A couple of weeks ago one of my students came into my office. And I could literally see her excitement when telling me about her latest experiment, which after many failed attempts finally worked and gave a really interesting result. And she said that when she was in the dark room seeing her results, she was actually crying. And I had to remember the times when I was in the dark room or went to the scintillation counter and got some really exciting result. For me it was more like wanting to dance and jump. But those are the moments that make all the hard work worthwhile.

 

When you encounter these moments, the first thing you usually want to do is to tell someone. Like turning around to your lab mate “Hey, guess what I just found. I can’t believe it.” (Of course, it helps if you have actually told your labmates beforehand what you are trying to do. So they won’t go like “Oh, and why is this so exciting?”) Or you may run to your supervisor’s office to break the news (but he is probably not there…).

 

Since I know how important these events are for students, especially when they start out doing research, one thing I really try to do is to make these experiences possible. Because it was these kind of experiences that made me want to pursue research. However, it turns out that it is difficult to plan or predict these experiences.

 

There are projects that definitely will NOT give you this wow experience. These include projects where you don’t have ownership, but just “help” your mentor with their work, or highly technical projects. Of course, it is gratifying and could be even exciting when you finally succeed in cloning something or establishing an assay, but this is not what we are talking about here. Things like cloning and assays are supposed to work. What we are looking for are new things that you find out in your experiments, things that nobody else has oberved or realised, yet.

 

When I consider the projects that my students are doing, I can generally categorise them into two types. There is the project where me or the student comes up with a great idea of how something must work. And then the student tries to prove it. There are many examples where great papers resulted from this approach. The really exciting moments in this approach are when you actually have the idea and when you get to publish the paper. The work inbetween could be frustrating if the assays are difficult or gratifying if the assays work and the data confirm the hypothesis. One downside of this approach, though, is that the idea of how things must work might be wrong. And then the project usually stops there.

 

The other type of project is the one where we start with a difficult problem, and there are lots of potential solutions, some that we have not even really considered. Here, the really exciting moment comes when you actually find the solution. And from then on you are excited about every step you get closer to eventually publishing your work. But it may take years to figure out the solution, or you may never get there, or someone else beats you to it.

 

And right now in my lab, I have students doing both these types of project. And I feel bad for both of them, either for having to do so much tedious work to just confirm one new hypothesis, or for having to try experiment after experiment until we maybe get a hint for how things might be working. I think what I will do next time is ask students which type of project they would like to do. But would they know?