Hello fellow grad students! This post is coming from the heart of tough times in the research realm. POV, I just spent the past year and a half building a research partnership to have my site withdraw just days before data collection. If research heartbreak is a thing, I am definitely feeling it.
Failure is practically a rite of passage in grad studies to which we have become quite accustomed. When your entire incubator of cells becomes contaminated; when your mice fail to express your precious transgene; when your participant withdraws their interview data after you finished transcribing, coding, and analyzing; when your manuscript spent eight months under review to get rejected; failure after failure, we find a way to persevere.
Are our failures like childbirth? Do we forget about the pain and suffering once we feel the joy that success brings? Does the joy of our successes allow us to persevere through another nine months of developmental stages plus long hours of labour followed by years of sleepless nights? Or is it that we are always aware of the burden that our failures carry, but are passionate enough to continue fighting injustice, searching for a cure, pursuing knowledge…?
Perhaps our greatest failure is failing to talk about our failures, making research seem far too glamorous. We fail to recognize negative data. We fail to discuss the countless assays that failed before the handful that didn’t. We fail to talk about the emotional toll that animal studies can have on us. We fail to consider the environmental impact that our failed experiments create. We have crafted a culture that only celebrates successes. If this were the case in every arena, there wouldn’t be any loyal Leafs fans left!
So why don’t we talk about the failures? I for one can say that I have learned far more from years of failed experiments than I have from inevitable successes. Through failures, we learn what doesn’t work, until, eventually, we can figure out what does. Failures give us opportunity to innovate and try different methods and problem solve and collaborate and ask for help. Failures make us stronger. They allow us to find resilience and face adversity head on and all the other buzz words that politicians used during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Grad students are blessed to experience research related failures every single day.
But perhaps this begs the question, what defines success? I attended a conference last week with a powerful keynote address narrating a life as both mother and academic. As Dr. Whitley demonstrated, mothers in academia can do all the things – caregiving, researching, supervising, attending conferences and soccer games – but there is a cost. The audience philosophized about that exact question – what defines success? And who defines it? Although the culture of academia defines success by the length of a CV, we came to the consensus that it would be reasonable to adopt individualized definitions of success. In doing so, I began to wonder whether there would be a cost to success if we adopted our own definitions rather than maintaining preconceived notions. If we valued wellness over overproductivity, quality of work over quantity of publications, community over independence, and relationships over work, would there be a cost?
“You can have it all, just not all at the same time.”