Importance of being dumb - oh science...

Taking break from student horror stories for a minute I recently came across an interesting article, which I have linked at the bottom (free access) for those that are interested.  The gist of the article, which we will go into more detail about in a moment, refers to the need of stupidity in graduate school and to be successful in science.  I had an interesting applied moment when I read this in light of my graduate career so far.  I remember reading an opinion paper (which I cannot find now for the life of me) in a journal that talked about how being in graduate school makes you feel stupid, even though being in school means to some degree you are pretty darn smart.  Recently, with my comps (ideally) looming next semester I've heard more than a few talk about the need for absolute humility while taking the oral component - in short explain what you know while never appearing as though you think you know everything.  Let's discuss.

First off, graduate school does make you feel stupid.  Part of this level of education is not taking regular classes but having them as seminar or discussion - to integrate advanced topics and reasoning.  Prepare as you will, the professor will always lead the discussion in a way that you never thought of and there's always someone else that says something profound (well, it's not always actually profound, but you're little brain makes it feel that way).  You'll find yourself scrambling to write down every word and still walking away only half following what the hell just happened.  This mixes very interestingly with the societal pressure to cut the tall weeds (aka it is often socially unacceptable to be the really really smart one) and the academic pressure to weed out the scrubs (aka figure out who really doesn't know much).  Most new students are too afraid to say anything, afraid to sound stupid or to come across like they are "attacking" another idea.  So you sit, smile, and nod your head.



Of course, this doesn't last.  Here in my 3rd year of my PhD I find myself participating more often, especially in classes or seminars with a large proportion of graduate students.  Still keep pretty pursed lips though in large scale settings with lots of faculty.  I'm not really a shy person, but what do you do?  Just try.

Now onto the comps piece.  We talked a little bit about this before but for the conversation to continue we all need to be on the same page.  For a PhD student, the only way to move from "student" to "candidate" (aka even be considered for grants or graduation) is to take comprehensive exams.  This differ from department to department and school to school.  Usually there's a mixture of written and oral exams.  Some use a mock grant proposal and defense.  Others use large scale tests.  My department has a week of essay papers for the written.  Each day a different committee member (minimum of 5, and trust me that's ALL you need) will send you a set of questions each day.  They will require you to produce facts from papers you have read as well as extrapolate and apply them to the questions.  Assuming you pass these there is a day of orals, whereby you sit in front of your committee and for 4-6 hours they verbally ask you questions.




Okay, enough on that drama for now.  I am more than sure as they approach and I sink in deep for survival there will be more on that.  The point of that conversation is to move it further.  Another student in the department (with another adviser) was telling me horror stories of her first failure and her second try (you only get 2) in which she passed.  She told me one of the biggest differences was attitude.  She's a smart cookie and going into her first one felt confident.  Responding to this her committee became very aggressive and would outwardly tell her that they didn't like whatever thought process she had followed to get to an answer, even if it wasn't technically wrong.  Afterwards her adviser berated her for her performance, leading her to almost quit.



Thankfully she didn't quit and when she tried again she went in with her head down.  She was still able to think through answers but by being less confident she got more positive responses and received much less aggression from her committee (plus she passed).  Now take any story with a grain of salt but it seems to me that part of the point of comprehensive exams is to show you how much you DON'T know (or can't know YET) and look for you to show signs of humility and "absolute" stupidity.  Keeping in mind of course that these exams also look for you to prove you do know the basics in your field and would be a respectable representation of it (not "relatively" stupid).

This brings us to the paper I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation.  The author actually teases at my assessment above, stating if a student is able to answer all the questions posed to the fullest it is the committee that failed the exam.  By that feeling of absolute stupidity it pushes us to question and inquire, to keep moving beyond the bounds of current knowledge to learn and regain the feeling of shock and awe at the complexity of the universe.  If we ever feel like we know anything, then we stop learning and stunt the learning of those around us.  In the universe of science, you shouldn't feel like you know what you're doing because that's what leads to the big discoveries.  So feel absolutely stupid but know that you're not relatively stupid.  You know a lot, but you can't know everything!

Check out the article.  It's a well written essay that is easy to follow, even if you don't get into science itself per se.

Swartz, M.A. 2008. The importance of stupidity in scientific research. Journal of Cell Science 121: 1771.
http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771.full.pdf+html-

Let me know what you think or share related experiences.  Your story can only lead to inform others coming through and make those who have felt it feel less alone.


"Do not be afraid of defeat. you are never so near victory as when defeated in a good cause" Henry Ward Beecher

TA: excuse note stories

Ah excuses, easily the biggest bane of any teacher's existence, ever.  And at the college level, we've gone well beyond, "The dog age my homework."  The tales you will hear will range from the astonishing, to downright infuriating.  Of course they're not all lies, but even the truth tellers tend to go out of their way to make things messy.



Firstly, every year you will always have at least one student e-mail you the DAY a major paper is due or a test will occur.  Always.  And it's always some variant of "I'm so busy I didn't have time to do it!"  Normally my rule is, if you came to me with a legitimate issue BEFORE said date, I will probably roll with it if it doesn't start too many issues.  Examples of complete inability of students to follow this philosophy:

1. Student A shattered his dominant arm mid week that a paper was due.  You don't really need a note for this, they show up with a cast.  So I gave him an extension to go down to disabilities resources and get help with writing.  Easy!  If he had told me the day of or day before though, hell to the no.  You shouldn't be writing the paper 2 hours before class anyway and putting if off until then certainly doesn't earn you an extension.  Of course, this kid ended up turning it in later than the extension date anyway so he still could have lost points.  Round two had no excuse besides, "I forgot!"  Regardless the paper was terrible so the score was low enough that not only could I tell he'd written in that Saturday to turn it in in the middle of the night (it was due Friday) but I couldn't even justify taking off an additional 20%.
2. Student B sends me an e-mail after hours on a Friday. She states that she is leaving for a conference in an adjoining state with her club and won't be back until late Tuesday, therefore missing the field trip we have on Monday. She says she will go to the Thursday class. So, I have two major issues with this e-mail.
1. It's a conference, which means you knew about it more than 12 hours in advance so either you are lazy and didn't bother to use a pre-excuse as an actual pre-excuse or you fibbing. I made her show documentation so it was legit, but seriously, she's known since the first week of school, what?
2. I HATE (hate hate hate hate hate) when students skip the request stage and immediately assume they can jump in where ever or just get the notes and that's just fine and dandy. As a student you are SUBORDINATE. You have to ask. And in this case we had full classes so she couldn't just pop on to another day, there wasn't room in the vans. 
3. The first week of school contained labor day, so Monday labs were missed. However, the instructor decided that all safety training needed to be done that week. Therefore the students needed to hop in to one of the other 3 labs that week or to my extra session on Friday. Student Splinter Group C ignored the requirement and the very important step of TELLING ME. 
1. Did I mention all I require is communication? You know that first day whether you will have issues or not. It's like the pre-excuse, I just don't care as much when you show me you don't either!! 
2. Anyway, I digress. Come the following Monday I had 7 students who had not only missed training the last week but ignored even talking to me about it in class. I held them after and asked why they skipped. The average response? "I just got the information from somebody else taking the class." 
3. So...I was pretty sure I hadn't certified anyone else to do safety training. I told them training is more of a piece of paper and I needed them in the training with a signature of completion if they wanted to stay in class. Furthermore, since they skipped class without discussion they received an unexcused absence.
4. I actually had a student tell me she couldn't e-mail me because she didn't have access to the internet. Apparently for 7 days. I asked if she had been on campus at all, since we have free computer access. What I didn't ask was if her legs were broken so she couldn't walk up to the instructor's or my office either, the location of which were given in lecture multiple times. Miraculous healing she must have had.

 

Next week I'll post some more serious excuse situations. Have some good stories of your own? Let me know!!

"The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal." Mark Twain 

Science-how the study itself adapts and evolves!

Science!  One of the things that is often misunderstood and misconstrued is scientific theories (and the process by which they are derived).  One of the major problems for this is scientists have established their own little world with its own lingo and set of standards.  The good thing?  These standards have a very good tenancy to hold up (as in relation to society-more on this in a bit).  The bad thing?  Nobody normal gets it.  Mercy sometimes I don't get it, so let's talk about some of the things that science does that incidentally fuels the anti-Darwin fires.

1. THEORY: A theory as the average person thinks of it is a constructive thought process by which a philosophy or belief is based according to perceptions and observations.  Again, I cite the Annunaki (the reptile aliens from a previous post), which is a theory that aliens had intermixed with humans. The theory arose from ancient Sumerian text and carvings.  The beings have traits apparent in certain (select?) humans and the whole shebang.  The term is actually not even caught by spell check it is so common.  They even tie in the the UFO theories and the Builderberg Group/New World Order theories.  They all sound new, they're not mainstream, and honestly some of them are just plain crazy.  
2. HYPOTHESIS V LAW: The problem is scientists don't use the word theory as we just described it.  The term "hypothesis" would tie up much more closely to this definition-a series of ideas or questions built on observational framework.  A scientific theory comes much further down the process line.  First you have a hypothesis, then you propose how to test it, you test it, get results, and draw conclusions based on your test and the subsequent set of results.  For any long standing scientifically accepted theory, that process needs to be performed many times by many different people (repeatable results). Very similar to scientific law.  In fact, the law of gravity is actually a theory according to scientific terminology, but I don't see very many people jumping off the building in order to fly home.   
3. SOCIETY: Science, like every other construct is the black duck of society.  You follow what people want to hear or you get squished.  Example-Ptolemy was able to explain heavenly bodies in motion with an Earth at center basis, he used concentric circles so technically the pattern matched the data.  What was more important was that it matched societies view so it stuck around for 1600 years, even though Galileo figured out the real pattern much sooner than that.  But what happened to Galileo?  Oh, he died in prison...  Now Ptolemy did not screw with data and forcefully misconstrue anything, based on what he had to work with and his observations it fit the pattern fine.  The issue here is that poor Galileo got squashed when he had a DIFFERENT idea, and it took almost 200 years to make it mainstream.  Society also governs what's important, or what types of things scientists should focus on.  AIDS research didn't really go into full swing until the 1990's, but was discovered in the 1970s and named.  However, because of the stigma, it wasn't "important" for mainstream research so it was very difficult to get funding.  It's kinda like that city law that so many accidents need to happen in an intersection before they'll budget in a stoplight.
4. WRONG: Like I just mentioned, sometimes science gets it wrong.  Sometimes it's completely innocent-trying to draw conclusions based on only a few pieces of evidence.  But you have to start somewhere in order to make progress.  Sometimes though, people do bad things, which I'm sure doesn't surprise anybody.  And let's face it, this isn't a construct isolated to the sciences, or even to our society.  However, the example I want to use I've actually seen brought up in a Darwin v God debate.  His name was Johann Meckel.  He made a very famous move in the early 1800s.  Meckel believed development of an embryo mirrored evolution (not that strange of an idea in the early 1800s).  He spent several years of his life studying it.  The issue was (of course) that it just isn't true, the development of an embryo does not mirror the procession of evolution through time.  Instead of admitting his failure, he was so passionate and emotionally tied to his idea that he forged drawings and had them published.  These drawings were even used in textbooks for a couple of years until someone figured out his masking attempt.  That's the perk about science, it has to be testable and repeatable by someone else.  Of course, the drawings have been stricken from teaching and his name only comes up to demonstrate a very bad point.  In fact it took me 10 minutes and 5 pages in google images to find his little faux pas (he went on to do some other quite spectacular things medically).  The point is that even though science makes mistakes, it is able to admit the issue and adapt to new information (even if it takes a while) which is certainly more than can be said of other passionately driven constructs.  No societal construct is perfect!