Photo by Simon Music

———————————————-

Let’s face it, most research projects don’t work. No matter how hard we try, how many gels we run, how many Western blots we develop, sometimes, the science just isn’t there. This can be very frustrating, especially if you’ve spent years on a project, only to realize later that your hypothesis was wrong. Therefore, to prevent students from remaining on the PI’s payroll for 10 years, most students will work on multiple projects at one time.

Most projects can easily take a year to complete. Of course, each project is composed of multiple experiments. Likewise, each experiment is going to have to be standardized. If you’re one who really doesn’t like to waste time (and you should be), then you’ll probably do multiple experiments per day for different projects. At the end of the week, you would have probably completed about 10-15 different experiments (or several steps of experiments) from 2-3 projects. Come Monday morning, your experiments may be a bit of a blur, and you may not know what you should be doing next. When your next lab experiment comes around, although you’ve been working hard, it may seem as if you’ve done much of nothing if you can’t express your results and current projects in an organized manner.

How do you stay on top of this stuff?

1. Set up your folders
You should keep a folder on your computer for each project that you are undertaking. All the data that you generate for each project should be stored in its particular folder. For example, one of my project folders has Excel file sheets (for number crunching), Word documents or txt files for protocols or experiment details (sometimes this information is included in the Excel files), and graphs of my data. Anything relating to this project should go into the same folder.

2. Keep a list
Furthermore, I keep a running list of my projects in a txt file along with some brief information regarding the status of my projects (how many mice/group, list of experiments in those projects, how many times it was repeated, etc.). This allows me to quickly overview the status of my projects and determine what I should do next.

3. Next Actions
Daily, I write down a list of Next Actions (see GTD by David Allen). This list holds all of the things that I need to do next for all of my projects. When one thing is completed, it is crossed out and another Next Action, from the same project, is placed on the list. This helps me to continuously move all of my projects forward. However, by having this list, this does not mean that I work on all of my projects at the same pace. On the contrary, I tend to focus on one project at a time until it is completed or there is another reason that I cannot move the project forward. At one point, I used to write these actions on index cards and hang them over my bench. I’m not sure exactly why, but I stopped doing that and I am now keeping it attached to my hipster PDA in my pocket.

4. Most Important Tasks (MITs)
Here is a trick I learned over at Zen Habits. Everyday, make a list of no more than three items that you must accomplish. These tasks should be the most important tasks on your Next Actions list and you should begin working on them first thing in the morning. As soon as you get to the lab, just knock out these tasks and spend the rest of the day however you want. By the evening, even if you goof-off all afternoon, you’ll still feel good about yourself knowing that you have accomplished your MITs.

These are tips that I’m currently using to complete my PhD. I’m sure that many others will have different, probably better, ways of managing projects. Please share them in the comments.

——————————————

During your first and second years as a Ph.D. student, your brain will be challenged to its maximum. You’ll be forced to learn new information faster than Neo in the Matrix when he was programmed to learn Kung Fu. In your classes, the subject matter that you are being presented with is probably somewhat familiar to you; however, you’ll be learning a lot more details. Furthermore, many of the details were not available in your college textbooks because now, you’ll be learning directly from peer-reviewed journal articles. Not only will you learn how the science works, but you’ll also learn the experiments that were used to prove such facts. Also, if you’re really insightful, you’ll begin to question the research, see what’s missing, and have some idea about what experiments should be done next. This is the biggest difference that I could see between college and graduate school. You’re not only expected to learn the material, but you’re also expected to learn how this material was discovered. This is the ultimate goal of Ph.D. training, to teach you to think critically and analytically, like a scientist, and learn how to solve scientific problems. That’s the career you are being prepared for…to be a scientific problem solver.

Lab work is yet another challenging feat that you are bombarded with upon entering graduate school. I know you’ve worked in a lab before, but not like this. No one’s gonna hold your hand this time. You’ll probably be given some keys to the dungeon and an older student’s lab notebook and told to get to work. Well, it probably won’t be that bad. Besides, there are several labs to choose from, and each one is different. However, you will be expected to function independently at some point during your graduate school years. You will have to learn many new techniques, some of which will take a few tries before you can grasp them. With that in mind, be prepared to do a lot of experiments that probably won’t work the way you want them to. Remember this, the faster you standardize these techniques, the faster you’ll graduate.

Here are 3 general tips to help you pass successfully through these stages:

1. Immerse yourself in graduate school
   This is going to be your life for the next few years so you must learn to love it. Try your best to enjoy being a student doing cutting edge research. Train yourself to love reading, writing, studying, and doing lab work.
2. Read as much as you can
   This cannot be overstated. For everyone in the world, reading is a good thing to do. But for scientists, it’s almost an obligation. If needed, go back to those old college textbooks to brush up on the basics. Also, and probably more importantly, you have to read journal articles. I know that upon first glance, most journal articles look terribly boring and tough to understand, and that’s normal, because if you don’t understand the paper, it’s probably not going to be very interesting. The more you read them, the better you’ll become at understanding them. One professor told me that I should read at least one article everyday.
3. Ask for help
   Most people aren’t jerks. If you need help, ask someone, and 9 times out of 10, they will help you. In your lab, when you need help on some technique, go to the friendly, smart post-doc. If you’re having trouble with a concept presented in class, go and visit the professor. It’s their job to help you.

This is definitely not an exhaustive list. If you have found other tips that were helpful to you, please post them in the comments.

————————————————-

Ok, so you just joined the lab. You’ve rotated here before, so you have a good idea about what goes on around here. You know the type of research that is going on (and apparently you must like it). You’ve seen the type of techniques that are done often in the lab and you’ve probably done some of this stuff already. However, some of it, you’ve never even heard of until now. You probably also have a good idea of who will help you, and who won’t. You know just which post-doc you can bother and which ones will bite your hand if you tap them on the shoulder. You should also know, by now, that when the boss has his door closed, you shouldn’t bother him…and if it’s opened, you probably still shouldn’t bother him unless you can’t find the answer anywhere else (this is not always true though…). You may even have keys to this place. If you don’t, get some because you’re gonna need them. Welcome to your place of residence for the next five years (if all goes extremely well)!

During your rotation, you were probably handed a few simple tasks from your boss which he thought any idiot grad student could complete in a couple of weeks. And if you are brilliant and had a lot of help, they may have actually worked. If not, don’t feel like the idiot he (the boss) thinks you are, because experiments hardly ever work. If they worked all the time, we’d get paid a lot more! But they don’t, and that’s how we learn.

Anyways, now that you’ve joined the lab, you need your own project. In my own experience, the tasks I was given during my rotation were closely related to a project that was up-for-grabs in the lab. This may be the same for you, and if you like it, you should take that project. If not, then obviously, you need a project. Most people, I would assume, choose some project that the boss has already dreamed up (I think it would be rather difficult to dream up your own project already). This project really may have just come up in one of the boss’ dreams one evening and he never forgot it. However, he probably never thought out all the details either. This is the critical stuff that you will need to progress. Don’t waste your time sitting on the hill, smoking your wooden pipe, and blowing smoke rings trying to figure this stuff out…there will be plenty of time for that later. You need to sit with the boss and talk through this entire thing.

So, what do you need to talk about. First and foremost, you need a “clearly defined hypothesis”. This is extremely important and could really move your graduation date closer by an entire year. There’s no need to flounder around the lab having your experiments go wherever the wind blows. And that’s exactly what will happen without taking care of this first part. Unless your goal is to learn some essential techniques before you begin your project, then you should avoid jumping around to different stuff right now, that’ll come up later on. Right now, you and the boss need to agree upon a nice, sound hypothesis that’s feasable for a grad student. This is not as easy as it sounds, but the hypothesis tends to evolve as you go along. The important thing here is to start working towards a goal. Setting your hypothesis will focus your efforts on a single question, instead of the thousands that go through the boss’ head every night. But, as you may be thinking, having a good question is not enough; you need to know how to find the answer.

It’s not enough to have a nice hypothesis, you also need to know how to test the hypothesis. With some effort, you can probably figure out some of the obvious experiments…or maybe not. Why waste the time? Talk to the boss about it. Make sure you have his full attention and that he really thinks about this stuff. He probably has all this stuff written in terrible detail in his grant. But if your project is not coming from a grant, then you have to meet with him and think through this stuff. It would suck really bad if you spend six months learning how to do an experiment, working through all the kinks, and repeating it several times to discover that it is really not a valid assay for your project.

The point of all this is to simply prevent you from being overwhelmed. If you focus your efforts early by having a clear hypothesis and mapped out experiments, then you will begin blazing the trail (however slowly) of your own road, instead of just chopping down random bushes all around you. Believe me, you’ll be doing yourself a big favor.

I’m sure that some may disagree totally to what I’ve just said, or have some better alternatives. I’m prepared to hear your view (and also back mine up!). So, leave me some comments.

Image by Amodiovalerio Verde

————————————–

All of us know how to read, write, think, and work with our hands. We’ve be in school for practically all of our lives, and we’ve done bench research before. However, some people can do these things much better than others. For example, why is it that some people can finish their PhD’s in 3.5 years, while others (probably most of us) can take as long as 7 years (that’s twice as much!). Why is that? Is it because they are smarter (probably)? Is it because they work 20 hours/day (most likely)? Or do they know some type of black magic where all of their experiments work the first time they perform them? I believe that the key to successfully finishing your PhD in a feasable amount of time is to work more efficiently, be more organized, and become fully engaged in your work. This is certainly not all that matters…of course, if you do all these things wonderfully and your experiments still don’t work, then you won’t be graduating any time soon. However, by tweaking a few things here and there, changing a few habits, and learning a few tricks, one can really speed things up.

This website is going to contain the many things that I wished someone would’ve told me when I first started my PhD program. Now, three years later, I’ve learned many tricks along the way, but I still have a long way to go. Self improvement is something that I really enjoy, in all aspects of my life. I’m always trying to discover new, more efficient ways of doing things. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A true thinker can learn from the world of nature and the lessons of history to prepare for future possibilities.” In other words, a real scientist should learn from all his experiments that never worked and he should learn from the screw-ups of others. That’s really what self improvement is. Basically, someone has screwed up so many times until finally, they figured out how not to screw up. Once they figure that part out, they write a book (or blog) and tell you how they figured out not to screw up…except they leave out the part about them screwing up many, many times. Well, that’s what this blog is going to be about, except I’m gonna fill you in (just a little bit) on how I, and others, have screwed up and figured out better ways of doing things.

The tips, tricks, and lifehacks presented here are a collection of things that I have learned, discovered, implemented, or read from various other places. I think that most of what I write is going to be stuff that I have implemented in my own life (or lack thereof) that I find truly useful. Many of the things presented here may have implications outside of the research lab, and I hope that you can benefit from them in many, many ways. This blog, as you can tell, is going to be geared towards PhD students doing scientific research, at the bench, in someone’s lab. However, I think that anyone who has lots of things to do but only 24 hours in a day can learn something here.

I’ll try to post to this blog at least once-a-week, if not more. I’ll try my best not to make this a place to rant and rave about how my whole life is a wreck and how journal reviewers suck and how my whole project is going down the drain. I’ll do my best to only post things that I have pondered over for a while and that I think is worth your time reading it. By pondering, I mean that I think about my post, possibly do some outline of what I want to say, write a first draft, and at least revise it once. This way, you’re not wasting your time reading a piece of junk, and, at the same time, I’m “publishing” some good quality stuff.

Ok, I think this is enough, browse around for a bit (although it’s not much on this blog yet) and feel free to comment. Thanks for reading!