{"id":618,"date":"2007-05-23T20:53:26","date_gmt":"2007-05-23T20:53:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2007\/05\/23\/in_which_the_focus_stubbornly_resists_narrowing\/"},"modified":"2007-05-23T20:53:26","modified_gmt":"2007-05-23T20:53:26","slug":"in_which_the_focus_stubbornly_resists_narrowing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2007\/05\/23\/in_which_the_focus_stubbornly_resists_narrowing\/","title":{"rendered":"In which the focus stubbornly resists narrowing"},"content":{"rendered":"

No, I can’t believe it either: exactly one week remains before I re-start my career as a bench scientist. In two day’s time I pack up my desk, bid a tearful, even maternal farewell to my lovely team of young editors and jump ship from science publishing. In the process, I leave behind a permanent position, a managerial role, a predicable career ladder and a comfortable salary. And next Thursday, I wash ashore at a lab in University College London, a newly-minted, badly out-of-practice post-doctoral fellow of molecular genetics with only eighteen months of not-quite-so-comfortable salary guaranteed. Beyond that, the aforementioned void<\/a> lurks, an omnipresent nothingness in which hardly anything is certain or predictable.<\/p>\n

\nTo be honest, though the thought of what happens when I get there, and of my long-term future, is making me sweat a little, what’s truly worrying is the grant application deadline looming just a day after I start. All 33 pages of it. More specifically, the 3,500 word research proposal forming the heart of this not inconsiderable document.<\/p>\n

\nFirst there are the stakes. This is a four-year fellowship, including a higher salary, travel and consumables. Eighteen months will pass in the blink of an eye, but with four years, I feel confident I can work out my next stepping-stone. As a non-EU citizen on a migrant visa who wants to remain on this fair island, and at my age (39), such considerations are not trivial. <\/p>\n

\nBut stakes aside, I seem to be as rusty with the grant-writing process itself as I most likely will prove to be with pipetting devices, microscope and gel apparatus next week. <\/p>\n

\nThis rustiness gradually became apparent a few months ago when I started brushing up on my new field. As a ‘civilian’, I was solely dependent on my future lab head to share his literature collection with me. Without a research affiliation, I am effectively the equivalent of a developing-world scientist. In the absence of a single subscription I rely on handouts; also, I find myself gravitating gratefully to the open access green fields of BioMed Central, Public Library of Science and Springer’s Open Choice. For many quick checks, I can only look at abstracts: frustrating.<\/p>\n

\nBut the real problem is a mental one. One of the main things you learn as a handling editor is to consider the big picture while more or less discarding the fine details. In essence, your brain becomes a highly trained, large-pore sieve through which the majority of items wash through. A scientific paper is a 6,000 word document of which only a small fraction really counts: the words that tell you why<\/em> the authors chose to study their particular question; that tell you what, actually, is an advance over what is already known, and why we should care. An incredibly complicated document that must be assessed, digested and classified in a matter of minutes, and I can tell you that such an assessment leaves little room for registering, let along remembering, the little details.<\/p>\n

\nBut for a scientist, especially one writing a grant, the details are crucial. And initially, I found myself reading through papers with an editorial agenda, my mind automatically going to the default ‘skim’ mode, eager to race ahead, to discard the acronyms and gene names and conditions in favor of the big picture. At first, I would have to read the same paragraph five times to retain even a fraction of the nitty-gritty. Over the days and weeks, grimly determined, I patiently retrained my brain to absorb like a scientist instead of an editor. I made lots of sketches and penned line after line of questions in the margins \u2013 used a highlighter pen as profligately as an undergraduate. I pestered my future lab head by email with silly questions (to his credit, he answered them all with swiftness and good humor). And then I started to write: hesitant paragraphs slowly growing more confident as I got to grips with what it is I want to achieve in a four-year research program. Little by little, the skills come back: hypotheses, controls, caveats, differential outcomes. <\/p>\n

\nAnd I suppose I am grateful that the grant deadline has made me address all this now. Before I pick up that pipettor and perform my first experiment, I need not only to be manipulating reagents like a scientist, but actually thinking<\/em> like one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, I can’t believe it either: exactly one week remains before I re-start my career as a bench scientist. In two day’s time I pack up my desk, bid a tearful, even maternal farewell to my lovely team of young … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}