Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.
No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries.
The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries. What I like about this excerpt - and about the entire article - is that with a very few changes, it could be speaking of writing.
Michael Schwartz says the same sort of thing, but the essay is more about what type of person you need to be to tolerate, and then enjoy, the scientific process. As the essay says Michael Schwartz got used to it and he enjoys it. I looked him up and he seems to be a wonderfully successful researcher. Science suits him. It suits many people but not everyone, because some people, even though they are super-smart, not stupid, are not comfortable with feeling at a loss, and being constantly defeated by the absence of knowledge that surrounds researchers.
Home Advertise Archives Features. J Cell Sci 1 June ; 11 : I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization.
At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else. I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view.
What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain. For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it.
That can't be the only reason — fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.
For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred?
My Ph. I remember the day when Henry Taube who won the Nobel Prize two years later told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about times more than I did conservative estimate. If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.
That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days.
It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things. The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite.
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