-
Asked by anon-352648 on 7 Mar 2023. This question was also asked by anon-360909, anon-360738.
-
Lucien Heurtier answered on 7 Mar 2023:
Dear easy482she,
I faced three main obstacles in my field of science:
1) Self-confidence: Although I am a quite confident person, and despite all the knowledge and achievements that I accumulated in my career, it is sometimes hard for me to face an audience (or an arrogant person in the audience) and to say with confidence that what I did is valuable. I am usually honest, acknowledge the weaknesses of what I did, express how I could make things better, etc, and somehow by being to honest and self-aware, sometimes people may think I’m not that talented. So I learned with time to keep my self-criticisms for myself at first, show everybody how great my work is, and possibly self-criticise my work only if people interested in hearing it, which people don’t always want to.
2) Relationship with colleagues: I’m a very social person, but as a researcher sometimes you have to be very pro-active and go towards people to create new collaborations. Sometimes they would be lunatics, and say one day “oh that’s a great idea” and the week after “why do you even want to study this?”. So sometimes it’s been hard for me to be confident enough that my own ideas are good, to go to people, convince them to work with me, and most importantly keep working on the project regardless of whether people change their minds or not. I learned to think “who likes my ideas joins me, who doesn’t can leave”. You will always find people interested in your idea if you are convinced your idea is good (learn to listen though, sometimes ideas can be wrong, and it’s important to hear criticisms).
3) Don’t be too specialized but also not too versatile: I started during my PhD to learn a lot of different things, but then I realised after several years that people could not really tell what I was really an expert in. So I learned to build my own direction by studying different things that I’m interested in, but trying to give the whole thing some consistency. Writing both in a few sentences, AND in one full page why what you are doing in your work is very important for you and for others is a good exercise. If you are not able to clearly answer the question, then that means you need to think of where you are going professionally.
I hope that will help you in the future!
Best
Lucien
-
-
Stuart Clare answered on 8 Mar 2023:
I wasn’t sure if you meant scientific challenge or personal one.
Pretty much every problem I have worked on has been a challenge to explore and overcome. I’ll give one example. Usually a doctor will interpret an MRI scan by just looking at it as a picture and seeing how it is similar or different to other scans and use that to diagnose a patient’s condition. I was working on a method to get a measurable number from the scan, that you could compare the number in others people’s scans and help diagnosing the condition multiple sclerosis (MS). In my early results, something was wrong and I was seeing patterns in the numbers that had nothing to do with whether the people scanned had MS. It took me months to figure it out, but I found an error in one of the assumptions that I had been making and so had to come up with a new method. Fortunately it worked and this method is now used in clinical trials.
As for personal challenges as a scientist, it was spending months writing an application to get money to do a research project and it being rejected, twice. People I worked with thought it was a good idea, but it wasn’t a priority for those funding the research.
-
Nikita Klimovich answered on 9 Mar 2023:
When doing research in science, you are trying to find answers to questions no one solved before, which usually means there’s some challenge that no one in history has ever solve before. Like any other scientist, I’ve had to learn to be comfortable with not even having the faintest idea of how I’d even go about finding that answer.
Sometimes I’ll try to read more about the topic and find that I can hardly understand anything they’re saying. The trick was realizing that’s okay. Even if it doesn’t feel like it, understanding just 10% of what I’m reading means I’m learning something and will eventually understand more.
Sometimes I’ll try to do some experiments and find that the results make no sense. I’ll double check everything and quickly run out of every single idea I had about what might have gone wrong. That’s also okay. In those cases, I’ll just try things (often completely at random) until something gives me a hint about what might be going on. If you try enough things, eventually you will stumble on something worth pursuing.
It’s very common to get stuck on a problem with no clear way of how to proceed. I’ve found that simply blindly pressing forward with the confidence that eventually I will somehow figure it out usually works. None of us know how to do everything, but we have to try anyways. If we don’t try to overcome challenges until we see a clear path to a solution, we’ll often be waiting forever to start.
Comments