Soil Science Journal Club : PhD

I feel good, I feel stupid

Andrew.Rate — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:59:00 GMT

This was something I sent around to our School's postgraduate students, after being sent the article by Prof. Martin Fey:

Schwartz, M.A. (2008) The importance of stupidity in scientific research. Journal of Cell Science121:1771 .

This should be essential reading for postgraduate students in any discipline. (It's irrelevant that it's in a biology journal.) Essentially Schwartz's argument is that since research is on the very edge of human knowledge, feeling lost or stupid should be felt regularly by researchers. This normalisation of the self-doubt that many of us feel (and not just while doing our graduate research!) is surprisingly encouraging.

"...we don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students
how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it
means we’re not really trying."

It's great to see articles in scientific journals that acknowledge the humanity of researchers.

Image from www.cartoonstock.com

Renewable energy

Andrew.Rate — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:48:00 GMT

It may be that we see a bit more activity on this blog, following Talitha's suggestion to crank up the old-style journal club. That is, a club with more than one person in it, who actually read and discuss journal articles, and post their musings on this site (formerly created for that very purpose).

I'd be very keen on this sort of development, particulary as I thought I heard an offer for participants to take charge of at least some of the selection of articles and the blogging. As Talitha put it, a bit like a book club, but with less reading. Less work for me? - sounds very worthwhile.

Partly, this springs from my newly acquired role as one of the Graduate Research Coordinators in the School of Earth and Environment. Lots of this role is administrative, to be sure, but the opportuntity to interact with many of the School's motivated and scarily smart graduate research students is inspiring (and a lot of fun).

(Image from www.hardbacker.com)

Irreverent and, as a result, funny

Andrew.Rate — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 06:15:00 GMT

The Wordpress blog "Stuff White People Like" has a recent entry "Graduate School" related to PhD study - an entertaining read.

Not PC, but fun.