So I'm a graduate student in the sciences. I've been doing research since 2013, I like to think that I know a thing or two about how to do research by now. Another important disclaimer is that I probably will exit doing research all of the time and go into teaching with a small lab on the side, I'm not about to be running a huge research lab. But hey, if you've had a different experience, feel free to get in touch! I'm open to talking about this further because I think it's interesting how other people approach this. Especially people in the humanities and other fields.
My main way of maintaining my mental health during work is to have a healthy detachment from it. I want my experiments to do well, of course, so I'm trying my best, but that's the extent of it. If the experiment works, great, if I get some little thing wrong and it doesn't work, that's fine too. I've found that if I start to get really invested in what happens that is when I start thinking "this experiment failed, I must be garbage as a scientist" and that's when things like last week's blog post happen. I end up getting super stressed out and needing to take a break from it all.
Of course, this is partially why I want to eventually get out of research. I think it's very easy to slip into those patterns of "I need this to work or I'm screwed" and it gets so much worse with grant deadlines and things like that. So as you climb the rungs it gets harder and harder to maintain a healthy detachment from what you are working on. And you can swing the other way, the thought process of "I don't care so I won't try" type of thing (I rarely see this in science though).
Having been in research for this long, I think I'm personally pretty good at maintaining this mentality. Everyone has their off days, but for the most part I try to not sweat the details if an experiment goes awry. But what I've noticed is that it gets so much harder when you are working with people who do sweat those details and are super invested in this. Because inevitably you start comparing yourself to them and wondering if you should be freaking out like they are.
This is then ten times worse when that person is your supervisor or mentor. When that's the case you already want to be like them and learn from them, and it can be hard to figure out what you want to emulate and what not to. But more often than not, it's the supervisors that are heavily invested in this work, for reasons I talked about above. It's a system set up to fail!
I just wish that those that are higher up in science and mentoring graduate students would maintain a healthy attitude towards science when interacting with early career scientists. You can do whatever you want on your own time, if you think this attachment helps or something, but for me I don't find that useful for me. It would be great if mentors tried to at least meet me where I'm at and at my level of concern for the work I'm doing. Otherwise I end up having a shitty time.
I'm doing better now, don't worry about me, but having time to think about this I do think that this pressure has had a severe negative effect on me. And I can't keep going like this for very long! Hopefully now that I'm aware of it I can try to maintain my own attitude towards science more effectively.
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