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

Soil Science Journal Club : research

I feel good, I feel stupid