Researcher's Mindset: People I Avoid Collaborating With - Part II

Becoming a good researcher is not something that can happen overnight. It takes years of practice, as well as dedication and self awareness. To be good at it, one needs to keep doing it, there is simply no other way. On the other hand, there are some personality traits that can make someone desirable to collaborate with. In the first part of this essay, I shared the related insights that I had gained throughout my undergraduate research life. In this one, I am focusing more on the personality traits that I have observed in researchers that I have collaborated with/supervised. As usual, I focus on the negative traits as discussing the opposite helps to internalize the positive.

Needless to say, this is a personal opinion essay and should be treated as such. Taking any advice from this essay without filtering properly for one's situation is not the intended way of reading it; as these are just my personal opinions. There is a high chance that more appropriate advice can be obtained from one's academic mentors and/or friends. The purpose of this essay is simply to show that meta-thoughts on becoming a researcher are important parts of actually becoming one and the thinking process should not be left on automatic mode.

Type 4. The one that lacks proper life-work balance in the long run

Conducting research is not running in a 100m sprint, rather it is a marathon. Marathons require more than instantanous speed, they require sustainable mental power and a rythm that goes on and on. Collaborations are not made for a few weeks and a researcher without a proper life-work balance cannot possibly sustain providing consistent output more than months. So, why would a researcher be drawn into an imbalance? Or is it really that bad to have such an imbalance for a short amount of time?

Imagine the life-work balance problem as a random process, flipping a coin if you will. If you flip a coin 10 times, it is quite probable to have 7 heads and 3 tails. But, if you flip it 1000 times and 300 tails come up, then it is time to suspect whether the coin is rigged. In my own experience, I have found myself swinging over to both sides of the balance at certain times. When there was a very important deadline, I had sacrificed portion of my personal life so that I could meet it. At other times, I have chosen having a lovely night-out with a friend over writing a not-so-urgent code in my room. I find such short-term imbalances completely normal, even necessary. Being flexible is an important part of the job. However, one should not led a temporary fix be a permanent problem. If short-term swings become long-term habits, then it is no longer called being flexible, rather it is called having a problem. Indeed, in many cases I have observed this long-term swing, it happened due to the person not correcting short-term fluctuations. It is important to create a feedback loop that keeps reminding us where we stand on average and if the tip of the scale favors one side, it might be time for some self-intervention.

All good, but why would I, or any other person in that sense, not want to collaborate with someone having an improper life-work balance? Well, because I value consistency over short bursts of results. When collaborating with researchers, I prefer being able to rely on the person that I am working with. Most of the time, research work is not too urgent, but it requires constant and sustainable care. Someone who lives from deadline to deadline can be very successful in many areas, but collaborating with me is not particularly one of them. I have my own personal rythm and I prefer someone with their own such that I do not need to keep breaking mine in order to fit to the other person's constant last second demands/needs. This is why, whenever I collaborate with students, I ask them to come up with a plan that can fit both their coursework and their research work while not sacrificing too much from their personal lives. Otherwise, I know that the student will be burnt-out quite quickly.

If you find yourself in a state of mind where you want to prioritize your work over everything else, be careful to follow some guidelines:

i) Make sure that it is only a short-term fluctuation and does not become a long-term effect.

ii) Make a very detailed plan of how long it would take to be on one side of the imbalance and give yourself realistic milestones. Celebrate the milestones by not doing work, but tilting the balance into personal leisure time.

iii) Set up actual time-delayed feedback loops, send your future self an email or ask a friend to remind you. There will always be something important coming up, try to balance it with spending enough time with the people you love. You never know, you might end up turning 30 and very successful, but also alone.

Type 5. The one that is too successful to fail

Research can fail, this is a fact; but that does not mean the researcher has failed. Success comes when researchers do a good job, but not all good jobs lead to a successful outcome. In a way, research is a random process. There is always a risk of failure in conducting cutting-edge research. What separates a good collaborator from an excellent one, in my opinion, is how fast they can get over failures.

If I am being completely honest, there is a way of never failing in research. One could go for low-hanging fruits and publish research that is not ground-breaking, but still adds to the body of knowledge. This type of research is very useful, as it teaches many techniques and skills to the researcher, which would later be used for spearheading a cutting-edge research project. Unfortunately, low-hanging-fruit projects do not teach much about how to handle failure, as the risk of failure with these projects are low. Perhaps, this makes the transition of the researcher from a sideliner to the quarterback painful. Because, the truth is, the ones that truly push a field forward or to a new direction are the ones that take on projects where the light at the end of the tunnel is nowhere to be seen. A researcher who irrationally fears failure can never take on big projects.

One similar argument can be made for A+ students and their first entry to the research. I have observed many perfect GPA students fail in research, because they could not find the answers that they are looking for at a first glance. For someone who is used to the idea of receiving perfect grade from every class, a slight setback, not even a failure, can lead to massive de-motivation. This is, perhaps, the main reason why I am reluctant to collaborate with students who have a very good GPA before I am convinced that they do not get de-motivated by not knowing things.

Truth is, in research, we never know things. The confidence of a student that goes into research takes a drastic dive, as they start realizing, in reality we know not even the tip of the iceberg. When that happens, overall, I have seen two type of responses:

• Student gets de-motivated because they don't know things and avoid confronting what they don't know
• Student gets extremely excited by the idea that they have found something they do not fully understand

To my experience, the latter is the person that I want to collaborate with and it is the person that can lead big projects despite a reasonable risk of failure, which leads to the cutting-edge discoveries that derive science forward.

Type 6. The one that shines while bringing their teammates down

So far, I have discussed personality traits in collaborators that I wouldn't mind at all depending on the situation and how open to feedback they are. In fact, when choosing students to supervise, I would be happy if students belong to any of the types 1-5, as it is my duty to show how these types can hurt the student. I would feel lucky if I could help a student's personal development as much as to their professional development. But, type 6 is my personal redline, one person that I would never collaborate with or supervise. Unfortunately, there are people of type 6 around and I believe that a researcher should be aware of their existence and develop ways to identify whether a person belongs to this group. Thus, I will be very brief.

If you find yourself collaborating with a person who puts their own need above yours at every possible checkpoint, without giving a second thought about your well-being or success, ask yourself the question: What happens once this work is out there and people ask who did this work? Will your collaborator give you the proper citation, or will they take the whole credit themselves while claiming that you were a dispensable part of the project. If the answer is the latter, run and don't look back.

Final Words: It takes years of practice to become a desirable collaborator in research. I am at the beginning of my own journey and probably not even close to be half-way there. This two-part essay has discussed the ideas that I have learned throughout my four years as a junior researcher. I know that I have a lot more to learn and hopefully as I do, I would be able to share them. For now, I use these guidelines to check my own progress and therefore the guidelines are probably much harsher than they should be. One final warning: A professor would take on students that have some of these traits, as everyone goes through a similar transformation no matter what. The purpose of this essay is not to judge people, rather provide my personal guideline as an aspiring researcher for others that are willing to give some meta-thoughts on how to perform research.