Being an Early Career Scientist

Keep running experiments

I’m officially past the early career stage and when I look back at whatever successes I’ve had it has come down to a willingness to experiment. When I moved to Louisville, Kentucky it was an experiment. I viewed every new job or career opportunity as an experiment in that I had a good hypothesis of what things would be like prior to starting and then as I got more data I would reassess and adjust as needed. Sometimes, you need to shut down experiments and try something new.

This newsletter was an experiment borne out of frustration and boredom and it ran consistently for about 3 years. My starting materials (frustration and boredom) have become scarce. It has been difficult to maintain a consistent pace of weekly or even monthly writing. I don’t see any need to stop because in theory I can just pick back up where I left off as I am doing now. In some sense I’ve realized that the larger the audience the more difficult it can be to write. I kind of miss the rebellious days when I was excited to have 100 people reading the newsletter consistently.

To the young scientists out there who are just starting their career my final advice for your early career is to go out and try things. This might be taking a job you don’t want in order to get out of your parent’s house. It might be taking on a new responsibility in your lab. It could be deciding to go back to graduate school to get a PhD or an MBA or maybe even going to law school. The great thing about an experiment is you can always adjust as you get more information. You can tweak the conditions and try and change the outcomes.

I think sometimes you might change the conditions so much that you end up outside of the laboratory space you’ve occupied for over a decade either real or virtual. This is exactly what I did. I am now doing something that I couldn’t have predicted 15 years ago. In November of 2009 I had just started my first post undergraduate job at few months prior, and I was living in a house full of random roommates, all of this was sourced via Craigslist. The company was a “start-up” that was 15 years old and on a Series C funding round and the house was essentially a more modern trailer of Animal House.

This is going out the day after an election too. Many of you are probably going to be upset and some of you might be really happy. In these situations when things seem dire or amazing, I think back to the below scene from the movie Blow. I think about the scene with Robin Williams and Matt Damon in Goodwill Hunting when he talks about the painting. I think about the last line of The Great Gatsby (I’m going to assume you know it already).

To me, what these scenes impart, is that we are hopelessly moving on despite the current, despite whatever outcomes we’ve been dealt, and despite the conditions we are facing right now. When I was younger, I viewed these same scenes through the lens of not having a lot of control in how life comes at you. The 2008 financial crisis felt really unfair to me as I’m sure the COVID-19 crisis felt really unfair to a lot of people in 2020. There is always a next crisis. Keep rowing.

The best part about being an early career scientist is that you don’t know a lot of stuff about the world around you and about yourself. The process of figuring stuff out and then getting results you predicted and wanted, or thought might be possible is about the most fun you can have in life. Also, knowing with certainty the results of a specific experiment are boring and uninteresting. Every time I write here, I’m running an experiment. I have a hypothesis of how it will be received. I don’t actually know until I hit publish.

Talk to you soon,

Tony