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Description
Description
My first project was helping a graduate student, Dave Pai, look at the spatial organization of tRNA genes in yeast. After working for months on this project, the original thought we had crumbled away. While many people thought I would be upset about the “failure” of the project, I surprised them by being excited that we had found an answer and could ask new questions.
Importance
This is the moment I saw myself as a true researcher. Through this experience, I realized that I valued the knowledge that come from conducting research over proving a hypothesis. I had success through a productive failure.
Skills Gained
Ability to see productive failure as success
Continuing commitment in the face of adversity
Lessons Learned
I understood that the data wasn’t out to hurt me; it simply showed me what it had to say. Being a good researcher means being able to remove personal feeling and bias from the work to see what insight the data has to offer.
Since then, I have taken the same approach to all of my projects. Being open-minded and thinking critically about data can lead to new and exciting questions. I let current data guide my thinking into uncharted territory. My work starts to illuminate the path ahead of me by showing me the way to go by a positive result, or by showing me the way not to go with a negative result. Null results encourage me to continue asking how I can better answer my questions.
Impact
Too many researchers see their experiments as failures when the predicted outcome isn't seen. As long as the work was done properly and is repeatable, the result is valid. A result is an answer to a question, even if sometimes it's not the question that was trying to be answered. Research is about learning, not proving. The data is the data- researchers interpret and explain it.
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