They invited me on board for a little lunch and a Coke and we talked about science and the randomness of meeting people anywhere at anytime. During the conversation he said to me "You want to know the secret to success? To how I got where I am today? It's staying open to possibilities. Never close yourself off to new things and new people, and pursue new opportunities as they come your way. Take risks and see what happens. There are no wrong choices, just different ones." Good advice I think.