Steel City Science

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Steel City Science

Is science right for me? Am I right for science? Can psychological tests tell me the answers to these questions?

When disappointing results arrive very late on a Saturday night, it’s easy to feel deflated. Last Christmas, when I suddenly learned I would have to repeat an experiment that had already taken me months, I couldn’t help but pose the question yet again: Why do I do this?

The lament of science’s foot soldiers is sung in labs, break-rooms, bus-stops and pubs around the world – hard work, bad pay, no career prospects, and the persistent and sometimes unidentifiable smells of our workplaces. But on a night of failure in an empty lab, the lament can take on a more personal tone: Did I make the wrong choice as a undergraduate? Do I even like science? Am I even any good at it?

One night, in the midst of such a crisis of confidence, I joined some friends from the philosophy department and listened to their animated conversation about Myers-Briggs personality types. I was surprised. Apparently they had been swept up in personality test fever. Surely these hyper-critical logicians didn’t believe any of that ‘free personality test’ hocus-pocus? They shrugged it off as harmless fun.

Several hours later, the internet had informed me that according to measures of my personality type I do indeed want to be a scientist. Phew. But that still left the other question, the nagging one that many young scientists harbour, sometimes in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Do I have the smarts to be a scientist? I’ve received my share of the marks of professional approval – papers, funding success, prizes and supportive mentors¬ – but how do I know if I deserve them? On this particular question the cheap banners advertising almost-but-not-quite-free IQ and aptitude tests claimed to offer a simple answer.

So, despite my reasoned bias against cheap aptitude tests, that night I just wanted to know if I really had the skills to excel in science. Unsurprisingly, the results were both reassuring and useless, but they did include something I hadn’t expected. I have a staggeringly good ability to alphabetize lists of words quickly. The internet interpreted this as acuity, or ‘an eye for detail’, which was not a skill I have ever considered myself to have. The final recommendation was that I had the most aptitude for a career as a legal executive. Now, that sounds pretty fancy, but doesn’t at all match my internet-confirmed personality type.

What I’d forgotten in all this neuroticism was that I’ve been doing real science for a third of my life now. Given the incredible capacity of humans to learn all kinds of bizarre skills, I shouldn’t be surprised that doing things like labelling hundreds of tubes every day for ten years has trained me to be good at repetitive tasks. Equally, and less depressingly, whatever my ‘natural’ abilities at higher-order skills, I’ve been doing science long enough that I’m much better than when I started.

So I did at least learn one thing from the internet that night: though my career prospects are undeniably grim – and simply deciding that I do want to be a scientist may not be enough to get me there – I’ve been trained to be critical, to demand the evidence, to solve problems, to be persistent and to seek the truth. I get to keep those skills, even if it turns out professional science and I just aren’t right for each other. On that note, I should look up the literature on aptitude tests.

Useless Knowledge

After 10 years working in labs, I have amassed a vast amount of useless knowledge. Most of it was vital to know at the time I learned it, but became irrelevant at a distressingly fast rate. Consider, for instance, the pride that I currently take in my manual skill at using a 96-prong replicator to produce perfectly formed yeast colonies on a nitrocellulose membrane. This process requires a certain lightness of touch and a steady hand, as well as knowledge of how to best achieve consistent mixing of the source yeast culture. I need these skills to do the experiments I said I would do in my fellowship applications. However, the job could be performed much better by a robot, and typically is performed by robots in every lab that can access one. In about six months time, our lab will have access to such a robot, but that is way too late for me. So, here I am, with highly technical, but already redundant skills.

Even worse, since it has become clear that there is, in fact, no tenure track faculty position waiting for me, it seems likely that even that part of my lab-lore that is still worth knowing will be useless to me within the next few years. Boo.

Useless knowledge: If you make the tape labels on these tubes too small, they have a tendency to peel off in the shaker.