Getting results is a prerequisite, but it does not guarantee that a student would be excited about a project. If I consider my experience in teaching, the one thing that gets students most excited is if they are confronted with a difficult problem. I suppose the same also applies to research. If we find a problem that we care about and for which we really want to know the answer, we tend to be highly motivated. Being emotionally engaged in solving a problem is often referred to as taking ownership of a project. In fact, to promote ownership of projects, some Professors asks their students to come up with their own research question.

 

If the students do not frame their own research question, I as a supervisor have to convince them that the project is exciting. What I often find is that what makes me excited may not get the students excited. This could be because the students only have a limited view of the research field. But it could also be due to my communication skills (or lack thereof), which goes to show that communication skills are really important to motivate others. In either case, to promote ownership, it does help greatly if a student reads up more about the project and adds his or her own ideas to it. Without doing one’s own reading and thinking it would be very hard to be truly excited about a project.

 

Fittingly to the subject of student motivation, this week I read a very interesting article by Raymond Huey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington. The title of the article is “On Becoming a Better Scientist” and in it Raymond Huey highlights a number of factors that can keep students motivated. The one that stuck with me most was to take up high-risk projects.

High-risk projects are inherently exciting. For example, what would make us more excited, a plan for a weekend run in the park or the intention to train for a marathon. For most people it would be the plan to run a marathon. One reason for it is that the reward of running a marathon is much greater if we were to achieve it. And in fact, taking up difficult (high-risk) challenges is a major source of my own motivation.

 

When I look at my current and my past students, it is also true that those who pursued more high-risk projects that were based on a unique idea were more motivated. Those students were often also more successful, despite the inherent difficulty of their project. That said, coming up with exciting high-risk projects (or for that matter with any projects) is not easy. It requires a lot of reading and thinking. But Raymond Huey encourages especially graduate students to come up with truly high-risk ideas and to pursue them. Inevitably, students will face skepticism and discouragement, but this should not deter students. He has the following advice and story to share:

 

“Learning by doing is important, but is not always the most productive (or safest) way to proceed. Advice from an experienced scientist will usually help you get up and running quickly and also can help you avoid disasters. However, always evaluate advice and be prepared to reject it if you’re convinced that is not right for you.

Be especially careful when someone discourages you from pursuing a new idea, stating that it can’t be done or it will never work. Such negative advice sometimes says more about the limited vision of the advisor than about the feasibility or importance of the project.

Of course, negative advice is generally given in good faith, and an example concerns negative advice I gave to Barry Sinervo when he was a graduate student of mine. He and Larry McEdward had pioneered a way to manipulate egg size in sea urchins, and they used their technique to investigate the developmental (allometric) consequences of differences in egg size (Sinervo and McEdward, 1988).

One day Barry told me that he wanted to study the consequences of reduced egg size in lizards. He was going to stick a syringe needle into a lizard egg and suck out some yolk. I thought this was a clever idea, but I knew it would never work. I said, “Barry, lizard eggs are too sensitive. If you merely ‘show’ an egg a syringe (you don’t even have to puncture the shell), the egg will roll over and die. Clever idea, Barry, but stay with your sea urchin system, which is elegant and which works.” I was genuinely trying to save him from wasting time on a manipulation that I was convinced would fail.

Like all creative scientists, Barry followed his intuition and tried his luck. Several weeks later he brought in a box of lizard eggs, the smallest of which was ½ the size of the largest. All were from the same clutch, but the small eggs had had some yolk removed. When I held the smallest egg up to the light, I saw a developing embryo inside. When I looked over at Barry, I saw one of the biggest and brightest grins I’ve ever seen. He had ignored my advice, tried and pulled off a high-risk experiment, and in so doing earned a classic series of papers, including three in Science (Sinervo and Huey, 1990; Sinervo and Licht, 1991; Sinervo et al., 1992). By ignoring my advice, he jump-started a successful career.”

 

Finally, is there also something like intrinsic motivation? When I was a student and postdoc, I can’t really remember a time where I lacked motivation. And I don’t think it was due to anything that any of my supervisor did. I remember when I started doing research as a medical student, none of the experiments really worked. But that did not really cause me to lose interest or enthusiasm. I did have a great supervisor at the time. But even as a postdoc at a major pharmaceutical company, where my supervisor showed no interest in what I was doing, I remember being super excited about my work. Therefore, in addition to getting results, wanting to know the answer to a problem, and being excited about a risky idea, what also matters is the personality. Some students are just naturally excited about working in a lab, and others are not. It is the same as with most other occupations. And finding out whether one enjoys doing research is an important thing to find out as a science undergraduate student.

 

On the other hand, our personality is not something that is fixed in stone and cannot be changed. Raymond Huey, in his article cited above, has a paragraph on “Learn to like what you don’t like to do”. And I believe this can also be applied to the very process of research, or really anything we do. If I draw again a comparison to running, when doing a workout, I can focus my mind on how much longer I need to run until I can rest and continuously countdown the remaining laps. This turns the whole workout into a challenging and unpleasant activity. Or I can focus on the running itself, enjoy my movement and not think about when I will reach the end of the workout. The latter approach makes running much easier and more enjoyable. The same can be said about research. Focus on the joy that comes with a new idea or planning an experiment and the excitement of maybe discovering something new. That possibility is always there if we ask an interest question. Like most other things, motivation is not something that is either there or isn’t, but it can be created through our attitudes and actions.