It was a typical Saturday morning, unremarkable at the outset, but one which quickly would become memorable. The laboratory was quiet, which on this day was important. Mice are easily startled, and extraneous noises could produce unwanted variability.
I had set them out the previous Friday evening, lined up in their individual cages along the bench. There were two experimental groups: normal control mice and genetically engineered mice. I gathered the materials and measured out the glucose injections. After administering the first injection, I started the timer and continued with the rest of the injections. At specified intervals - five minutes, 10 minutes and so on - I measured the blood glucose of each animal in sequence.
This experiment, called a glucose tolerance test, is a measure of how the animals handle glucose, which is relevant to the study of diabetes. After the two-hour point I took my lab notebook to the computer and plotted the results. My heart raced when I saw that there was a very real difference between the groups. The experiment involved only a low number of animals and it needed repeating, but if this result was reproducible, it meant I had a project.
The road ahead was unmarked. I never would have predicted some of the turns the path this project would take, but nearly three years later, the results from this experiment and many others were published.
The pursuit of a Ph.D. presents a variety of challenges, perhaps the least of which is intellectual complexity. Far greater at times are the emotional ones of riding the ups and downs of experimentation. Surprisingly, a Lady Gaga parody on YouTube titled "Bad Project" captures this sentiment quite well. For those graduate students presently identifying with the lead singer in the aforementioned video, or for the undergraduates considering a graduate program, I offer these three suggestions.
First and foremost, love your project. Think of it as you would a romance - but, hopefully, not your only romance. If you're not thinking about it as you fall asleep at night, change projects. I recently had lunch with a newly retired scientist who told me the thing about science he never expected to miss as much as he does is the preoccupation. He used to ponder experimental challenges in the shower, but now he found himself washing his hair with a quiet mind. This is the kind of passion you must have if pursuing a worthwhile project; it will thrill you in the highs and sustain you in the lows. This love also may torture you, but if you don't love the project, you never will have the drive to work through those challenges.
Second, and somewhat paradoxically, learn how to put a project down - learn how to kill it. Another professor once said, "Your ideas are not your children; it's OK if some of them don't live." This was the case with one of the first projects I was involved with. I really liked it; it made sense and was interesting. After about six months of failed experiments and insignificant results, I finally decided that enough was enough. We were wrong. I was wrong. Not just any experiment can kill a project, and you will learn much more from the failures than the successes. The project which survives your assassination attempts will come out only stronger on the other side.
Third, judge yourself by the process, not the result. In science there are many variables out of our control, some of which we are unaware of, and we often don't know what the answers will be. That's why we ask the questions. But we can't control the results. What we can control is how we get them.
Did I set up the experiment right? Did I perform the steps correctly? Do I have the right controls? Did they work? Don't beat yourself up if the results do not support your hypothesis. Just make sure you to conduct the experiment properly, collect the data and go from there.
A fellow graduate student and friend once pointed out to me that this is the message of a well known prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Jeffrey Sturek, PhD is a University MSTP student. He can be reached at jms3hk@virginia.edu.
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