27. "Owning My 'Failures'"
- Bianca Blanch
- Sep 4, 2020
- 6 min read
Research is about hoping for the best and picking yourself up when it goes wrong. A paper/grant gets rejected, an experiment that took months to plan doesn't work, samples get contaminated, you see an error in the data which means you have to start again. This week I speak about some of my failures, and how I picked myself up.
My Experience of 'Failing'
Research is all about picking yourself back up after you fail.
And you will fail.
Repeatedly.
Thankfully, over the course of my career, I have had only few big failures that I will likely always remember. I say 'failures' because I did fail due to a mistake I made or just circumstance, but I gained a lot from each of my 'failures' below. I learnt I had the strength to accept my failings, be less perfectionistic, and grow to become a better researcher and create stronger science. Ironically, I also learnt to trust myself as I knew I would never make the same mistakes again.
"Failure" #1 - The Paper That Was Never Written
For regular readers of my blog, you will know after I finished my PhD I flirted with the idea of becoming a genetic counsellor. If I had, I would have focused on Huntington's Disease (HD). I first heard of this illness on the TV show 'House' where the character, '13', was deciding whether to get a genetic test done to see if she had HD or not.
HD truly fascinates me. A disease you may be born with, that shows little to no symptoms or impact on your functioning until you hit your 30s/40s. One of the defining symptoms of HD is chorea, involuntary jerking or fidgety movements of the limbs and body, but interestingly, when the person sleeps, they are still, there is no chorea.
During my PhD, I looked into HD and wanted to write a paper about its prevalence in Australia based on the drug used to combat chorea (using prescription drug utilisation data). I contacted a physician who worked closely with HD and we set about writing this paper. I would do all the data analysis, and we would write the interpretation together. We got pretty far into this paper. All the analyses were completed, graphs were completed, and we were writing up the discussion when it just stopped. I can't recall why, I think we were waiting on another paper or dataset to be published/made available but we must have gotten too busy as it was abandoned.
I still think of this paper as 'the one that got away'. I wish I had finished it, both to satisfy my curiosity with HD and create some much-needed evidence about this disease which should have more funding dedicated to studying it.
"Failure" #2 - The Hurt I Caused
For one research study, I needed to mail a letter to some research participants to ask their permission to use their already collected data in a new study. I sent out the envelopes and waited for the replies to come in.
Within a day or so, we got a number of unexpected replies.
In the mail out, I had accidentally included the names of deceased people. They should have been excluded for obvious reasons. So their relatives (if they still lived at the same address), received a letter with their deceased family member's name on it. For some family's it was seen as an error that they shrugged off, and they simply threw the letter away. For others it was extremely hurtful and distressing to see their loved one's name in print.
As researchers, we are taught that research should never inflict any unnecessary pain on individuals, and I had inflicted a lot of pain on innocent people. The guilt and heartache I felt for inflicting so much pain stung. I still feel the shame today as I write these words. This is partly why I am writing this blog, to publicly own my worst research mistake.
If you have made a big mistake, or if you make one in the future, know there is life afterwards. You need to pick yourself back up, go back to the lab/office, keep going and make sure it doesn't happen again.
If I was to do another mail out, I would triple check the inclusion criteria for who should receive a letter, and make sure deceased persons, and persons who have either not consented or revoked consent are not contacted. I also advise anyone with a dataset to remove the addresses and phone numbers of known deceased persons, then there is no way they can be sent a letter or contacted.
"Failure" #3 - The Hubris (The Job I Didn't Get)
I was working as a casual RA, and the senior researcher running the study left the organisation. The senior researcher's full-time job was advertised and I applied for it. I assumed I would get it as the main job was to finish the project I was working on, and I was the only person working on it. I mean who could know more about the project than me?
Turns out, at least one person, as I didn't get that job.
I still recall being told that I didn't get the job. My reaction at work was calm acceptance. My reaction at home was lying face down on my bed crying my eyes out for hours. I felt raw and betrayed. My destiny was being given to someone else. Then I remembered, I will have to train the person they hired and I quickly became outraged at the injustice.
That night, I allowed myself to feel all these feelings. Then I went back to work the next day and continued working. Because, I still liked my job and I still had things to learn. It took me a few weeks to get over it, and maybe a bit longer to truly warm up to the new hire, but I am only human. As an added bonus, the new hire and I worked well together, we were a productive team and I ended up learning even more about research from them.
Today, I look at this situation totally differently. I didn't have the skillset to deliver that project, and the other projects the senior researcher ultimately became responsible for, I was too junior. The person they hired did. It was not a reflection of me, but rather the quality of the applicant pool.
The Lessons I Learned
Feel the feelings
Researchers are humans too! We have feelings, doubts, triumphs and failures. Sometimes we have all thee experiences in one week. Practice self-care and allow yourself to feel your feelings, especially when you feel like you should just suck it up and you are just being dramatic.
For me, crying on a bed over a job is dramatic, but it allowed me to go back into the office the next day, be a professional and do my work.
Find the Lesson
To stay sane, and not beat yourself up when you 'fail', you need find the lesson in the 'failure'. All failures make you a stronger researcher. These are the hardest lessons you will learn, as it didn't happen to someone else, it was not a research cautionary tale. It happened to you, on your watch. At the very least it will make you a more diligent researcher so you will be less prone to make similar mistakes in the future.
Not Getting Hired Is Not Personal
I am a strong believer that when you apply for a job, you do your best and then it is largely decided by the applicant pool. If someone applies for the job that meets every criteria, you never really had a shot. But if you are the most qualified person, the job was always yours, no one else had a shot. Give yourself the best shot you have, do our research for the job, think about what experiences yo have that will translate to this role, think about your transferable skills, be positive and kill the interview. Then leave it behind, if you get the job, great. If you don't, it will sting, but there will be others, you just need to keep on looking.
What have been your 'failures' as a researcher? What have been your hardest learnt lessons? Let me know your experience by leaving a comment below or emailing me at AuthenticResearchExperiences@gmail.com
BB
Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash
I will write a new post every Friday about another aspect of the research world. Please email me to subscribe to my blog. AuthenticResearchExperiences@gmail.com
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