Last week, Zoe wrote about research in the face of despair from external factors. How can you not push forward, she asked, when in your work is hope for a better future?
This week, I tackle inner despair: How can you push forward when in your work you see no hope?
My thesis project holds no immediate promise of hope for the reefs, or of curing some plague, or of fantastic future technology. The motivation for basic biochemical research comes from its intrinsic beauty, and the hope of applications long in the future. I was incredibly excited about my thesis project at the beginning – I was asking fundamental questions about the origin of life; I had the potential to create something genuinely new. Inevitably, though, my project hit obstacles – both technical problems and scientific difficulties indicating misconceptions in my original idea.
So, the thesis I’m currently writing looks nothing like the thesis I imagined last spring.
Despite my initial excitement – or perhaps because I was so invested in the work – I began to take technical setbacks or unexpected results as a negative judgment upon my value as a researcher, upon my value as a person. Research (especially scientific research) is about crafting elegant ideas about how the world works… and then, as often as not, seeing those elegant ideas torn to shreds. When the ideas being torn to shreds are your own, you may begin to suspect that they are not, in fact, so elegant – and that this is a personal failure.
Research is about standing on the brink of the unknown and taking a step forward. When the vertigo from staring off into that unknown is mixed with an insidious brew of imposter syndrome and unmet expectations, this can be profoundly troubling.
Wherever you are in your research journey, there will come a point when you do not want to continue. When you feel burnt out. When your research feels irrelevant, or failed. When the task ahead of you may not be impossible, but is so utterly devoid of the value you attached to it originally that moving forward seems pointless.
When you’re staring at a blank page, sometimes you can’t outline, and you have to just write – stream of consciousness, gibberish. Your first draft will be awful and disorganized, but you’ll have something. And once your ideas are on paper, you can piece them together, turn them into something beautiful.
That’s what research can be. You keep working, not because you know where it’s going, but because you don’t – and won’t it be interesting to find out?
I’ve learned a lot about biochemistry this year. But I’ve also learned how to deal with failure. I’ve learned that I will get out of bed, and I will push forward. I’ve been surrounded this year by unimaginable support from friends and family and mentors. And my mentor and adviser have pointed out that, while my thesis doesn’t answer anything about the origin of life, and the protein I designed doesn’t do anything I thought it would do, it could have an application as an extremely useful tool for future biotech research projects. Less grandiosely, but more personally important, when I turn my thesis in on the 18th, it will be proof that I can summon the personal, intellectual, and organizational fortitude to finish a project that seemed inconceivable just four short years ago.
So, the thesis I’m currently writing looks nothing like the thesis I imagined last spring.
But that’s because what I know now looks nothing like what I knew last spring.
When I turn my thesis in on the 18th, it will be proof that I can summon the personal, intellectual, and organizational fortitude to finish a project that seemed inconceivable just four short years ago.
How do you separate experimental failure and personal failure? I don’t know. I still struggle with that. But if you can find beauty in that failure, pick up the shattered, scattered pieces of your ideas and build them into something interesting, push forward regardless, then can you really call that failure at all? The results of my research don’t promise hope for humanity (then again, if the biotech applications work out, maybe they do). But the fact that we, as a species, can take failure and turn it into knowledge and success may be the only hope that humanity has.
And knowing that is worth more than anything I’ve learned about biology.
— Bennett McIntosh, Natural Sciences Correspondent
