- Why should you care about coming up
with your own scientific question?
So if you've joined a lab there might be
a number of well-defined questions already, right.
People are thinking about projects and problems
all the time, and they've probably written
about them and outlined them and it seems like
there is some value in just taking advantage
of all that work and picking up and running with it.
And it's true that there are probably pieces of
existing projects that are well-defined
that are worth doing.
But in parallel with that, it's also really important
to focus on coming up with your own scientific question
because it's a process that you need to learn
and, I would argue, is at the heart of the value
of graduate school.
So it's not so much about the question that you land on.
It's about getting really comfortable with this
process by which you come up with one.
- One of the most critical aspects of graduate education
is not necessarily learning all of the tools
and all of the methods that are currently applied
because those tools and methods actually change
quite rapidly.
Just from the time when I started as a Ph.D. student to now.
So those aren't necessarily the critical parts
that are important for a graduate education.
But instead, being able to develop the ability
to ask the right question, to try and figure out
how do we dive deeper to understanding
the mechanisms or the basic biology of whatever
system you're looking at
is really the critical essence of what
graduate education should be about.
- There's a set of kind of embarrassingly simple tools
that every student needs to have.
So I would say there's three.
One is the capacity to identify
an important problem.
And then the second is
how to plan experiments that move that problem forward.
And the third is to make good choices
about which results to pursue
and which ones to leave behind.
So there's a toolkit.
Choose an important problem, plan an experiment,
decide what to do with your data.
If the Ph.D. topic suddenly were to go away,
the properly armed student with a toolkit would say,
it's okay, I can choose another important problem,
plan an experiment, and decide what to do with the results.
So that toolkit would be, it seems to me, the kind of
fundamental thing that you'd want graduate students
to leave with.
- The ability to ask a scientific question,
the ability to ask an interesting question
is one of the best gifts you get during graduate school.
And I think it's also a transferable skill
because you can then if you leave science
you can take it to places where the path is
not yet clear.
We know that the places where things are simple
have already been basically done by computers
by now, right.
The interesting questions in the 21st century
are the ones where we need a lot of skill to
even ask the interesting questions.
That's one amazing thing we can learn in graduate school.
- If you master that skill of engaging
with a new problem and formulating F 72 00:03:12,178 --> 00:03:16,218 a good plan to work on it, that is the deepest
transferable skill that you will
take away from your Ph.D.