In a laboratory setting, researchers, postdocs, and graduate students can find themselves alone and lacking confidence in the face of some common challenges. Those difficulties are often lumped together as an inherent part of pursuing a research career, but we think they could be divided into two types—challenges that are hard in a good way or in a bad way.
Good-hard challenges include rigorous tasks that lead to scientific discovery, and can be surmounted with discipline and focus, while bad-hard challenges are those that are extraneous to the research process and can lead to debilitating personal stress, poor self-image, and stagnation in the work.
We’ve created a partial list of both types to help researchers differentiate between the two. If most of the challenges you face fall on the good-hard side of the equation, they are simply an artifact of the brain-squishing process of finding, understanding, and articulating new discoveries. But if you relate to more of the bad-hard indicators on this list, it may be time to discuss those problems with your colleagues, supervisors, or administrators.
Good-hard challenges:
- There’s too much literature to read. Reading academic and scientific literature takes concentration and time, and doing so effectively is a learned skill. Although you aren’t specifically accountable for reading everything on your topic, you should take the initiative to understand as much of what others have done before you as possible. You may feel anxious when reading someone’s successful published work because of pressure to publish your own. Relax and remember that understanding the hard-earned arguments of others will add validity to your own work. At the same time, be careful of spending too much of your work day searching for literature to read.
- You don’t agree with or understand a well-regarded theory. Some things you will read and not digest immediately. That isn’t a “bad” challenge, but an indicator that you’re learning more advanced ideas, which you need time to absorb. Reread those articles, ask others for their opinions, and read papers that cite the point of view you are confused about. If you find that you are still confused or that you disagree, see that as an invitation to begin an open-ended discussion.
- You don’t know how to solve something. Sometimes you put off solving a research problem because you haven’t encountered it before or you just don’t know where to start. Perhaps you haven’t quite figured out how to test a particular theory, or how to solve a series of equations.
It may seem easier and more strategic to seek a solution by repeating familiar tasks (“I know how to find an R2 value!”) and avoiding the unknown. But this is no time to be timid. Dive in, be brave. Get some help if you need it from peers, online software forums, or your university’s statistical consulting service.
Some of the most difficult scientific questions may not have clear answers, or there may be many answers, and it is hard to tell which is most “correct.” One approach: Think about why the answer is unclear, and the costs and benefits of all the possible responses.
- Your research topic has been done before. Finding that others have completed parts of your research plan can be disappointing. But the point of a scientific career is not just to promote yourself but to pursue research for the sake of science and humanity.
If you can’t find pleasure in seeing some aspect of your research idea already solved, then you probably shouldn’t investigate the problem in the first place. If others are working on similar research, it means your topic is of wide interest. Try to differentiate yourself from them in some way, or join forces.
- You did not get the result you expected. Some researchers who don’t get a desired result will try to tweak the research question to fit the result. Sometimes that is acceptable. In other cases, it’s important to report your findings even if they go against your hypothesis or argument—so long as your experiment (e.g. method) was done in a rigorous, empirical way. That is a success toward the advancement of science, not a failure.
- You messed up an experiment. Research takes time, and mistakes happen. Perhaps you need to learn new software, secure new data, master new analysis methods, or wait for other colleagues to finish their part, return drafts, or make decisions. Don’t be discouraged when those tasks take longer than you expected, or when you make errors along the way. Remind yourself: Even the best scientists make mistakes, and many discoveries have stemmed from accidents and errors.
- You don’t know how to write well. Scientific writing is a specialized skill that is not often emphasized in graduate-school courses. As a result, learning to write well almost always involves years of practice and reading of others’ work to see how they frame arguments and write results. To encourage yourself, reread your previous writings from a few years ago. You should (we hope) see the progress you’ve already made, and that may help you persist.
The path to a peer-reviewed publication is long and filled with small, unexpected setbacks that are too mundane to talk about out loud, but that together add up. It can make you feel crazy and alone. Everyone gets rejected in peer review, but the process (while flawed) is a natural research challenge. Continue to be thorough in your experiments, and send in manuscripts when you believe they are of similar quality to pre-existing articles in your field. You will benefit from getting in the game early.
Bad-hard challenges:
- You are not being listened to. If you have ideas, input, or new results that you think are important but that aren’t being taken seriously by your peers and supervisors, don’t just hope someone is listening. Speak up. If your idea can’t be used, ask why not. Figure out a way to explore your idea further, whether now or in the future. If positive feedback is lacking, ask to be evaluated. If your professor cannot provide constructive praise and criticism, take that as a signal that you should be working with someone else.
- You don’t feel like a valued part of the team. Would your lab’s research be different without you? If so, do your peers and supervisors realize that and value you? Don’t accept a dysfunctional lab as “normal.” If you make a breakthrough, your colleagues should be supportive, not dismissive or resentful. Your peers, and especially your supervisors, should be mature and graceful enough to give you a pat on the back, or acknowledge your research in their own. Worrying about whether you will be credited for your role (or worse, whether your work will be misappropriated by others) can cause unnecessary stress. Your success should be viewed as group success, and, in turn, you should acknowledge the team for its support.
- Your boss has a mean streak, or other issues. Labs and research parternships have systems for sharing and commenting on the members’ work. Sometimes a lab’s researchers present their findings during intensive discussions in front of a large group where the director may be harsh and negative about your work in front of everyone else. In other cases, your director may give instructions more frequently than is manageable, or may give no feedback at all. If your lab’s presentation system makes you feel uncomfortable or embarrassed, ask for a different forum that makes you feel more at ease. Discussing your work with a fellow student can be helpful as well.
- Your research isn’t being communicated (e.g., published, presented, discussed, shared in lab meetings). Don’t let the minefield that is the publication process stop you from trying to publish your results. Make sure your supervisor is on board with a particular project or publication before you invest a lot of effort into gathering results. Sometimes dead ends are unavoidable: Your mobile-phone data provider doesn’t want to publish the results, a tissue sample turned out to be bad, etc. However, if the results are usable and worthwhile, find an avenue for communicating them to the outside world.
- You do too many things that you’re overqualified to do. If you find that most (or all) of your work is something you could have done just as well with three to five years’ less experience (for instance), you may want to ask your supervisor to pass those tasks to a more junior student. If you’re pipetting droplets every day for too long, even though it’s what the research needs from someone, you can get irreversibly discouraged. Again, speak up.
- You have too many things to do and can’t focus on any of them. It’s typical for researchers to have 12 or more papers that they are working on concurrently, but make sure that projects are being completed and getting out the door. Talk to your supervisor if there’s so much going on that you aren’t making adequate progress on anything.
- You don’t see how your work fits into the big picture. If you cannot synthesize an overarching goal for your work, how can you be passionate about it, or believe in it? A synthesis of research may be: “We look at people’s genes to see which cancer treatments might work best for them.” That statement has a goal and a purpose, and the work one does toward it clearly leads to a bigger contribution to human understanding. If you don’t see the big picture of your own work, ask for clarification. Can you explain the goals and motivations of your work to a stranger?
- You aren’t interested in your research. Clearly that’s a big problem that many researchers can have trouble acknowledging, even to themselves, let alone to others. Try to be honest at least with yourself: Do you actually care about your research question? Do you really want to know the answer? Is there something else you’re more interested in? Is your lack of interest temporary? Is it caused by stress or self-confidence issues?
Learning to differentiate between good and bad indicators and making necessary changes toward a productive, supportive atmosphere can strengthen us all as scientists and promote scientific discovery itself.
If you’re a supervisor, you can confront some of these problems by creating a list that reflects your own expectations for good and bad research challenges. Post it in your lab or office. And consider how you contribute to both types of challenges. Think about how you can best support other researchers.
And if you’re a graduate student or a postdoc, be supportive of your peers and try to interact constructively when you discuss work and its associated challenges. Expressing your concerns to a more senior scientist can be intimidating. And you might be worried about seeming “difficult” or “lazy.” However, the outcome may benefit both sides, lead to good scientific discoveries and happy scientists, and be preferable to letting bad-hard conditions persist unaddressed.
