Today is about that most essential talent of spies, and one that scientists also feel they need much of the time. Disguise.

To set the tone for Moscow Rules number 4, could I please have some music, preferably in 5/4 time, from a show that went through more rubber masks than a Hallowe’en shop?

Moscow Rules, number 5.

Go with the flow, blend in.

The Great Paris in disguise

Every spy knows the importance of cover. Scientists should too, since so many of us feel - often a lot - like our cover is going to be blown apart at any second. Because, according to a lot of people, they perpetually live in fear that they are in a Mission: Impossible episode, and that at any second, their PI is going to realize, “That’s not a real face! That’s just a rubber mask!”

It’s called imposter syndrome.

I suspect there are two points in scientific careers when imposter syndrome might feel particularly acute. The first is when you enter grad school. The second, for those who neverlearn, is when you get into that first job, like an assistant professor position or equivalent.

These two times are stress points because there’s no way to know what to expect. As an example of the importance of expectations, one of the factors that predicts how well a student does in university is whether his or her parents went to university.

First generation university have it a little rougher, in part because their parents have been through it, and can let a student know at least a little bit of the territory they face. For someone who has never had anyone in their family in a university, something like “Read the syllabus!” is not an obvious thing to do. But it’s very likely that they can get some inkling of what to expect when a family member has been through that process.

But every graduate student is a first generation graduate student. Even if someone in your family has gone to university, it’s highly unlikely they’ve gone to graduate school. And even if they’ve gone to graduate school, they probably didn’t go to the same one as you. Graduate programs are wildly idiosyncratic in how their expectations and procedures, even across a single campus. And even if someone in your family went to the same program in the grad school, they probably didn’t go so recently that the faculty and procedures are unchanged from their time there.

Meanwhile, most of the faculty have been at this for a while and have internalized their procedures. When something is routine for you, you forget it’s always new to someone.

Of course a new grad student will feel like an imposter.

The same factors come into play when you start that “real job.” It’s unlikely that anyone you know has been hired in the place you are now working. You’re thrown back into that uncomfortable situation of not having clear expectations.

This is where watching your peers can help. See what their experience is like. What are they trying to do, and what are they struggling with? They can give you an idea of how to blend in.

To put it another way, fake it ‘til you make it.

If you want to read more about imposter syndrome, you can do no better than to catch this huge compilation of posts in the Diversity in Science Carnival, hosted by Scicurious.

I realize that presenting a whole series of spy rules can be disheartening. It’s all how you protect yourself against unknown foes, mysterious dangers, the threat of being revealed as an imposter at every turn, and so on, and so on. Let me lighten things up - and let today’s Cold War spy music reflect that.

Rule 4.

Don’t look back; you are never completely alone.

Yes, this rule sounds like typical spy mistrust at first. I want to convince you that it isn’t.

“Don’t look back.” When you’re in a new grad program or post-doc, or even a job, it can be very tempting to convince yourself that things were better at the last place you were at, or to think that you missed some chance or opportunity. I felt this when I was in grad school. I moved to a new city to go to grad school. In doing so, I’d made choices. Some things got left behind that shouldn’t have. I got incredibly distressed.

But none of it had anything to do with the professional situation I was in. That was all good. I think I was able to realize that, and maybe because of that, I was able to keep going. But I could easily see how that level of distress could convince someone it was all a horrible mistake and they should quit.

Similarly, there’s a decent amount of research showing that people who spend a lot of time “in the moment” are happier than those dwelling on the past or fretting about the future.

What’s the opposite of looking back? Looking forward. Think about the future.

“You are never completely alone.” Yes, it can be an isolating to be in research at one time or another. Ultimately, ain’t nobody going to write that thesis or dissertation but you. Sometimes, you might feel like this is you and your supervisor:

The Cone of Silence

As Amanda Bower said:

Getting (a) PhD is like getting (a) full-body tattoo. It's permanent, takes a long time, really painful, and people think you’re nuts.

And we don’t like hanging around with people we think are nuts.

The good news is that it’s easier than ever to join a community. I’ve benefited tremendously from being online, and the conversation and insights being shared on blogs and twitter and elsewhere. You have a deep, deep well of knowledge out there to tap into. The amount of information available about the grad school experience and career development is phenomenal. I wish I’d had it when I was in grad school.

That I’m guest blogging here, and am working with people to promote SciFund, are just tiny examples of the benefits of joining a community. I feel much less alone by virtue of being part of the online community.

Get friends and get feedback. It will help you stay sane in science. (And elsewhere, too!)

If you look around for the Moscow Rules on the Internet, you’ll find several versions of them out there. The version I’m using is from the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

To set the mood for rule number 3, today’s Cold War music is one of the best explorations of “Who’s side are you on?”

Everyone is potentially under opposition control.

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to get your paper accepted or your grant funded. Standing between you and your mission objective... peer reviewers.

Not Reviewer #2, either.

If there is anything in professional science that is cloak and dagger stuff, it’s the peer review process. Almost all of it is shrouded in anonymity. Someone you’ve met someone at conferences several times, gone out for drinks with, has always had good things to say about your posters could easily be that maddening Reviewer #2 who wants you to run more experiments, hates your introduction, wants you to redo every figure and recommends your paper be rejected with extreme prejudice. If there’s a plus, it’s at least possible that someone you consider a bit of a prat might be the person fighting for your grant proposal at the review table.

Maybe Maurice Bowra said it best:

Scientists are treacherous allies on committees, for they are apt to change their minds in response to arguments.

Most people have friends: friends who are loyal, who will stick up for them and defend them against attacks. But the first loyalty that scientists feel is rarely to another scientist. A scientist’s first loyalties are usually to things like evidence, data, and analysis. We’re trained to take that stuff fairly seriously. You? You’re way down the list, bub.

In science, a friend might be the one dishing out your harshest criticisms. Be ready for criticism from any source.

Today, my second SciFund project - “Beach of the Goliath Crabs” - launched at RocketHub. I’m excited to be taking part in round 2 of this crowdfunding endeavor, because it is the future of science.

It’s fun, but not easy. Part of putting together a project required making a video. There are a lot of decisions to make about exactly what to say, show, and what music to use. (Speaking of music, here’s today’s vintage Cold War spy music to set the mood.)

I did a full two weekends before #SciFund started. I ended up redoing almost all the sound, and shooting a new section, the next weekend. I did all this extra work because I was following Moscow Rules number 2.

Never go against your gut.

I watched my draft video, and I just knew there were places that were weak. Sometimes, it was as small as how I said one word in a sentence. But could I tell you why it was wrong in an analytic way? Nope. This was gut instinct.

This is a hard lesson for scientists. We are supposed to be analytical. Ken Robinson jokes that professor live in their heads so much that their bodies are just a way to get their heads to meetings.

Four organs of decision-making

Randy Olson talks about this in Don't Be Such a Scientist. In his “four organs” model, the head is your intellect, the heart is the emotion, gut is intuition and humour, and the sex organs, libido and survival instinct. Randy was talking about communication, but the model is also about decision making. What do you decide to do? What are your motivations? Scientists are unusually head-centric. We’re all about facts and data. We go through a long period of training that forces us to think that way. Consequently, we tend to underestimate the pull of the other organs on our decisions.

For all that we pretend that we are proceeding logically in generating our hypotheses and testing them, there's still a huge role for gut instinct in the life of a scientist. If that freaks you out, just think of them as ideas that are insufficiently articulated for immediate verbalization.

For example: When is a project done?

We all talk about doing that one beautiful experiment. But it's rare that you get the “smoking gun” experiment: the one with crystal clear results that definitively tells a single, unified, publishable story. More often, you have a set of interrelated experiments that all get at slightly different angles of the same problem. When do you stop running experiments and write it up for publication?

There’s no simple test to decide when you have “enough” for a paper.

I often think about my projects as having “confidence intervals.” (I use the phrase informally here, not in it’s proper mathematical definition.) When I am examining data, I’ll often notice something that seems to be a pattern. But I’m good at guessing wrong, and so in the early stages, my confidence may be only 50%: I’m imagining things, or it’s real, but it could go either way. I keep running more tests, and if I’m lucky, my confidence interval creeps up past 70%, even to 90%.

I have a few projects where I tell my students, “I’m 90% sure that this is what’s going on, but I don’t want to submit it until I’m 95 or 98% sure this is the case.” I never want to be 100% confidence of a result, because I always want to be ready to change my mind given good data. I always tell students that any scientist who says there is nothing that can change their mind on an issue should have their “Scientist” card taken away from them. (If only we gave them out!)

At what point do you write it up and try to publish? You can’t get infinite data. There is always a point of diminishing returns, where new data leads to less and less new understanding for me. I only have my own gut instinct that what I have will be persuasive to reviewers, editors, and readers.

The few times I’ve thought, “I’m only 90% sure this is the case, but getting that last 5% confidence is going to take a long time, so I’ll have a go and submit the paper anyway,” guess what? Rejected. If something doesn’t convince you, even if you can’t spell out why, it’s probably not going to convince other people.

There are lots of other examples of where you sometimes have to listen to your gut in science. I admit that the “Never” in Moscow Rule #2 does makes me nervous - “never” is is a long time. But sometimes, if something feels wrong, it’s because it is wrong.

External link

Does trusting your gut make you unscientific?

Hello! Zen here. I’m pleased to be on Scientopia’s Guest Blog, because blogging at NeuroDojo, Better Posters, Marmorkrebs, Sunday Matinee and running my second SciFund project was just not enough for me. You can never have enough blogs. (Besides, I can quit any time I want.)

For the next two weeks, I’ll be presenting the Moscow Rules – Science Edition.

The Moscow Rules were directives that undercover American intelligence agents allegedly used in the Cold War. The rules were there to increase agent’s chances of making it out safely.

Sometimes, being in academic science can feel like being enemy territory in a cold war. You are often in strange territory (new lab), with many unfamiliar people (other grad students, post-docs, faculty) whose motivations are unclear. You might not trust them completely (especially administrators). There might not be the risk of attempted assassination by having poison injected into you with a specially built umbrella, but there’s enough similarly that the Moscow Rules can still apply.

(To get in the right frame of mind, you might want to watch some vintage spy titles before proceeding.)

The Moscow Rules

Rule 1.

Assume nothing.

This one almost doesn't need any further elaboration for scientists. If there’s a list of things that scientists are supposed to be, “skeptical” is high on it. But it’s one of those things that we might know intellectually, but don’t put it into practice as much as we should.

I’m thinking about replication, for example. Everyone agrees that replicating results is necessary for science, but in practice, very few people do it routinely. (I am pleased to see a project encouraging replications in psychology.) Big spectacular claims in the glamor magazines come under extra scrutiny, but if the claim is not a particularly spectacular one, there is more of a tendency to assume they’re correct.

But remember Moscow Rule #1: assume nothing. John Ioannidis is practically making a career out of pointing out that the published literature contains a lot of findings that turn out to be incorrect.

One of my papers almost didn’t happen because I ignored Moscow Rule #1. A student and I were working on a project when a relevant paper came out tackling the problem with a different technique. my student said we should replicate the other lab’s experiment. I resisted, saying, “Ah, that’s already published.” Eventually, I gave in, because I thought it would be a quick thing to replicate the results.

And we couldn’t.

Needless to say, this was an unexpected turn for the project. But the turn was still on a road that ultimately ended with a publication.

One note, though: “Assume nothing” is not the same as, “Trust no one.” I’m all for skepticism, but not paranoia.

I'd like to thank the folks here at Scientopia for letting me guest blog for two weeks.  It was a lot of fun but also a real challenge.

Although there's no posting quota on the Guest Blogge, I decided early on that I was going to post six times a week--something I don't think I've ever done before.  And I did it--despite legal action between my ex-husband and me, a visit to our collaborators across the country, and catastrophic hard drive failure.  I'm pretty proud of myself!

I hope you learned at least one small tidbit from me.  If not, there's still hope...come and visit my blog!  And now I turn you over to the capable hands of Dr. Zen.

I wrote before of the importance of deciding who you want to be: in other words, actively choosing the sorts of characteristics that you want to define you as a person.  I realized recently that, although I’d never actively chosen who I wanted to be until recently, I had picked out several role models to emulate in my younger years.  Because I had wished to be like them, I did end up acquiring many important characteristics from those role models.

I’d like to talk about one of those people today.  Her name was…Emily Pollifax.  Really.

When I was a young mom, just getting into homeschooling, I used to hang out on a homeschooling discussion forum.  One day, someone asked the question:  “Have you ever thought about what you want to do when you are done homeschooling your kids?”  Different people had different answers, of course, but one—a woman I looked up to—had an answer that really stood out. “When I grow up, I want to be Mrs. Pollifax.”  She then went on to explain that if we hadn’t read the Mrs. Pollifax books, we were missing out on something special.  Intrigued, I checked out a book from the library.  And I was hooked.

Mrs. Pollifax was a woman who had done everything society expected of her.  She married a lawyer, then stayed at home to raise her children.  When the children were gone she involved herself as a volunteer for various charities.  Her husband passed on but she continued to do nothing but volunteer.

Then, one day, her doctor noticed that she seemed rather depressed.  She replied that she felt she felt like she’d outgrown her usefulness: all that the volunteer organizations seemed to need was a good pair of teeth (for smiling).  The doctor asked her if there was anything she’d wanted to do while she was younger that she’d never got around to, and she said:  “When I was a girl, I wanted to be a spy.”  When the doctor laughed at this, Mrs. Pollifax was affronted: what was wrong with her childhood ambition?  So she applied to the CIA, got a courier job, and then proceeded to land herself in the middle of an international incident.

The neat thing about the Mrs. Pollifax (in this first book, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, and in subsequent books) is that she manages to wiggle out of the stickiest places primarily by being herself: creative, open-minded, and resourceful, of course, but also kind and keenly interested in other people.  If anything, it is these last two qualities that help her most in her “courier” work (which never ends up as a simple mission it’s supposed to be).

You might see how this sort of story would appeal to a stay-at-home mom.  “Yeah, I’m home with my kids now, but when I’m older…”

As I read, re-read, mulled over, and re-read the stories yet again, I found that I wanted to be Mrs. Pollifax too.  Except without the CIA involvement.  I would have an interesting job that involved travel (which I’ve always loved) and I would meet interesting people—not by accident, but because I’m just interested in people in general.

When UnlikelyDad took over homeschooling the kids in 2006, I was at a loss for what to do at first.  Yes, I was tutoring.  Yes, I was speaking at homeschooling conferences.  But these were hardly full-time activities.  I needed something to do with my life.

I got involved as a CERT instructor and was able to meet interesting people and teach them things like how to triage victims, how to splint an arm, and how to shore up unsafe buildings well enough to effect a rescue.  And still I was not satisfied with my life.

I applied to grad school and was accepted to two traditional chemistry departments and two interdisciplinary programs.  When I visited the traditional chemistry departments I noticed that something was lacking, something I couldn’t put a finger on.  I didn’t understand what until I visited MyU and listened to all of the students in my program talk about their field work.  Field work in the mountains; field work in rivers; field work at sea; field work at places I’d dreamed of visiting.  And then I knew: I didn’t just want to do science.  I wanted to have adventures doing science.  If I didn’t do field work, I’d be missing out on that part of me that craved adventure.

And now I do have adventures during which I attempt to do science.  During these trips I meet cool people and do neat things.

Stay-at-home moms of my acquaintance tell me that they live vicariously by following my escapades on Facebook.  Some have told me that they are surprised that “someone interesting” like me is willing to be friends with “someone boring” like them.  This is silly, of course: they’re interesting people too. They just happen to be interesting people with humdrum jobs.  But I know that could easily change in the future: it certainly happened to me.

It may seem kind of funny to say that one of my role models was a fictional character, and yet it’s true.  And though I didn’t really grow up to be like Mrs. Pollifax, I adopted the attributes I loved best about her and made them an integral part of my character.

God bless you, Dorothy Gilman, for creating a character that changed my outlook on life.

*Brownie points if the name 'Wakalixes' sounds familiar--do you know who coined the term?  I'll mention it later on...

Outreach is more and more on scientists' minds.  Or maybe I should say it's on their to-do lists.  Adding an outreach component to a grant proposal makes your Broader Impacts section look great, after all.  And, let's face it, if you go talk to a bunch of kids about what you do, there's no way you can feel guilty about being stuck in your ivory tower.  Right?

Now I've  talked to some of my fellow grad students about the outreach they've done in conjunction with their advisors--and I've also done outreach myself (on my own, with a school club, and with my advisor).  So I like to think I have an idea of the general sorts of outreach scientists like to do.

On the flip side, it's easy to put myself in the shoes of the people on the other end of the outreach: the kids.  I'm not a kid any more, but I do have kids and I used to spend a lot of time tutoring struggling students.  So I think I have some idea of how the kids react to different sorts of outreach.

After considering both the kids' and scientists points of view, here are my thoughts on different approaches to doing outreach.

(1) Talking about your research.  This generally does not work unless you're doing something that kids would consider cool, like astrobiology or something.  And even then you have to be careful that they will understand what you're talking about.  You don't want them to think that science is something that only a brave and gifted few can understand.

(2) Talking about simple science concepts.  This may be good, but sometimes it's taken to an extreme and made too simple.  Kids aren't stupid.  They may be ignorant (though even this is rare, in today's world of technology) but they definitely aren't stupid.  Also, you have to be careful that you don't make it boring.

(3) Making big booms (or other things that make the kids pay attention).   The goal of this approach seems to be, "let's show kids how cool science is":  a worthy goal.  But often people make the "big boom" the majority of the show, which defeats the purpose.  Ideally, it's supposed  to get the kids' attention, after which you explain what made the thing go boom in the first place.  If you get them excited about something, they're more likely to want to understand the underlying science.  Right?

But what I frequently see when I watch others doing 'big boom' outreach is the Wakalixes effect: using buzzwords without ever properly explaining what those buzzwords mean.

('Wakalixes' comes from Richard Feynman's book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.  When he was on California's science textbook evaluation committee, he saw a book that had pictures:  "What makes it go?  Energy makes it go."  But it never once talked about what energy is.  As Feynman said, they could have substituted some sort of nonsense word--like Wakalixes--for energy, and it would have made just as much sense to a kid who didn't understand the concept of energy.)

 So what do I like to do when I do outreach?

(1) If at all possible, I try to find out what the kids have been studying in their regular science class and use that as a springboard for what I'm going to talk about.  (For example, once I heard that the homeschool group I was going to speak at had been learning electrochemistry.  So I talked about the redox chemistry of acid mine drainage.)  Alas, this isn't always possible, but when you can do it things work out much better.

(2) I start out by asking them to think about something particular in their everyday life and what they've observed about that thing.  I ask lots of questions. The sooner I can get kids jumping up and down and waving their hands, the better.

(3) I give them a little bit of scientific background.

(4) Now I do my 'big boom' experiment related to what I'm talking about.

(5) I explain some more.

(6) I do another demonstration (usually a bit less flashy) to help illustrate the concepts.

(7) Repeat steps 5 and 6 as needed.

(8) Play time.  I ask the kids a question about the topic that we're studying that can be answered after doing an experiment.  Then I let them mess around individually or in small groups.

(9) I pull everyone back together and we discuss until the time is up.

This formula has to be tweaked slightly depending on what I'm talking about, but overall it works pretty well.  I love seeing kids walk out of the room, talking to each other (or their parents) about something related to my outreach.

Because I'm scheduled to teach Dr. Hand-Waver's class for her next week, we've been having an ongoing discussion about educational philosophy.  Basically we're trying to decide an age-old quandary: do you cover the lower-level material until you're sure the class has mastered it?  Or do you only do so until they have the absolute basics down, then move on to more advanced topics that they might find more interesting?

Dr. Hand-Waver usually falls in the former camp (as do I), but as time goes on she's thinking more and more about the latter course of action.

To illustrate my argument for the first course of action--getting the class to master the basics before moving on to more advanced topics--I trotted out a story of a former tutor client, a 9th grader in pre-algebra.  His mom hired me to help him learn to solve for 'x', but I found I could not do that.  See, when I first got there, he was working on problems like this:

(2/3) x + 1 = 5

He understood that he had to subtract one from both sides to get (2/3)x = 4.  But after that he was stumped.  Of course I told him that he had to divide by 2/3 next, but he really didn't seem to understand that.  We played around with some other problems for a while, and it became clear that he could solve 2x = 4 just fine.

So what was his issue?  Simple: he couldn't do fractions.  Years ago, his teacher had moved him on because she should...and now it was coming back to bite him.

"If they don't understand the basics," I told Dr. Hand-Waver, "They won't be able to do the more advanced stuff.  It will make them feel stupid."

"Yes," she said, "But if they don't do the advanced stuff, they will think that our subject is all menial math.  And they will hate it.  I want them to love it."

She's right, of course.  We decided the only way to cover everything in that class was to have the students put in more time.  But the only way that would happen is if the students did it outside of class--which they won't do voluntarily.

In the mean time we're stuck trying to figure out the best way to find a happy medium between covering the cool, advanced material and the necessary basic material.  If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

Career coaches say you should be able to describe what you do in 30 seconds or less.  I can definitely sum up my research in one sentence for non-technical folks (and no, I don’t just say “Frustrating—argh!”)

But I’ve found that I almost always have to answer another question:  “What is geochemistry?” I was asked this about 10,000 times during my first year in grad school (I know a lot of people outside of academia) and my one-sentence answer never seemed to satisfy people’s curiosity.  So I came up with a little blurb, a bit longer than 30 seconds, that explains my feelings about geochemistry.  Dr. Hand-Waver rolls her eyes when she hears me say it, but since she hasn’t offered a reasonable alternative, I keep using it anyway.  Here it is.  (And yes, it is a bit simplistic: this is what I tell non-technical people.)

What is geochemistry?

Well, you know what chemistry is, right?  Most chemists do work in the lab under closely controlled conditions.  They control the temperature, what goes into the flask, and stuff like that.  Geochemistry is the chemistry of the natural world.  It’s the chemistry that happens in water and rocks and the atmosphere, where there are about ten million different variables that you can’t control.

The usual response to this was a pause, then:  “So why would you want to study that?”  I never could quite convey to them how cool it was.  *sigh*