00:10
Alright, hi Len. Hi Asami. How it goes?
Huh? How it goes?
Thanks for asking. I'm still jet-lagged.
But I wanted to sort of bounce around ideas with you, as we typically do in these conversations.
About the difference between grad students and being a postdoc or a full-fledged researcher of some kind.
And this kind of spawned around the conversation with my current colleagues, who are both grad students.
Most of them are towards the end of their grad student lives.
And another postdoc who started at the same time as me, but completely on a different grant.
So we don't really work on the same project or anything, but we got PhD around the same time and started postdoc around the same time.
And maybe because this lab is very engineering heavy and most of the graduates work in industry.
Unlike many of the academic labs that I am more familiar with.
They're kind of very frank and open about being disillusioned by academia or not super being passionate about research.
Which is fine. It's just an interesting perspective for me.
But one of them said that one of the reasons that they don't think they can do academic research.
Is because they are much more comfortable being given a topic or being given a problem and then solving it.
And they said that if I were to become a PI, I would need to do the giving of the topics to others.
He would somehow need to come up with an idea or at least a theme of some kind to investigate.
And have some kind of coherent approach to tackle that.
And hopefully those are in alignment with his skill sets.
But he was saying that even after doing five years of grad school, I still have no clue how to come up with a completely brand new problem.
03:06
Because becoming a PI requires you to spearhead that kind of asking questions activity.
And coming up with solution activity.
Rather than, here's a very well defined problem. I think I have an idea of how to go about it.
You grad student A, go solve it. Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I laughed too hard at the grad student A thing.
That was a very depersonalizing version of what grad school sort of is.
And it was too real.
Isn't that our experience?
It's why it was too real.
My brain, I wanted to glide by it.
But my involuntary response was to laugh at it.
So please continue.
This is the situation.
I feel like it is also the kind of problem that I can resonate.
I tend to believe that there's nothing new under the sun.
Or nothing original under the sun.
But what I do feel like it is possible is to sort of bring an approach.
Or bring the way of framing the problem.
From one type of problem to a completely different context.
And apply it in that way.
I think there are two ways that you can create a meaningful original contribution.
In a very generic form I'm talking.
And one is to hybridize the field. Right?
Join or start your own little cult of scientific field.
That bridges these two specific hybrids.
That's one.
The other is take an approach or a framework.
The ways of thinking that's maybe established or pretty common in one field.
And take it to another field that is not applied in that way.
And this is a little bit different from hybridizing.
Because you're not kind of meshing the field.
It's like cross-pollinating.
Yeah, exactly.
It's more like cross-pollinating.
And I think if you do it well.
You can't just randomly cross-pollinate.
But if you do it well.
Then the fruit of this labor could be very delicious.
Okay, we're diving into the pollination and the food plant analogy.
I like it.
I will try not to deviate myself from the main point.
No, we're on.
Basically, depending on how cleverly you select the combinations of the two fields.
06:02
It's not the same as coming up with brand new knowledge.
But it's still scientifically meaningful.
Plenty of scientific innovation happened this way.
And it requires just a few people who are interested in a bunch of different things.
To see the connections.
Like, oh, we already do this.
Why haven't we done it in this other field?
Kind of thing.
I mean, those are sort of like two major ways.
Maybe there are geniuses out there who can summon the secrets of the universe from nowhere.
But I don't count myself as one.
So I'm just like thinking about what is my realistic scientific contributions that I would like to make in my career.
Yep, yep.
So would it be fair to say that like these two, as you said, sort of like generalized.
But approaches to research, right?
Which is maybe for the purposes of our definition, research, which is at the frontier of some aspect, right?
Of something.
So it's trying to push the creation of something.
Trying to avoid the word new.
This is a flavor of research that's interested in pushing the boundaries.
Rather than like verifying the past knowledge or past hypothesis.
Because that's also a legitimate field of research.
It's just that I find myself not in that.
Sure.
And that one also doesn't get nearly as much funding or appreciation as it should.
Which it really should.
Like imagine all of the decades that we lost believing that one thing is correct.
Like the famous example is the Alzheimer's disease research, right?
I'm not going to go talk deep into it because I'm not an expert.
But like it's very, very possible that an entire field could be misled and waste a lot of the time and money on a wrong hypothesis.
Because somebody didn't do the unsexy experiments or research about verifying these hypotheses.
Yep.
But that's a different conversation.
It's a different topic.
Save that for something like, you know.
Yeah.
So between the difference between grad school, grad students and post-doc or like after post-grad school days, right?
Where you are at least in a scientific field, I feel.
Because I think humanities students are actually asked to come up with their own original ideas during PhD.
09:02
Their entire thesis is supposed to be, you know, no professors give them an idea or like give them a topic to work on.
Like they are supposed to come up from scratch.
Yeah.
I'm going to tentatively sit in the middle of uncertainty on that.
Knowing that a PI in any field, I think it's more, I'm more ready to accept and just from the light bits of knowledge I have that like a PI can still pretty much tell you what you should be working on.
Like they're still going to give you that like deep influence.
And I don't know.
I want to agree with you to some degree.
But I'm hesitant to do so just in case there are situations I'm unaware of being outside of the PhD in the humanities fields.
Something makes me hesitate there.
Okay. Fair enough.
Regardless, you're pointing out the sort of way that one could end up in a grad program and essentially be told this is your, you know, question slash direction.
And you're kind of meant to take it and invest yourself into it and then to, you know, commit to this thing, right?
Maybe not necessarily developing or designing your own question to a certain extent, right?
You take on the questions that are in front of you and then maybe continue off of that.
And I'm glad that you raised that flag because when I say this, I'm obviously oversimplifying everything for the sake of discussion.
But also I think there is a gradient to like how much ownership or autonomy a grad student has in his or her research.
Because in my experience, I only feel like I started to have developed my own questions.
Like something that was truly coming from within, from my daily experiments, maybe year three onwards.
Like first couple of years, I was just like doing what I was told because I didn't know any better, right?
Like they said, oh, go work on this molecule.
I tried something.
Go work on this other molecule.
I tried that.
You know, like basically, because I was a baby researcher and needed that kind of structure to follow.
And this is my personal experience.
But even until the end, I feel like my thesis, because I didn't get the grant for this thesis, right?
12:03
It was a grant that was obtained by my PI.
And I selected this project from a few that I had choices of.
But it was basically his idea that I was executing, which is a very common format in science, like STEM research field.
And because of that, it's not to say that I didn't feel the ownership.
But I always felt like I'm just kind of like a worker bee than like the one who conceptualized the idea, right?
When you submit a paper and declare who did what, conceptualization is my PI.
I did all the other things, but like the initial ideation was credited to my PI, rightfully so.
And it is possible that if I were a more successful grad student, I would have sort of moved on from that stage during my grad school years to start materializing my own ideas.
But in my five years, I did not quite get there.
I was, you know, happily doing what I was told to do, essentially, with a little twist of my own, of course, like as I developed.
But overall, I don't take credit for ideation of my projects.
I have ideated, like I have given ideas for how to approach it.
And I did execute it.
But like the very decision of like, let's study this molecule, you know, like that didn't happen for me.
Whereas, so now that I'm like a year, year and a half into my postdoc.
And now I am in the position to propose a research of my own original ideas, whether it's for a fellowship or for grants of some kind.
Like, you know, I'm sort of like tasked to come up with my own.
And that's sort of, it was pretty scary at first, the idea of doing that.
Because like, who the fuck am I to say that my ideas are good, right?
Yeah, we're touching on another space there.
Yeah, yeah. But like, because I haven't done it all time, you know, no amount of literature review can give you the confidence that like, yeah, that's, that's it.
Like, that's a million dollar idea, you know.
So that was one of the things I was working on before I left for holidays.
And I was kind of like, it was a weird, exciting moment.
Because on one hand, I feel like I was on to something.
15:00
And I had a strong sensation that like, yes, people haven't quite done this, this way.
Right. And I can see the importance of solving this problem.
And I can see that I, on paper, at least, I qualify to solve this kind of problems.
And at the same time, maybe I have a huge gap in my literature review.
And like, people have done it already.
But like, I haven't read their work.
Or like, maybe there's someone else already working on something super similar, or like have a better ways of working on this problem.
And what I'm doing is just like a shittier version of them.
Like, that was like a weird limbo of like, me feeling like, sensing a little growth of myself as a researcher.
At the same time, feeling the different kind of imposter syndrome than the ones I've experienced in grad school.
And yeah, it was a weird time.
I can tell.
Well, weird, I think weird is a good word for it, because it's so unfamiliar, right?
Like this isn't, it's the experience is something that you can have when you are at this particular stage.
Like of, let's say, career, but it's not even so much career as it is at this particular stage of development, say in the research field.
I think you get similar ones in any position where you are tasked with holding sort of a broad scope of information or a, maybe not a broad scope, but a deep amount of information about something that spans like a lot of other people's works.
And you're in a position that tries to become, quote unquote, completely aware of everything, while at the same time up against the knowledge that it's kind of impossible to be totally aware of everything.
And so there's an inherent uncertainty, which then feeds a new, as you said, a new kind of sort of imposter syndrome, where it's not that it's a question of whether you can do these ideas or you've created them, but it's a how will the external space react to my contribution, right?
How is it going to be seen by other people?
And that's a big unknown.
The hope, I would say the hope, is that when you get it, there's space to then learn, ah, I see, there is these other things that I can now read and learn about.
But as you've already really said sort of directly, but mentioned, is, well, it's attached to like funding.
18:07
It's attached to that driving force.
It's attached to the same disinterest and perhaps even discomfort or for some people fear, right, that you mentioned in the anecdote that started this, which is, I don't know, right?
I don't know what to do with this thing.
And it requires me to believe it in order for me to then fuel and fund myself, right?
It requires me to believe in my ideas and also requires them to believe in my ideas.
Yes.
It requires you to start by getting to a belief in yourself and your ideas and then accepting the process while the people outside of you will hopefully also then believe in your ideas by seeing how much you have spent to organize this.
Which is hard.
Yeah, it's huge.
That was like my first official experience doing it from scratch.
Coming up with the idea randomly one day when I was walking to work, it really came out of nowhere.
Of course, I mean, it's not like a subject matter that I'm unfamiliar with.
It was a relatively new subject matter and these were kind of unrelated.
So it was kind of new for me to be thinking about the two together in the same space.
I think it was like a truly genuine wonder.
Like, I kind of want to try and see if that works.
It's a very almost naive question of like, I kind of want to see what happens if I do this.
And that's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time!
