How to lead your own research as an early stage researcher
I wanted to post some points for early-stage researchers who are taking the lead on a project but are probably collaborating with a more experienced PI. Of note, I’m mostly thinking of drylab work with this, though perhaps some will apply for wetlab.
Meet regularly on some cadence
If given the chance for a meeting once a week or once every two weeks, spring for the once a week meeting. Try to make slides of important results, you can always reuse thoses.
Communicate important new results consistently through email
It’s easier to catch someone up if you’ve kept them in the loop the entire time. And if you are presenting results without a Zoom meeting, then just use email instead of Slack or Teams. Instant message platforms prioritize smaller messages that disappear and are harder to search for. Email can be more easily searched and email threads are more productive and not as easily siderailed. Think of an email as the shortest lab report possible.
Expect to reprocess everything multiple times
This is different than, say, shepherding raw files into a usable directory structure or keeping the location of files in a database. But you should expect to run the actual cleaning and preprocessing multiple times as you find errors or issues over time. Make sure your preprocessing scriptsa are somewhat reproducible.
If you use Jupyter notebooks, follow KISS
Keep It Simple Stupid.
Jupyter notebooks were not meant to be thousands of cells long. They get really laggy and hard to follow. (Trust me I know). The best notebook is less than 100 cells long, and are often 50 or less. They express a concise idea and showcase it.
If you are experimenting, don’t be afraid to copy and paste once or twice. But if you are copying dozens of times, or rerunning the notebook multiple times with different slight alterations each time, it’s probably time to move functions into a library.
Keep an affirmations PowerPoint going
Do one slide every day. 3 questions. 1-2 bullet point for each.
- What did I do yesterday?
- What is my goal today?
- What is 1 task that if I did, the day would be successful?
The last one is especially helpful. Make it a clear, concise, doable, and boolean task. It’s either done or isn’t. If you keep the PowerPoint going for awhile it can be a fun reminder of how far you’ve gotten.
Caveats
The Dunning-Kruger effect is defined on Wikipedia as “a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of a task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge.” As the earliest-stage researcher, I’m probably most susceptible… but I do have both industry experience and years of undergraduate research under my belt, so my advice still applies for a lot of folks.
I must also be honest, I don’t always follow all this advice, so this blogpost is partially also for me. :D