Batting average

So, turns out science is hard. I know this, no one goes into research thinking it will be easy. We all know the stories of the great discoveries that were accidents or that took 3 gazillion attempts before things worked. But somehow it can still come as a shock whenever you start a new project, especially on that revolves around free-living birds that do things. Unfortunate things like not even showing up for the behavioral trial.
Part of the problem is that once something has been figured out, it's not exciting or novel anymore, so you can only get so much mileage out of it. We all know that replicating findings is important. But, if that is all you do... you are going nowhere fast.
So you try something new, something exciting, something that, if it works, would get you a paper in a nice, highly-ranked journal, or act as preliminary findings for a new grant. But whenever you try something new, you're taking a chance, rolling the dice, and hoping it doesn't come up craps.
A friend of mine compares research to baseball, if you are batting .300 you are doing pretty darn good. But if you think about it that means you are failing more times than not, more than twice as many times actually. So once again, success in science is as much about the willingness to persevere in the face of failure as it is about being able to succeed. Kind of like a lot of other things.

Rejection

One of the hardest things about being an academic is that we are constantly prostrating ourselves to our peers and asking for their approval. Not because we want a pat on the back or to feel good about ourselves but because our existence depends on it. Grants, papers, talks, they all are geared towards presenting our work so that others will give us the thumbs up and say that it is good. To be successful you have to get your colleagues to agree that your work is exciting and important.
To some extent this is no different than being in high school or college. You work on projects or write papers and submit them to the higher authority and hope they like your work. But, now instead of being given an assignment to work on for a week (or even 6 weeks), you come up with your own assignment. You develop an idea yourself (something you think is fascinating and important), you come up with the questions (and hope they are interesting to others), you design the research (and try to make it rigorous, powerful, and feasible), you analyze the data (and make every effort to use the right stats), you write the paper (and hope your ideas translate well). You spend months or sometimes years on one single paper, then you give it (your baby) to a journal editor and they send it out to some anonymous experts to review. And then you wait.
And you wait, and you wait to hear back. And then, finally, you get the verdict. More often than not, the answer is no. No, we don't think this is exciting enough, or novel enough or important enough. No, we don't think you did this, that and the other correctly. No, although you agonized over your word choice and whether to analyze the data this way or that way, the conclusion you came to is wrong. And there it is.
That baby, the one you labored on for so long, they don't like it and don't want it. It is not good enough for them. And for some people this easily translates into, you are not good enough. It can be challenging for the ego to say the least. And you do this over and over and over again. This is your entire career. Repeatedly handing an axe over to someone else, laying you head down on the chopping block and hoping you did enough hard work, and are lucky enough, that the axe won't fall.

Lessons

Ugh. I learned a hard one yesterday. I was so close to being done with a manuscript I've been working on for a long time. As I was finishing up some minor edits and ran some stats to get some additional numbers. While doing so I noticed a few weird data points. I start looking more closely at the weird ones. Huh, that is strange. I go back to the original electronic data sheet to make sure there wasn't an error importing into the statistics program, but no, everything jives. I pull out the original data sheets and feel a surge of adrenalin run through my body. Wrong. The electronic data I have is wrong. This particular part of the project was done by an undergrad, and another undergrad finalized it for me. I never went back and triple checked the data. Dumb. Real, real dumb, to assume two separate set of eyes would take care of the errors. Not everything is wrong, but enough. Enough that I am now correcting the data and will have to redo the stats from scratch for this part of the paper. And if the results are different....
Oh, I can't think about that right now.
If I do I'll go crazy.
I'll think about that tomorrow.
-Scarlett

p's and q's

Ugh. It's Saturday night and I'm sitting here with my laptop formatting a paper for submission to a journal. Does that make me old, lame or is it just the mark of a fifth year grad student feeling the heat? Probably all of the above.
As a youngster I never appreciated the amount of work that goes into formatting a paper for submission. As a student you only see the finished product and it's easy to be blissfully unaware of what it takes to get it there. It takes days, full eight hour days, to get a paper that is complete and ready in all other respects ready to be submitted. There are a ton of little things that must be done. Like making sure all of your p's (a commonly used statistics symbol) are all in italics and capitalized. But guess what, every journal does it differently, so in one journal it may look like this P, but in the next one it's this p, and others are simply p. This is just one example of many.
So you write the paper, you edit, you rewrite, you get feedback and rewrite and reedit. Then you polish it till it shines, and then, only then, do you get to format, and how you do that depends on where you want it to go. And when it gets rejected and you decide to send it somewhere else? Even if you change nothing about the writing you'll still spend a couple of days reformatting. And that doesn't even include the dreaded bibliography, or figures. Those two sections can suck your soul out of your eyeballs.

Perks

See those pictures? I get to go there. For free. There are a number of perks to being an academic, that is one of my favorites. Traveling to new and exciting places and part of your duties. I'm headed to Western Australia this week to attend a conference (International Society for Behavioral Ecology) and present some of my work. It will be a very nerdy week. All day, everyday, listening to interesting people talk about their fascinating work, telling them about mine, arguing about conclusions and methods, making connections with potential future collaborators and advisers. And then, when my brain is filled to point of bursting and feels more like gray mush than gray matter, I get to take off and travel to countryside for a week before coming back to the real world. It will be spring there, the wild flowers blooming, the whales migrating, and the weather idyllic. It's hard to be me.

Field season is over. I've made it back home and have begun the work of reclaiming the life I left behind. For four months I've been away from my partner, my dog, my house and my garden and all of which require a significant amount of attention before they are prepared to forgive me for my over long absence. It is not an easy thing to leave your life for a third of the year.

If things go as planned this will have been my last field season. What this really means is that, in theory, I have collected all of the data I need for my dissertation. This is exhilarating as I am in range of getting a doctoral degree and moving along to the next step. It is also terrifying in that there is nothing between me and the finish line except data analysis and writing. There is a reason that there are a number of people with the title ABD (all but dissertation). It sounds like a small task but in truth it is the hardest part.

I didn't have a picture to illustrate so instead I've included an image from one of my favorite procrastination places. hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com
Go there and enjoy, but don't blame me...

Science as art

Many people assume that to be a successful scientist you need only to be good at science, and maybe the occasional related field, like math. But the reality is far different. To be successful at science, especially the sort of integrative science that I work on, you have to be able to communicate. So much of our work revolves around being able to convey to others what it is we do and why it is important. Others meaning journal editors (who control when and where we publish which is the currency by which we succeed or fail) and grant readers (who control whether or not we get money to do the research that we want to publish on). But it also means other scientists, the public and students. The ability to write clearly is a hard won skill and not one that we learn very well in high school or even college. Same with presenting our ideas and findings orally. There is an art to being an effective communicator, and there is a minimal level of competence needed to do this job. Of course, many scientist are just barely above this minimum and can only communicate with each other (sometimes that is even a stretch). I think this is a big reason why the general public is skeptical or uninformed about science, i.e. the evolution debate. We, as a group, are just not that good and talking to others, we are as a rule a socially awkward bunch.
I'm currently working as a mentor for a group of undergraduates and that is among the hardest lessons to learn. They understand the concepts, they can do the work. The hard part is putting into words. The above photo shows one of these undergrads and a fellow mentor doing the fun and easy part of science, collecting data.