There’s an old joke about a guy going to a fancy party. The party was attended by only the richest and most famous Americans, from Hollywood stars to CEOs of companies to national politicians, so the guy wasn’t sure he really belonged. He voiced his concern to another guy he met at the party saying “I’m not sure what I’ve done to be invited to this, I mean unlike most folks here I didn’t do anything myself, I was only doing what they told me to do.” The other guy says to him “well sure Neil, but most of us never walked on the Moon.”

It’s an old joke but it gets to the heart of what’s been called “imposter syndrome,” people thinking that they aren’t as special or as capable or as important as they really are, people who despite their long list of achievements feel like “imposters” when people congratulate them or talk glowingly about them. It’s been said that this is especially common in Academia, but I don’t know if I buy that since I’ve only been told that factoid by Academics. Every industry thinks they’re special and unique, and I don’t know if a poll or study would find imposter syndrome to be any more common in Academia than in Journalism, Tech, or any other white collar field.

But what if you really are an imposter? What if you really aren’t as good as people think you are, your work isn’t as deserving of praise as what it gets, and you’re just hanging on with the certainty that any deep look at your work would show you for what you really are. I know for a fact that Academics aren’t usually of the ability of looking closely at each others’ work, the sheer number of retracted papers each year speaks to the fact that even the journals and committees that are paid to keep out imposters don’t work all the time. And beyond retractions there’s always a truism that you don’t know someone else’s work as well as you do your own. So when I feel like my work just isn’t good enough and feel helpless not knowing how to improve that, platitudes about “well everyone feels imposter syndrome” aren’t necessarily the solution.

When something fails in science, you can either overturn the hypothesis or conclude that you did the experiment wrong. When something fails again and again in science, you either have strong evidence that the hypothesis is wrong or strong evidence that you’re really bad at doing the experiment. If everyone but you is able to do the experiment and get the results, then the hypothesis is probably correct. That’s what it feels like sometimes in the lab, I have no reason to believe that my experiment is wrong because I see others have been able to do it flawlessly. And so I can only conclude that I’m really bad at doing the experiment, meaning maybe I’m not cut out for doing this “science” thing.

I just don’t know what I could be doing wrong. If I had some idea then I could design some experiment to determine if I’m doing it wrong or if my sample is wrong or if my hypothesis is wrong. But I have no reason to doubt the hypothesis, little reason to doubt the sample, and all the reason in the world to doubt my own abilities. I know I have my flaws, I’m lacking in manual dexterity and attention span, I have poor motivation when things don’t work and this sometimes leads me to doing more bad work because the work I did just prior was bad. So I’m not sure if I’m the problem or if something else is the problem, and I’m not sure what that says about me in science.

Sometimes when you get scientific data that doesn’t make sense, the best use of your time is to say “well that’s weird,” and just redo the experiment. I’ve been in many labs where strange data, be it unknown proteins in a mass spectrometry sample or unknown shapes under an electron microscope, have gotten people’s minds aflutter as they try to figure out what it all means. Is it contamination, is it scientifically interesting, is it something that should be expected but we just don’t know about it? Humans are innately curious, scientists most of all, so when presented with a mystery it’s natural to want to solve it. And a scientific mystery should be easier to solve than most because not only are the experiments set up with numerous controls that can be checked against, but there is a wealth of data in the literature that might point to an answer. When you see something you don’t recognize, it’s easy to dive deep into the literature searching for some paper or clue which might tell you what you’re looking at.

But this isn’t always the best use of your time. Sometimes stuff is just weird for dumb reasons and if you spend weeks trying to figure out why then that’s weeks you’re not spending working on your actual projects. Chasing false leads can also blind you to the more important (if less mysterious) true leads that you should be following. All this to say, my lab is currently in the midst of a mystery that I don’t think is very important and I wish we could all just agree it’s mysterious and get back to more mundane but solvable problems.

I’m going to come right out and say that I don’t know if I’m a good teacher.  I’m a passionate teacher, I like to see students learning and growing, but I don’t know if I’m a good one.  And honestly, in my position I don’t know if I can be a good one.

I’m a researcher at a major research institution.  One of the first rungs of the “science-as-a-career” ladder is usually for students to join a lab as unpaid volunteers, either for course credit or just for fun.  They will get trained and learn to help out with some of the duties performed by the lab, they may even do some actual science.  Eventually they may move into a semi-paid position in which their work in the lab pays for some of their tuition, before finally moving to a paid position around their graduation.  From there, the scientific world is their oyster.  But this first rung, with untrained students, is to me the hardest.  Nobody really knows what work in a lab is like until they do it, I know when I was a kid I had a picture in my mind that scientists spent all their time sitting and thinking.  But it’s actually a job that requires moving, doing, skillful techniques, and a lot of hand-eye coordination.  These are all skills that a student needs to learn to progress as a researcher, and I don’t know if I’m doing good as a teacher.

When I work with these students, the biggest issue is imparting on them the necessary knowledge.  This starts with “what is the work we are doing and why,” student may have just learned about DNA replication for instance, but that doesn’t necessary give them the background necessary to understand why DNA-intercalating-molecules are known carcinogens.  And it definitely doesn’t give them the knowledge of all the previous research that has been done in this field that brought us to that conclusion.  So you need to get them up to speed on some of the facts of the field, “here’s what these molecules are, this is why they’re important, this is how we are studying them.”  

Furthermore, a lab is nothing like a classroom, there is no textbook filled with the One Holy Truth that they can study, textbooks only get written about the settled science that is decades old.  Instead there are papers and literature of all kinds that they need to read, scattered throughout many areas and each focusing on a different area.  These scattered papers don’t even make a coherent story unless you know how to read and understand them and draw your own conclusions.  So additionally we must teach them the skills necessary for them to gain knowledge on their own.

Finally, there’s teaching them the things we actually do in lab.  The techniques, the protocols, and even the proper methods for safety and cleaning, teaching them all there is to know about working and being in a lab is probably the most important part of keeping them safe, but it’s also difficult to teach this in any way but by rote.  You just tell them what to do and tell them to keep trying until they do it right, I don’t really have the skills necessary to teach physical activities in any way but that.

So with all that said, there’s a lot of teaching that needs to go on between senior lab members and junior lab members, and personally I don’t know if I’m up to the task.  I try to help them learn on their own, but I seem to always just give them the answer when they can’t figure it out.  I try to help them do things in lab, but only by doing it myself and letting them watch how I do it.  I just don’t know if what I’m doing is the best or most helpful way to teach them, but teaching is just such a small part of my job that I don’t have the headspace to “get good” at it either.  I hope I’m teaching them and I hope they can leave this lab with good memories of their time here, but I just don’t know.