Mentoring a lab colleague? Share your ‘CV of failures’ with them

Alena Vdovchenko 00:04

So I’m a chemist and experimental scientist, so I don’t need to search very hard for examples of day-to-day failure.

Stephen Webster 00:12

That’s Dr Alena Vdovchenko, a postdoctoral scientist at Imperial College London, talking in April this year at the Failure in Science conference.

Alena Vdovchenko 00:22

In the lab, simply most of the things don’t work the way you plan them.

So sometimes you carefully design the experiment. You run it for sometimes weeks, months. It depends.

Maybe days if you’re lucky.

But then when you analyze the results, you realize that okay, you didn’t account for factor A.

So then you have to go back.

You need to redesign the experiment, maybe read more literature, go back to the lab.

Stephen Webster 00:48

Alena was speaking at the session called A Taxonomy of Failure, where we heard early career researchers explaining how, in real life, (let’s put it like this), things often don’t go quite as planned.

Alena Vdovchenko 01:01

But overall, I think a lot of chemistry is trial and error. And during my PhD, we have that quote printed in our lab.

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.

Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.

In our lab, theory and practice are combined.

Nothing works, and no one knows why.

I feel like it’s very funny, but also very uncomfortably true.

Stephen Webster 01:30

I’m Dr Stephen Webster, director of the Good Science Project at Imperial College London, a programme that examines what we like about research culture, and what we don’t.

And in episode two, we hear panelist Melanie Stefan, professor of physiology at Berlin Medical School, talk about failure and the lab.

Melanie Stefan 01:57

My first big experience of failure in science was when I was doing my masters in a developmental biology lab, and I really had a difficult time there.

I didn’t quite know how to troubleshoot experiments if they failed. I didn’t quite understand what I was doing. I think it was not the right place for me.

And the worst day was when my supervisor called me into his office and said, "Melanie, I think you should really look for jobs outside of science."

And that was devastating because I had been studying science for many years at the time. I saw myself as a scientist. I didn’t really have a Plan B.

So much of my identity was being a scientist and doing science.

Not just that I loved doing it, and I was really interested in it, but also I didn’t know what else I could do.

So this was really a devastating failure for me.

And I wrote an article about this in Nature. It’s also the only thing I have published in Nature.

Other journals exist, and since then I’ve kind of become the poster child of failure, kind of without intending it.

So at the Failure in Science conference at Imperial College, I talked about this article I wrote called A CV of Failures.

And the story of that is after my master’s degree, (which I ended up completing in the end), I did a PhD, and I had a very great time there.

I had a lot of fun. It was quite a successful time for me.

But then I was done with that, and I needed to apply for funding to go to the next stage of my career as a postdoc.

And it was really hard. It was really hard to find funding. And I was rejected from, a lot of my funding applications were rejected. I started doubting myself.

And I also thought that, "Oh my God, I’m the first person this has happenened to."

Because all the other scientists around me, obviously, or like the scientists who were like a bit further ahead they were further ahead because they were ultimately successful in securing a postdoc position.

And so all I saw around me was ultimately the successes.

So I felt like I was the only one who had ever failed. So that made it even worse, and so this gave me the idea of writing this article calling for a CV of failures.

So the idea would be that the successful people in science would actually open up about their failures that they had on their way, and how many jobs they didn’t get, how many positions they weren’t admitted to, how many grants they failed to receive, how many papers were rejected, things like that.

So that younger scientists like I was at the time could actually take heart and see that this is actually a normal part of the process and that they’re not alone.

So that was the idea. And since then, I’ve kind of become the poster child of failure a little bit.

A lot of friends tell me, "Oh, Melanie, I read something about failure. I was thinking of you."

I was like, "Thank you. That is so nice."

I think it’s generally really cool that there has been following up on this article a bigger discussion about failure in science that the conference was also part of.

I think that’s really lovely. And it’s really lovely to see people come together and talk about this concept.

Melanie Stefan 05:43

The conference is called Failure in Science, but I’d like to smuggle in engineering. I know Mary already mentioned engineering in the last session, and I’m an engineer, and I think engineering has a very well developed tradition of understanding and learning from failure.

Melanie Stefan 06:03

So I liked the the session that was called "A View from the Lab.

And it was especially nice to to hear from the more junior scientists about how they interacted with failure and how they experienced it.

But I also thought the moderator George Constantinides is one thing that really that I found really interesting about what he said was how he compared it to engineering.

George Constantinides 06:27

And I think if I were to summarize the very broad literature on failure in engineering, at least my understanding is: number one, there is no failure without uncertainty.

And number two, structured ways from learning from failure are essential.

And I think those are things that we can carry forward into many different aspects of our work.

In general, I would kind of summarize by saying, in my view, if we want people to fly high, then we have to make it easy and safe to fail well.

Melanie Stefan 07:02

And in engineering, you have to fail. Like, that’s how. You build something, you try a prototype and then it fails, and you learn from that.

You watch how exactly it failed, you analyze it, and then you build the next better version, and the next version, the next version.

And I think the point he was making, and I really agree with that, is that we should treat scientific careers in the same way, and that we need to give people spaces where it’s safe to try something and fail, and then to talk about it, and learn from it, and then do better the next time and try again.

And maybe fail in a different way, but then build something in the end that’s better. So I really like that engineering analogy.

So one thing that also came up in a lot of the discussions at the conference, and that I think is really important, is the question of who actually gets to talk about failure and who gets to fail.

So the reason why I’m invited to conferences like that is that ultimately I did finish my master’s degree, and ultimately I did become a scientist.

And this is why I get to talk about failure is in my scientific career is because ultimately I have succeeded.

And what about the people, though, who have failed?

And I use the word advisedly.

It’s not always like a personal failure.

But people who have set out to have a life in science and are now doing something else. We never hear from them, right, because they are not in that space anymore?

So I think it takes a certain amount of privilege and position to be allowed to talk about failure.

And also, when I was a young scientist and I was looking for positions, I was sometimes, like, googling my name, and then the first thing that came up was A CV of Failures.

And I thought that was really strategically not that clever of me.

But I was not in a position then where it was much less safe to open up about failures.

And now I’m in a position where I can do it because I have a professorship. Nothing is nothing bad is going to happen to me.

So this privilege of opening up about failure is really important.

And then also failure itself is something that you need quite a bit of privilege to do.

So for me, I was able to apply for several postdoc grants and failed to get them until there was finally one that I succeeded in getting.

I was in a position to do that because my institute was happy to pay me for another year after I finished my PhD, and my supervisor was happy to keep me around in the lab, and my visa status didn’t depend on me securing funding right away.

So, and I didn’t have family to take care of at that time.

So it’s really like a lot of privileges came together that allowed me to even fail that much.

And that’s also something we need to think about. Who gets to fail? And then who gets to talk about failure.

I always had this kind of secret plan B, which was to open a cinema.

And I think a lot of my friends in science, if you ask them, they always have like a secret plan B. And it’s usually to do with doing something lovely like opening a bakery or opening a bike shop.

And for me it was opening a cinema, a small indie cinema.

I don’t know if I would have done it actually if I left science. But it was kind of a nice fantasy to escape to, and it sometimes still is.

But I still think, "Oh, I can open a cinema if if everything else fails."

But I would not think of it as a failure.

Because I think there’s a lot of ways to leave science, or to leave academia, and do really interesting and really cool things.

So a lot of my friends who were at university with me are not practicing scientists anymore. Or at least not research scientists, but they do really cool things in industry, in education, in all kinds of sectors.

So this view of leaving science as a failure, I think, is quite problematic as well.

I think it’s really important to share failures as well, in order to distinguish what is a personal failure and what is a system failing you.

And if I submit a grant application and I don’t get the grant, that’s fine.

That might be that my idea wasn’t good enough. Or the grant wasn’t well enough thought out.

But if 100 of my friends submit grant applications and then only 10 of them, only five of them, get a grant, then that maybe points to there being not enough money for research or not enough funding.

And I think we need to open up about failures as well to see where there are places in the system where the system actually could be improved.