Thinking vs. Doing

I can be hard-headed and sometimes I can have trouble stepping back and accepting the fact that I know virtually nothing about anything. I will carry on thinking that I’m on the right track until something—a journal article I read, an e-mail I receive, or a meeting that doesn’t go as planned—smacks me in the side of the face (figuratively speaking of course) and screams “you have no idea what you’re doing!” When this hard truth hits, it can be quite upsetting and I sometimes let it result in a “bad day” which may or may not involve complete loss of confidence, withdrawing to my office, and/or taking everything anyone says the wrong way, suspecting that they too have lost all faith in me. This paints a picture of an extreme case, but it does happen.

While preparing to leave Woods Hole for New Zealand, I was chatting with my advisor Dr. Tim Shank at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) about the year to come. He said something that caught me off guard which, paraphrased, went something like this: “If you come back to WHOI with a boatload of genetic data about species around New Zealand, you will not have had a successful year. But if you come back understanding what goes into designing a research project, that will be success.”

My emotional response to this was a cocktail of excited and a bit irritated. I was excited because this whole learning to sculpt a research project business sounded like a very large step down the poorly-defined, often blocked, and tumultuous road between studentville and scientist city that we call a PhD program.

So, why did this also bug me? Because in my mind I had already come up with a research project: I was going to study the genetic connectivity of seamount invertebrates and try to understand what the genetic legacy of bottom trawling might be on benthic dwelling species. I had a topic. I had leader-of-the-field advisors to work with at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). I was going to hop on a plane, land in New Zealand, grab a pile of samples, and be a DNA-sequence-generating lab-dwelling machine for a year (with brief breaks to explore the country and play cello of course). But that would have been too easy and, in the end, pretty pointless.

While I knew that my previous forays into the world of science were heavily skewed to the grunt labor side of things, it was never as clear to me as it is now just how little I know about how to do science. Working as a summer intern or a lab tech for months at a time gave me a very naïve version of how things work. Over the three weeks that I’ve been at NIWA I’ve been working to formulate an actual plan and proposal for how to proceed with my research. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. At each step—actually figuring out what the research questions are, choosing a target species, determining the physical sites of the populations I am to use, and trying to understand what genetic markers and tests could help illuminate patterns of gene flow in the deep sea—I find that there is an entire world of knowledge that I have never broached. It’s almost terrifying how much there is to learn. And while I could spend the rest of my life THINKING about these topics, there’s a very hard-headed part of me that wants to start DOING.

There have been some good days when I think I know what I’m going to do and I’m just one tantalizing step from being able to actually get in the lab and start doing work. And surely there have been some not-so-good days when leads that I thought I had on samples or genetic markers fall through and I realize I haven’t made progress.

But yesterday was the first bad day. Yesterday felt like one of those smacks in the face I was talking about. I received information that, while actually really helpful in designing my study, has strongly made me reconsider using the two species I was hoping to use for my major research questions.

What do you do with this kind of information? You breathe deeply and start thinking again. It’s called being a rational human and it can be extremely difficult. So, after my typical series of irrational emotional responses—helplessness, uselessness, frustration, omni-directional worry—I’m back to thinking. Rationally.

Something that my NIWA advisor, Dr. Ashley Rowden said to me last week will make a lasting impression on my career, I think. When I expressed my eagerness to get in the lab and start doing things, he essentially said, “Ellie, I have news for you. This reading and thinking is most of what science is.”

Sirens, bells, and whistles exploded in my brain (well, probably I just grunted) because this led me to recall what Tim had said back in January about what a successful year would look like. He was telling me that success would be learning to think and not just do. When two extremely intelligent and well-published scientists from almost directly opposite sides of the globe seem to have the same message, they must have a point.