Praachi : For me, it was the constant feeling of not knowing enough. Right from school, we were consistently rewarded for knowing information. By the time we make it into graduate school, this pattern is so ingrained that we are strongly conditioned to have an inherent discomfort with not knowing something. When I first came to TIFR, I must say, I felt out of place. Nobody had taught me to say “I don’t know”. It was never an acceptable statement. This can instil an ‘imposter syndrome’ which becomes hard to shed. It would really help if people further ahead in their scientific journey acknowledged openly how they felt during their initial years in graduate school. As someone who left an Indian education system for higher studies abroad, did you ever feel this way too, Vidita?
Vidita : You bet! In my first semester in grad school in the US, I was convinced I knew pretty much nothing about neuroscience, and you’re right – that feeling of ignorance can be rather overwhelming. All of us go through this to different degrees. Unfortunately, not knowing somehow gets equated with failure. Failure, especially for experimentalists, is an essential building block to scientific discovery. We expect graduate students to quickly accept failure as a part of their journey, without ever actively discussing our own engagement with failures. The impact this can have on self-esteem is underestimated. Advisors would do well to drop this perceived ‘requirement’ of appearing invulnerable. In my personal experience, a willingness to admit to one’s own insecurities serves to open the door for stronger mentor-mentee relationships with grad students.
A FAILED EXPERIMENT, A GREAT NEW OPENING FOR SHRAVANI & SAIDA DURING LOCKDOWN DAYS!
Today Saida of CUBE Elphinstone, Mumbai was reporting about Shravani of her center , but currently in her house during Lockdown, on Shravani’s attempt at growing and maintaining CHOROHYDRA using MOINA as the feed! So she was maintaining a Moina culture ( by feeding a drop of milk in 250 ml of Dechlorinated tap water (a standard practice by cubists) too!
However, she found to her horror the Moina culture showing up no moina after a few weeks. To top it all , the water in the water turned green!
Shravani then followed others by just maintaining the Chlorohydra exposed to indirect sunlight by keeping near the window of her house. And HYDRA SURVIVED all these weeks of lockdown without any Moina as a feed!
A NEW TURN TODAY: Shravani, an Alexander Fleming in the making!
Shravani was about to throw away the green water of the failed Moina culture LO AND BEHOLD Shravani finds about 15 Moinas in that green water!
All this reported by Saida on behalf of Shravani who has some network issues at home!
A FAILED EXPERIMENT, A GREAT NEW OPENING FOR SHRAVANI, SAIDA AND ALL CUBISTS!
Quite often we are tempted to not report if we make no progress. This poses 2 issues.
It is likely that we have missed some clues pointing towards an alternative towards our experimental goal
Missed some other result that we were not looking for anyway
Forcing others to continue to repeat what ever we have done instead of thinking of better methods
Science and tech are incremental improvements of previous work. We stand on the shoulders of giants is a well known saying. Reporting lack of progress even if they are not goofups is as important.