James – Page 3 – Student Guidelines

You Will Make Mistakes

Equally as frustrating as the times when the laws of nature seem intent on thwarting your every move, are the times when you make stupid mistakes. The guidelines on planning and implementing research will help minimize your unnecessary mistakes, but they won’t prevent them all.

When you inevitably add enough inhibitor to make your cells shrivel up and die; add an extra bracket to a line of code that you don’t spot for two days; delete a patient’s data from the computer; or write an entire chapter on the wrong title, DO NOT DESPAIR.

Get Practical Tips

Don’t make the same mistake twice. Note the error down several times and take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
If your mistakes are because you don’t fully understand something, then learn it.
Read these guidelines again.

Read Personal Perspective

There was one step in my cell staining protocol that I always used to forget. After washing them with various chemicals for ten minutes at a time, there was a one minute wash with water, which the first two or three times I left out despite remembering it every time just after it was too late. I highlighted it on the protocol, wrote it out several times and never forgot it again.

Check You Are Being Safe and Ethical

If you make a mistake that happens to be dangerous, then this is a tremendous source of stress, and could cause you and others potential harm.

Although these occurrences are rare, it doesn’t mean they won’t happen to you. They may not, but if they do then you will wish you thought about them beforehand.

For each experiment you should do a risk assessment and think about what the potentially hazardous outcomes are. You don’t have to write an essay on it, but really bad things with small probabilities are worth thinking about beforehand. It reduces the risk of panic, which in turn reduces the risk of unpleasantness becoming disaster.

See Wet Lab Examples

Large bottles (or small containers) of dangerous chemicals can spill or smash.
Lasers and radiation can inflict various degrees of harm
People or animals could be injured during experimentation

See Social Sciences and Dry Lab Info

It is a mistake to assume that because you don’t use obviously hazardous materials that this guideline does not apply to you. Safety and ethics boards may disagree with your assessment, and even if you think they’re wrong, they can cause you serious problems. Any research that involves other people requires approval.

Get Practical Tips

If you are still not sure about something, ask. It sounds obvious, but people hate asking. You just have to do it. It isn’t rude or stupid, and if the person takes exception to your question then they are socially defective. Feel sorry for them, and ask someone else.
Make sure you have taken all the courses necessary to meet the required safety and ethics standards. If you have somehow slipped through the gaps, this is not an achievement. You are a danger to yourself and others, and a potential liability to the university. They won’t thank you for it.

Get Wet Lab Tips

If you’ve spilled or broken something dangerous, don’t hide it or rush to clean it up yourself. You may need to tell someone what you did and what you think the best course of action is.
When you start working with a new chemical, look at the accompanying data sheets. Make sure you are aware of the associated hazards.

Read Personal Perspective

I already had ethical approval for my project which involved getting members of the public to fill in a questionnaire about how they viewed politics. What I didn’t realise was that I also needed ethical approval to stick up posters asking people to fill in the questionnaire. This had never struck me as unethical, but the ethics board saw potential problems and wanted me to safeguard the procedure. If I had put this in my original ethical approval I could have potentially saved the months I waited for them to get back to me.

Don’t Ignore Your Other Commitments

Scientists, more than most, have a tendency to ignore their personal lives and focus on their work. The job becomes increasingly stressful when you leave other important tasks incomplete. As they build up, things will only get worse, so do them as they come.

If your bills are piling up, and exercise has become something you hear about but don’t fully understand, then you need to take a step back. The chances are that although you are working pretty constantly, the quality of your research is suffering. The mistake at this juncture is to think you need to do more work rather than less. Take a break. You will gain a new perspective about your research and be able to return to it with a greater level of enthusiasm. Don’t burn out by exhausting yourself.

Get Practical Tips

Make time for people. Family and friends are important and will positively affect your work.
Make a list of your obligations and cross each thing off as it gets done.
Don’t run too many procedures at once.
Even if you are experienced at a certain procedure, don’t just pile the replicates on top of each other without analysing the previous attempt first. Make sure you not only know the outcome of the previous attempt, but understand why any problems occurred before you do it again. Otherwise you will inevitably make the same mistakes, reducing both your productivity and morale.

Get Wet Lab Tip

Don’t think that you have to complete each experiment every day. Know the points where you can stop and continue the next day.

Read Personal Perspective

At the beginning of my third year, I didn’t have a lot of data. I felt like I had to run procedures faster and faster in order to generate something useful. Before one had finished I was already running it again, and again. But of course this meant I kept making the same mistakes. I never took the time to analyse where the mistakes were, and the protocols kept failing.

The result was that I got increasingly stressed and piled on more replicates, becoming disheartened by their failure. My social and home life both started to suffer, and I stopped enjoying my degree.

If you are stressed by your lack of progress, don’t just pile on more work mindlessly. It’s inefficient, and will only make things worse.

Go to Talks at Your University

When you first start out in research, going to presentations about people’s lab results is like listening to an alien trying to communicate by spraying you with its scent glands… though hopefully less odorous. The fastest way to make it more intelligible is to listen to more talks.

They will give you a much broader view of science than your fairly narrow scale project. You may find alternative techniques; phenomena that affect your work; materials that are better than the ones you use; and new directions your project could take.

It is a mistake to think you only need to focus on your project. Even if it works ok for your degree, changing topic afterward will be much harder.

Get Practical Tips

Unless you can write very fast, don’t focus on getting every last detail down on paper. You would do better to actually listen and try to understand.
Take note of the person’s name; broadly what they study; things relevant to your own work; and most crucially anything they mentioned that you didn’t understand.
Look up a couple of things you didn’t understand after every talk, and make sure you don’t come out as ignorant as you went in.
Think about potential links you could make with your own work, as this is how many great discoveries are made.

Read Personal Perspective

I suffer from a disorder that I think is fairly common, where listening to people talk at me sends me straight to sleep. It doesn’t even matter if I’m tired. There are a few techniques I discovered that helped prevent this:

Dressing for the talk so that I was slightly cold – though this isn’t pleasant.
Asking myself questions about the person’s research and looking things up.
Keeping a question in mind for the end that I want to ask the speaker.
Sitting near the front, or close to people I didn’t want seeing me asleep.
Sitting next to someone who agreed to jab me in the ribs whenever I fell asleep.
Coffee

Form Relationships with Other Students

This doesn’t mean a trip down the pub or coffee shop with everyone after work – though that is great as well. It means understanding the projects and techniques that your friends and other students are doing. This will not only increase your understanding of scientific principles, but also reveal potential collaborations that might help you get onto other people’s papers and get them to do some work for your paper.

Very few students do this, but in the end the three things that will matter most to your success in academia are the number of papers you have, the number of techniques you can do, and the number of people you know. As a student, it will be difficult to form collaborations with big PIs, but collaborating with students is something you can do easily.

Get Practical Tips

If your university has a student seminar series, this is a great place to meet other students and ask questions in a judgement free zone. Even if your questions are stupid, most likely other people had the same question.
Ask other students if you can watch them do procedures you are unfamiliar with; there is no better time to learn these things than now. However, it is important to remember they are students as well and may not be performing the technique optimally.
Take thorough notes when being taught new techniques and video it if you can so it is easier to remind yourself if you don’t use it regularly.
Don’t form collaborations without telling your supervisor, and make sure they are relevant to your work.

Read Personal Perspective

It wasn’t until I was applying for jobs that I realised how important it was to have experience with multiple techniques. I could have greatly increased my narrow range by learning from other students.

One thing I did do was gain a few middle author papers by contributing my skills to other people’s projects, which was very useful.

Go to Conferences and Talk to People

The more people you know the easier you will find it to move on to your next post. Knowing other students is great, but the people you really need to know are the people who are in charge of projects and have their own funding. The best way to do this internally is to go to talks, and the best way to do this externally is to go to conferences.

Get Practical Tips

For many scientists networking is hard. It feels forced, it’s uncomfortable and it’s scary. No one is suggesting you should spend the entire time at the conference schmoozing up to PIs, but set yourself a target of talking to a couple of people each day whom you actually respect and know something about.
Before you go to a talk or conference, read some of the presenters’ work. Then after they have done their talk you can discuss it in more detail.
Think about some questions you can ask them about their work. If you can link the stuff in their talk back to their previous work you will make a very good impression.
At every conference you should submit to present at least a poster. It will encourage people to talk to you, get your name out there, and give you some practice at talking to people about science.

Read Personal Perspective

I got my post-doctoral position because a PI saw me give a talk at a conference. Before that she had never heard of me, but was sufficiently impressed to tell me about a position she had coming up. Going to conferences is always a good idea, but it is particularly beneficial when you are about to finish your degree.

Expand Your University Experience

Something that a lot of students miss out on is the opportunity to go and learn new techniques outside their institute or university. The main way to do this is to go to workshops which specialise in teaching specific procedures and can last a day or several weeks. As these take place all over Europe, America and outside, this is also a good way to see new places and make new connections.

Putting these courses on your CV shows that you are motivated and more importantly that you have experience with more techniques and procedures.

It is a mistake to think that putting your head down and getting lots of data will definitely carry you through your degree. That is putting all your eggs in one basket, and science makes for some notoriously unreliable weaves. Learn things, enter competitions, and show yourself as a well-rounded individual to increase your chances of success.

Get Practical Tips

Actively search for the courses and conferences you want to attend. Be proactive and email the organisers; you may find they are willing to help fund your travel, or waive the entry fee. Don’t wait to be told about things or you may miss out.
Courses teaching statistics and graphics programs are good ones to attend because they will be important for writing up your papers, theses, and dissertations; and learning them as you write up can be very stressful.
Your university probably has a list of approaching events. This is a great source of cheap and free activities so make sure you know where it is. Ask the administrative staff if you don’t know.
Don’t dismiss university emails as they may contain opportunities to do these courses.
Look for competitions for students and enter as many as you can. You can put them in the awards section of your CV.
If there is a procedure you are interested in learning, google it.
You could also email other labs and ask if you could do some work for them in order to learn new techniques, or find placements in labs the other side of the globe.
You can also do placements in industry. Some techniques which are too expensive to be done frequently in most labs are routine in industry. Ask around who has connections with industry and see if you can make contact, especially if your goal is to go into industry after you graduate.
If you are interested in industry and this is not your final degree, then you could look for a project with industry connections for your next one.

Read Personal Perspective

I had a great time with my degree, but I didn’t do much of this. It was only as I was finishing that a few of my younger friends started going all over the world. They went to Amsterdam, Japan, China, Croatia, Spain, America, and more, whilst I never left the country. Worse, most of these trips were completely free. If, like me, you are not a particularly organised person, it is really worth the extra effort to look into doing a few of these trips.

Aside from experiencing other places and things, these courses show potential employers that you are enthusiastic about learning and are active at pursuing it.

Go to Journal Club

It doesn’t have to be called journal club, but attending a weekly meeting where you discuss scientific papers with other people will help your development a lot. Journal clubs are the best way to gain a feeling of how research is done outside your lab, which may not always be the optimal way.

General structure is that one person per week picks a paper and sends it to everyone else in the group. Everyone reads the paper before the meeting, and then the person who picked the paper chairs an informal discussion by going through the figures and the conclusions.

Get Practical Tips

If someone else is presenting, then you should still read the paper. You won’t have time to analyse the figures properly during the presentation.
If your institute or group doesn’t have a journal club then set one up yourself. Send an email around asking who would like to be involved.
It’s generally better if there are a few people of more experience present who can point out inaccurate methods or invalid conclusions that students might not know.
When you are reading the article, look at the figures first, then conclude what the paper shows before reading the authors conclusion. You might be surprised at how different it is.
Sometimes if you have time you could look at a few reviews on the subject to see how the data ties in with other papers, especially if it is related to your own research.
At some points your life will be too busy for all these extra activities, but put off that moment for as long as possible as they really do help.

Read Personal Perspective

If there was one activity I would recommend to anyone, it’s journal club. Seeing the differences between the high and low impact papers and analysing them in detail helped me avoid the same mistakes and improved the quality of my research.

Present Less, but in Greater Detail

This is one of the more equivocal guidelines as there are different schools of thought. There is something to be said for presenting reams of data at high speed – if you have reams of good data to show. Most of the audience won’t follow what you are talking about, or pay much interest in your data, but the ones that remember you will likely come away with the impression that you work hard and you probably know what you are doing.

On the other hand, fewer people will remember you. To the big PIs that you are hoping to impress, you are only interesting as far as your data are interesting, and they can’t be interested in something they can’t follow.

For this reason it is probably better to be slow and clear, presenting a smaller fraction of your project in a coherent story. Scientists enjoy stories and are much more likely to give you their attention if it looks like your data are leading to some conclusion.

Get Practical Tips

Make sure your presentation doesn’t go over time. Practise it repeatedly and make sure you keep within your allocation.
When you actually present it, nerves will make you talk faster than normal, so don’t worry if your talk goes slightly over time during practice.
Include a comprehensive introduction. Remember that many of these people will not know the details of your project, so if you want to hold their attention make sure you explain how everything works. It may mean you have to miss out a bit more data, but you can always state that if people want to hear about more of your data they can talk to you afterwards.
Practise the presentation for people outside your lab who don’t know much about your project, and ask what bits they didn’t understand. Then ask them questions about the bits they claimed to understand and see if they did.
Picture your audience in their underwear – just kidding.
NEVER picture a scientist in their underwear.

Read Personal Perspective

Most of the talks that I learnt nothing from had a similar format. They used one, or at the most two slides to introduce the fine details of their project which most people in the room had never heard of. The next slide was the first graph showing their results. At this point they lost me. It was impossible for me to care about their data because I didn’t understand its importance.

They needed a thorough introduction where they explained firstly the basics of the topic, and secondly the previous studies that led up to their work.

The more time you put into the introduction, the more the audience will care about your results.

Start Early and Plan Thoroughly

The earlier you start your thesis the more time you will have to correct any mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes and generally the main difference between a good and bad piece of work is how many times it has been checked through.

There is nothing more intimidating than the blank page, and the closer you are to your deadline the more intimidating it is. Starting to write as early as you can will reduce stress later on. Even if you haven’t got all your data, or you don’t know the main story of your project, there is always something you can do.

Secondly, it is highly important to plan your thesis thoroughly. The amount of planning should always be proportionate to the size of the project. A 1000 word essay needs a five minute plan. A thesis, which will take months to write, should be planned for considerably longer.

It is a mistake to start writing your introduction with little idea of where it will lead. It’s easy to find yourself on tangents talking about irrelevant information if you have not planned exactly what needs to be written.

Get Practical Tips

The earlier you start writing, the less you will know about your project. If you don’t know your story (see Structure your Project), then doing the general introduction might be a mistake. Writing about specific sections that you already have results for is more worthwhile. Often you can cut and paste these straight into your introduction later.
Many people start with their materials and methods section as it is the easiest, and likely to remain relevant to your final draft. However, everyone is different, so do what works best for you.
Make sure you know the stats and graphics software in advance of writing. It is stress you don’t need if you have to learn how to make your graphs at the same time as doing your thesis. Most theses do not contain Excel graphs.
Use your results to plan your introduction and you will ensure your introduction is relevant. Think about why you followed those procedures and what previous research paved the way.
Also plan how much information is required for each section so you allow enough time for research. Assess the relevancy of the details you mean to include.
Make your plan as detailed as possible, including sub headings and sub-sub headings.
Check your plan with your supervisor before you start writing. Or if that is not possible, at least have someone look over your plan before you start writing. Other people can be a lot more objective about your work.
A late start does not mean you don’t have time to plan. If anything it is even more crucial, and will save you time as you progress.

Read Personal Perspective

I am not a planner. I hate planning, and for much of my life I’ve got by without it. The result of this attitude when it came to my thesis was vast sections of irrelevance. I’d talked about the things I found most interesting rather than the ones necessary for my project. I read widely in areas of less relevance, and as the deadline approached I rushed others. A tight, to the point thesis requires planning.