Learning Experience

As I sit here, finishing my last week or so of my postdoc, I am finally able to begin to reflect on my experience, and where it all went wrong.  I can sit here all day and play the blame game by either blaming myself or blaming my PI.  But I think in the end it's a combination of the two.   Let me explain.

The more time I spend at the bench, the more I realize it's not for me.  At one point, my PI said 'if you don't wake up at 3am thinking about an experiment, science isn't for you'.  And at the time I took that very negatively, but in a way I think she's right.  The fact is, I don't wake up at 3am thinking about science. 


It's 3am-do you know what your experiment is doing?



Now, that doesn't mean I don't love science.  I do.  I love thinking about it, talking about it, reading about it.  Many days I even love doing it.  But the nitty-gritty, day to day task of slaving through something, troubleshooting, all for the perfect image for a paper or the perfect set of data is not fun to me.  All the time, effort, and long hours that go into that one 'aha' moment, or the one exciting piece of data that feeds you for months on end is just not worth it to me. Without giving too much away about what I work on (although you might be able to guess from my 'name'), I remember thinking one late night while looking through a microscope 'what the he*$ am I doing here counting dead animals in the middle of the night?'

However, being on this path of self discovery that I didn't even know I was on, I do think my PI failed, or was at least lacking, in her job as a mentor.  I found this old article that's definitely worth reading on the Science Careers website.  My PI did not do many of the fundamental things that are suggested here.  She did keep close tabs on me, meet with me weekly, make sure I was doing experiments the way she wanted them done.  She did not, however, let me write my own papers, design and implement experiments without checking with her first, or allow me any freedom whatsoever to explore science on my own.  And since I came from a lab in grad school that did allow me that freedom, I found this environment stifling.  And I brought up these issues with her, and she just said she wasn't comfortable giving me freedom.  I always wondered, why did she hire a postdoc?  Because we have better hands than most techs?  What she should have said is that she wasn't comfortable giving anyone any freedom and wants to have her finger on everything going on in lab.  Maybe this is the curse of the new PI, but I'm afraid it may backfire in the end.  At some point you have to trust that you hired good people and let them do the job you hired them to do.  Not just have a lab full of techs.

So in the end, I figured out I don't want to spend more time at the bench (or at least much more time...I may have to for a little while to pay back the government).  And I figured out I don't work well with certain types of people.  And maybe that knowledge is going to be invaluable to me in the future.  No matter what, you should be able to learn something from every experience, good or bad.  So I'm still figuring out the important things I learned from all this-and I don't think it's anything that went into any of my papers.