If you are reading this, hello! Welcome to my first blog post!
For the past month, I have been struggling to figure out what to do with the “blog” section of my portfolio website. After doing a lot of reflection, I believe I have finally found a need that I wanted to address!
I am now coming up on almost 9 months of doing undergraduate research in Xu Lab. (That’s 3/4ths of a whole year!) I currently keep two lab notebooks with me: one for general note taking and data collection related to all the assorted projects I’m involved with, and another notebook that is completely dedicated to my senior thesis research topic. Although my notebooks are a great place to document my technical and experimental challenges, I realized that I didn’t really have a dedicated space to reflect on my learning or talk about the more “emotional” aspects of doing research.
Academia is incredibly lonely. This is a conclusion I have come to realize after talking with many professors and graduate students about going into academia vs. industry. Often, research academics are often expected to act as information silos. Your PI gives you a task to do, and somehow, you’re expected to figure out how to do it almost entirely on your own. You might have mentors and postdocs to guide you in the beginning, but there is very little hand-holding throughout the process. Although I want to be self-sufficient and be the leader of my own independent research project, there are some things that I am just not able to do on my own yet. I struggle with designing my own experiments. I don’t always know how to find the right rationale or methods for studying the things that I am curious about. I am awful at verbally articulating my thoughts. There are some times where I struggle to do even the most basic tasks in lab.
I want to use this blog to document some of the various challenges I face as a scientist/engineer/researcher, as well as the various learning outcomes of these challenges. In particular, there are three things that I would like to improve upon as a researcher (before I graduate from Tufts):
- Firstly, I want to be better at handling criticism. Although, I am excellent at handling academic criticism, receiving criticism within a lab/research setting still activates my fight or flight response. I tend to internalize a lot of my mistakes, which is a very bad habit that I am trying to break. If my goal is to defend my thesis next spring, I need to learn how to be able to stand my ground and not be red-faced when I am presenting to my committee!
- Secondly, I want to practice intentionality within my research. I want to be critical of the literature in my field and use a similar framework for critiquing/analyzing my own experimental design. (As Professor Xu constantly says to us, “What is it you are doing/trying to do? What is the rationale behind it? Is it new, and is it important?“)
- Finally, I hope to gain the confidence to be self-sufficient and independent within my lab. This does NOT mean that I won’t be reliant on other people or that I won’t ask anyone for help. I don’t expect that I will know everything about my lab or its research before I graduate, but I hope that I will have gained enough knowledge to be able to be a good teacher and mentor to others!
I do not expect anyone to be actively reading or keeping up with this blog! In fact, I intend to treat this like a personal journal or a third lab notebook. One of my personal interests is STEM education and studying how people (including myself) learn and teach science/engineering. If anything speaks to you, feel free to comment or engage with the posts. Until next time!
With endless scientific curiosity,
Vio 🙂