(soft music)
- So once you have your plan laid out,
your action plan for the year,
the last piece is to simply implement your plan as you go.
So for example, it's not good enough
to go to a single workshop, right?
If you want to develop your writing skills,
you may go to a workshop on writing a grant proposal.
But simply going to the workshop probably is not going
to result in a lot of strong skill development for you.
What I encourage you to do is think about the strategies
that you might take to get training in that skill.
So learn new strategies for improving that skill.
Then, make sure that you practice the skill.
The practicing itself might end up meaning practicing things
that are not the best behaviors or the best practice
of the skill, so also make sure that you get feedback.
So if you think about it,
there's a framework for developing a skill,
which is a three part framework.
One is to get training or learn new strategies.
Second is to practice the skill.
And the third is to get feedback.
- So a great thing about being a graduate student
is that one has endless opportunities to practice.
So think about this in a relationship to going to a gym
and having a personal trainer say,
take you over to some fancy machine and say,
so this machine, you're going to develop your quads.
So sit down and have a try at this and try to do ten reps.
And you sit down and you're dead, you know,
you do two reps and you think, I gotta leave.
This is too embarrassing, I'm never going to be able to do this
and two weeks later, you're doing three sets of ten.
So when you were in an environment
like this in graduate school,
it's like living in the gym.
That's both for graduate students and post docs.
The opportunities to get better at those skills
are all around us all the time, you know.
You go to a group meeting and you hash out the experiments
of friends of your colleagues in the laboratory,
your advisor asked you to help review a paper
that's come to him or her for review for a journal.
You work on writing a grant section,
and every single one of those things is an opportunity
to kind of ramp up that skill set.
Now, that's a great opportunity.
- Something else that can help you accomplish your plan
is to think about how to hold yourself accountable.
When I was in the lab,
I often used this principle to get my paper done.
So my research advisor may or may not
have kept me on strict timeline,
but I knew that I wanted to get the paper out
and it was important to him too.
So what I did was I thought about a way
to hold myself accountable towards completing that paper.
I came up with my own accountability plan.
When I met with him, I told him you and I have decided
that we're going to move this paper forward.
Next week I'll bring to our meeting together
the figures for the paper and I'd really like to discuss
that rough draft of figures with you and that'll help me
map out the outline for the rest of the paper.
Now he may or may not have remembered that conversation.
He was very busy, but just knowing that I had told him
that I would commit to bringing
those figures to the next meeting
meant that I was going to follow through.
But I want you to remember that part of having a plan
is having a heightened awareness
of what other opportunities come along
so that you can change your plan and adapt as you need to.
It can sometimes feel difficult
to adapt or change your plan.
Some people feel like
they should really hold on and stick with it.
Once you check that gut feeling
and you decide yes, that's the right thing to do,
then think of that as a deliberate decision
and stick with that decision.
Really own it.
In that moment of time, given the information that you have,
that was the right decision to make.
- I've had to modify my research plans
a fair amount over the course of my thesis research.
I think basically everyone that I've talked to
in graduate school has had that experience.
- My qualifying exam project is way different
than what my project is now, but I'm really seeing
the fruits of my labor by just having planned for it.
- For me specifically, one example that I can think of,
is figuring out the type of experiment to round out a paper.
And so, in my case, to round out a paper,
I could do a very technically challenging genome editing
experiment that incorporated some data that I had collected
over the course of my project, that I tried and tried
and actually am still trying for two and a half
to three years that still has just not worked.
And so after around, you know, a year of trying
this type of thing and having it not pan out,
you basically start to think of other ways that you might
be able to round out the paper or round out the project
and so the plan shifted from trying this very,
very difficult experiment, investing a lot of resources
into doing that, to taking a different approach
where we approach the situation bioinformatically.
And so one just has to be adaptable
in terms of conceiving of and changing your plan
based on the realities of science.
- Part of science is about discovery.
Unexpected variables emerging
that one can pursue and discover something new.
Changing your mind in the face of new evidence.
And so I think it's very important to have some degree
of plan in order to set yourself on a trajectory
toward something that appears desirable in the moment
but also have a willingness to shift from that trajectory
and an awareness that that can and probably must happen
if you're really developing as a scientist along the way.