Dare the plane to crash, redeem the miles for cash when it starts to dive

The people who do the neuroscience are the least appreciated and nurtured resource in science.

Here's why:

We never bothered to map out success.
Few labs have documented, readily available, and shared protocols. This usually means that people learn technique from an oral tradition. Strangely, oral tradition is an inexact method and seldom lends a deeper understanding of technique that a career scientist needs to troubleshoot, should things go awry (as they usually do).

Superiors/senior scientist advisors seldom establish clear goals for success for more junior scientists. Sure, projects come and go, but more long term goals (18- or 24-month long, or even 4- or 5- year long career-related landmarks) might lend better career perspective for scientists who frequently can't think far beyond the current experiment.

We expect a level of devotion that's religious to qualify for respect.
Unless you're an undergraduate (and sometimes even that won't help), your PI expects you to be at the bench during business hours and toiling on everything else before and/or after that work. Usually more.

People who pass on family commitments or personal needs in the name of scientific work wear these sacrifices like a badge of honor, whereas someone who strives to achieve a work-life balance is considered less dedicated.  Recently, a co-worker of mine declared that they had to leave work early, at 5 p.m., to "babysit." I couldn't help but scoff. "I don't think it's babysitting if it's your own child," I mused.

I've been involved in roller derby since my third year of graduate school (that's nearly four years, including the two years I've been in my postdoc). Both of my superiors have reacted to my involvement in that community like it's the most insane thing they've ever heard. When I told one about making the team, he reacted like I had just told him that I was from outer space.

Professional conferences and workshop cruelly test your endurance in front of your peers (read: competition). For example, the annual meeting for Society for Neuroscience starts on a Saturday and runs through Wednesday. Talks start at 8 a.m. each day, and continue for 5 to 60 minutes, with more than a dozen ongoing sessions as any given time. Posters are presented in shifts, with hundreds simultaneously available for viewing. At 5 p.m., the at-conference bustle largely ends, but socials, meetings, lectures, and socializing (i.e., drinking) commence and continue into the morning hours. There are also several programs/events that precede or follow that main event. A couple of years ago, I spent a whole week at the SfN annual meeting in Washington, DC. It was so grueling that I skipped the last day of the conference in favor of spending the rainy day writing a manuscript and considered it a day "off."

We suck at communicating, but especially "thank you."
Everyone's been busy in the lab, using up the aliquot of this, the last of that, and spilling it on here. Sometimes, you fail to replace things or clean up after yourself before someone else also needs that resource. Both parties have the choice to be classy team players or unnecessary dickheads about the situation.

Dealing with equipment or facility issues can be a comedy of errors as each lab member independently discovers the issue or missing resource. A scientist could be royally screwed if they haven't accordingly planned ahead (which is probably most).

Periodically, the PI tries to show their appreciation for the lab team by providing food or drinks. It'd feel more meaningful if there was any real forethought, creativity, or commitment to it. Sure, they bought the food, but seldom is the act concurrently presented with an actual "thank you." It feels more like a tribute to an angry god than a team coming together to celebrate the group's efforts.

Team building and respect for one's peers is heavily undervalued and largely nonexistent.
Scientists, who appear to have a higher incidence of social awkwardness than the general population, work in groups that are hardly encouraged to communicate with one another. Without careful moderation, they won't actively challenge that difficulty. There needs to be a leader for or in the lab itself, aware of the social and functional culture of the lab. The chaos of every-awkward-(wo)man-for-themselves can easily devolve into shitty science work.

As a behavioral neuroscientist who works with operant chambers, I needed to quickly build up a competent crew of undergraduate assistants to help with the testing so that I could dedicate more time to the other things I need to learn, master, and accomplish as a postdoc. I solicited, interviewed, and trained an army of assistants with which I am excited to work everyday. It's a ton of front-end work and double checking that if implemented properly, pays major dividends in team member contributions. Because of them, I am frequently able to accomplish twice as much work as I would on my own and their efforts are a major factor in my scientific throughput. I get the feeling that my PI wouldn't agree with me, however, despite requisitioning my most senior assistant to take over a project dropped by someone under his own supervision.

Thinking is seldom considered to be productive, and haphazardly doing without thinking is generally promoted by the get-it-done-yesterday culture of science.
It wasn't until my fourth year of graduate student that an advisor demonstrated the importance of reading and thinking. It blew my mind! I had been focusing all my efforts on doing science with very little reading or understanding of science to guide it. Too few advisors and mentors encourage thinking about science in a creative way, especially when that time could be spent doing science.

I love having young science minds around me in the lab because I can't possibly espouse their worldview after 7 years of scientific devotion. Too few scientists solicit, or even value, the viewpoint or opinions of their fellow scientists. As a behavioral neuroscientist for seven years, I have developed firm opinions about how to get the best possible behavioral data out of my animals (obey their light cycles, avoid wearing or using perfumed products, approach animals with a calm, loving, but firm hand). Not that anyone would ask, however, so good luck with doing a cognitive task at the cusp of animals' day-night cycle while sporting that Axe body spray.

Likewise, my colleagues have strengths in techniques and fields that I don't know anything about. I wish asking for their help or opinion didn't feel so much like a confession of idiocy, even though it is completely normal and reasonable that I'm not the foremost expert in everything I do. Isn't having more smart people attacking a challenge better than fewer? Problem solving can be a funny thing - a novice could approach a problem with creative insight that a specialist in that field might not observe. Likewise, an expert might understand limitations with precision that can help modify a solution to fit the parameters at hand. Now that's fucking teamwork!



The only scientists you see working alone are in movies or TV, and they are generally "mad genious" scientists, and not in a good way (THERE'S AN ENTIRE WIKIPEDIA PAGE??!). I can think of villains  whose desire for fame, money, or power drove reasonable people to extreme ends. Sure - real science isn't a Hollywood movie, but it's also not completely unlike its depiction in films, either.

I firmly believe that while science is an academic endeavor, it is too seldom considered to be a group or team venture. I think failing to recognize and act upon this can make good, rigorous, and thoughtful scientific work more difficult to accomplish, and we already have enough barriers to that outside of what we scientists can directly control.

i (don't) mind you coming here and wasting all my time

Dearest academia,

Thank you for making a job search in academia/research the world's cruelest scavenger hunt.

As a neuroscientist. I have used some of the following sites to look at positions:

Professional Society page (Sfn's Neurojobs, APA)
University-specific HR page (Research, Staff, Administration positions)
Research-specific Department page (Postdoc positions)
Academic Unit Page (Professor and Lecturer positions)

Commercial job search pages (monster, careersearch, etc)
Higheredjobs (Teaching/Administration positions)


It's all so disenfranchised that I've found myself emailing people about job postings with submission dates from months past.

Learn from my mistakes: Having a life outside of research is just trouble.

Baby you can do it, take your time, do it right

So I've had this behavioral soap box just sitting here and I don't feel like I've abused it at all, and that's a crime.

Something that scientists hardly ever is do is slow the eff down. That exact issue is what lead to severe burnout for myself this spring, possibly culminating in writing a blog about neuroscience because I needed some catharsis from a stressful and sometimes abusive science career.

For the last year, I've managed a large mouse colony, learned to assemble, troubleshoot, and use operant touchscreen-equipped chambers, coordinated a crew of more than a dozen undergraduates, and completed *8* behavioral experimental projects (each requiring 4 months to run) in that time. Do the math - my crew has completed 32 months of projects in about 18. That doesn't even include the 50-ish pilot animals we ran during that time - each for at least six months.

This would be ridiculously productive if being productive in science was purely who finished the most studies - but it's not. The work that you publish and present is the true measure by which your productivity is measured in science. The quality of this work is a big factor in that judgement, and the rush to finish work before someone else publishes that technique or finding can frequently results in slap-dash work of questionable standards.

Why do you think the hashtag #overlyhonestmethods exists?

So I have a ridiculous and soul-crushing amount of data and it wasn't until I turned off the damn chambers and killed all of the trained animals that I was able to make myself stop. Now my PI and I are finding way more cool stuff (where cool stuff = possibly publishable data) than we've noticed in two years. It could lead to several meaningful publications of the behavioral correlates of adult hippocampal neurogenesis. Isn't that the point of all this?

Lifehacker has an incredible wealth of insight into the idea of productivity. For example, it helped me find this article describing how working more than 40 hours a week is probably making me less productive on the whole, Nicholas Tesla was just one of many wildly successful and respectful people to take walks to boost creativity and thinking, keeping a journal can help assess productivity habits, eating lunch at your desk can make me less productive, and so on.

To boost productivity in science - and not just perceived productivity - may actually mean spending more time idly or even at other pursuits.

It's shocking how infrequently this topic is broached in the workplace. Things that seem like they would improve productivity (i.e., working more) probably hurt output. Like one of my graduate school mentors, Greg Rose, impressed upon me - too little time in science is spent thinking. If we spent more time thinking critically about all aspects of our work, and ensuring that the endeavors we undertake are done so with a rigorous dedication to high quality technique, a lot less time, effort, and money would be wasted.

I can't get out of what I'm into

In an increasingly competitive science talent market, publication counts are much more highly valued than moral fiber. Who reads your work or what publications print your manuscripts really matters when you're fighting for an important or influential job [read: a position ineligible for a student discount]. Unfortunately, the only thing that's truly publishable is a study boasting significant differences or relationships among variables. The standard used to guard the term significant - a p-value less than 0.05, is a arbitrary value which dictates that 95% of the time, a 'significant' effect will be a true and valid thing, and 5% of the time it will be an anomaly. Having the designation of being !STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT! is also usually the only way to get your findings to your peers whatsoever.

This system sucks balls for several reasons:

1) You might find the cure for cancer, cure for AIDS, but unless your study makes the statistical cut, it's probably going to become a story never told. That treatment that dramatically improved symptomology for a large proportion of individuals in a study? Not valid unless you've got that coveted asterisk (*) over some graphs.

2) This case-by-case system does not account for data/studies in the aggregate. A small effect, which emerges consistently in a number of studies with variable statistical power (possibly due to methodology limitations), might actually be a real relationship, but current statistical standards might prevent that connection between meaningful variables.

3) Studies that have nonsignificant findings are just as informative as studies that do demonstrate significant differences. In a culture where only select  information (i.e., significant findings) are disseminated to the scientific community, this means that the same mistake (i.e., null findings) is bound to be committed time after time. It's a waste of time and money to allow studies with null findings to quietly die rather than be shared among the community.

4) This system sometimes forces scientists to make hard choices between success (publishing statistically significant findings) and all-out truthfulness. Statistics can be easily misleading or twisted to suit the purposes of the author. This is accomplished because the emphasis in training is in area-specific knowledge and methodology, rather than an in-depth understanding of the appropriate use, implementation, and interpretation of statistics.


You see, when the scientific and statistical culture requires a "threshold," i.e., an arbitrary and difficult statistical standard to fulfill [i.e., p<.05], those in the culture are incentivized to twist data any which way to publicize their work [i.e. get published]. Until the accepted guidelines and statistical methods are questioned at a basic and fundamental level, science will continue to see in a fucked up and sad grainy black and white picture of what the (probably) messy and vivid technicolor "truth" actually is.

I've been in science just long enough that my desire to succeed (read: publish) tests my desire to tell the unabashed and naked truth. I've run numerous behavioral studies based on an educated guess of what interplay between variables should look like based on previously published work, only to find following examination that differences or relationships were not statistically significant. In order to someday secure the "ultimate" goal of becoming a successful scientist and/or professor, I need to publish my work.

If only statistically significant work is publishable, rather than rigorous work regardless of outcome, it is reasonable that one would be tempted to fudge findings. In the intensely competitive field of science, a career that often requires a slavish commitment to work that forces many people to make a hard choice between personal happiness and only possible success, it also seems reasonable that talented individuals might opt out of this career path with such a bleak outlook for success.

They don't tell you this shit in graduate school. I wish it could be talked about more.