My bag of tools
Yesterday was the first day of orientation for the department, and today, I leave for a departmental retreat, wherein the first-year students get bashed over the head with tons of talks, plenty of poster sessions, free food, drinks, and lots of interaction with the professors, post-docs, and older graduate students.
During the retreat, I’ll also be thinking about this post from “GTD in Academia”, especially the comment about developing a toolkit. (It reminds me very much of the part of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, where Feynman talks about his mathematical toolbox and differentiation under the integral sign.) The post focuses on ecology, but of course the advice is more general than that.
Develop a toolkit. You’re going to know how to design experiments and analyze data and think broadly and synthetically about ecology. But you should also develop a toolkit to distinguish yourself from all of the other ecologists who can do those things. Your toolkit might include modeling or null model analyses or genetic techniques or specialized statistics. Just make sure you have one, and make sure everyone knows what it is. MK–make yourself unique and indispensable part of the group.
So I keep wondering, what kind of toolbox can I develop? Even as I try to find a topic that I’m interested in during the retreat, and lab rotation choices, I’ll be thinking hard about that.
All of the professors that I’ve admired have their own little niche that they create with their unique expertise, their esoteric collection of abilities. Howard Berg, for example, is really good at machine-work, and so he was able to hand-make the parts needed for a 3D E. coli chemotaxis tracking microscope, which led to his great theoretical contributions to that field. David Evans is spectacularly good at dissecting molecules down to their basic, synthetically manageable parts, to make clever insights about reaction mechanisms via molecular orbital theory, and visualize asymmetric induction at a very sophisticated level in his head, allowing him to manage the beautiful, almost pedagogic syntheses of really complicated molecules. Martin Nowak is really good at paring away the complexity of a problem to get at the underlying mathematical structure and model, in order to gain very deep, and yet strangely simple and beautiful insight. They’re not expertises in the sense that they’re one-trick ponies; it’s more that they have some sort of edge on the competition that just allows them to break through and do the work better and faster.
I need to find my own toolbox to really succeed and do well. But what? I’m decent at math, programming, physics, chemistry, and biology, but not a big deal on any of it. No subject really scares me, though; I know I can learn more of anything if need be, so I have some help there. But what’ll be my edge? Finding that will be my goal this year. Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none is not the way to succeed in grad school, I think. Still, until I find that straight-flush, lots of jacks aren’t that bad either…
