Graduate Student Poster Award Winners' Column
Emily Bastarache and Raffles Cowan
Northwestern University
Emily D. Bastarache and Henry R. Cowan, graduate students from Northwestern University and winners of the 2017 ARP Poster Awards, were asked to share their insights about the graduate student experience at ARP 2017 in Sacramento.
We are graduate students—scientists in training. One could argue that all scientists are scientists in training to some degree, but graduate students often have the most to learn. We are the metaphorical sponges of the academic world; we are impressionable. This makes us a key audience for conference presentations. However, with the exception of the bold few who prefer the spotlight sitting front and center, you will find most of us sitting in the back of the room in twos and threes. Because we are out of sight, you, as a presenter, might wonder what we're getting from your talk. Rest assured that being out of sight does not mean being passive. We try not to miss a beat in every presentation.
We pay close attention because, at our career stage, new ideas can have an outsized impact in our professional lives. Conferences help graduate students determine which ideas to pursue and which to let perish. They let us see in real time what is interesting, exciting, and valuable to more senior researchers. It is like a faster, more supportive version of peer review. A seed planted at ARP has the potential to grow into an integral part of our research. It could become the foundation for our next project or dissertation, and could even set the trajectory of our academic career. From this perspective, conferences can have a profound impact on graduate students.
For example, a lunchtime discussion among graduate students at ARP that started with the properties of p-curves ended with the realization that we all wanted an ongoing forum to discuss quantitative methods and replicability. Now, three months later, we are scheduling the first meeting of a student-led reading group focusing on these topics. More than a dozen students and post-docs in our department have signed up, and we are building an infrastructure on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/) to allow this group to continue indefinitely. We all wanted to have this kind of group, and our experience at ARP encouraged us to do something about it. We were empowered to go out and create the forum we wanted to be a part of.
This is just one example of many conference "ah-ha moments" in which we have discovered new ideas or new ways to bring these ideas to light. However, these moments are not the only reason we attend your talks. We also aspire to learn much subtler things from every presentation. What may not be obvious as a presenter is that you are not only teaching us scientific content, but you are teaching us to be better academic colleagues in several different ways.
First, it is helpful for us to hear about what went wrong in your research, as well as what went right. Research is a series of hurdles suffused with uncertainty and rejection. It can be isolating at times, and we often feel as though we are the only ones struggling. It is refreshing and validating to hear about your struggles—how you faced them, how you grappled with them, and how you persevered to overcome them. There are few things more reassuring than hearing our academic role models talk about the difficulties they faced and the thought processes, actions, and resources that helped them overcome these obstacles. We appreciate when you share with us that, despite your best foresight and extensive planning, things did not go quite as planned. We learn the importance of transparency and openness when you discuss your null results and your well-informed hypotheses that were not supported in your data. While experience is the best teacher, let's not leave each other in the dark and force each successive generation to reinvent the wheel. Tell us what you learned and what you might have done differently in hindsight so that we can all learn to do the same.
Similarly, don't be afraid to answer a question with "I don't know." In doing so, you teach us to admit that, despite our hard-work, curiosity, and eagerness to learn, there will always be more things to learn and more ways of thinking about an issue that have not occurred to us. As students, this helps build our confidence to stand up and give our own talks when we may not have an encyclopedic knowledge of the literature or a confident, informed answer to every question. The best and most scientifically productive questions should be the ones to which we don't have an easy answer. Hearing someone we admire say, "I don't know, and I'm curious to find out," helps us to understand these questions as opportunities to make our science better rather than as threats to expose how much we don't know and fuel our ever-present imposter syndrome.
Finally, as a generation of researchers growing up in a Twitter-conscious world, we are hungry for models of collegial, constructive discourse. We are on the same team. Helping others do better science helps us all, and we do not aspire to tear down those with whom we disagree. The tenor of conversations at ARP was a respectful, supportive, and constructive model, which fostered open dialogue rather than defensiveness in the face of scientific critiques. Disagreement is integral to the scientific process. We are forever learning how to give and take criticism. Although we graduate students might not participate in these debates directly, we listen and learn from you how to have these difficult but crucial conversations. We ask you not to be afraid to have these conversations in the spirit of collaboration, congeniality, and (except in extreme cases) trust in your colleagues' best intentions.
So the next time you get up to the podium to deliver your talk, remember that we are all eagerly watching and absorbing. We are absorbing the content of your presentation, and it may have a lasting impact. But this is not the only lasting impression we will take away. When you get up to give a talk, the way you communicate your work and your findings, and how you respond to questions, informs a whole new generation of researchers in how to do the same. No pressure.
Click below to see the winning posters!
