It's a
harsh world in here, in academia. We all already know that academic science is not a carebear teaparty, and apparently now things are worse than ever as far as potential jobs for Ph.D.s and
funding goes.
A brief interruption, for an ad:
Use Grammarly's plagiarism checker online because it's better to have a computer criticize you than a person.
And now back to your regularly scheduled blogramming.
Scicurious has a
great post up at Neurotic Physiology about what it is like to be out in the 'real world' and out of academia. She has some fascinating points about how academia has skewed her perspective on things, but one in particular jumped out at me: That now she has to re-learn how to take criticism.
Scicurious says:
"I remember a time when I took criticism well. I did a lot of theater and
music, it was something you HAD to take well. I took it, I improved,
worked harder, fixed things, and did better. Sometime during grad
school, however, criticism began to paralyze me. Every critique felt
like a critique of me, as a scientist. Since a scientist was what I WAS,
all criticism began to feel like criticism of me, as a person.
Sometimes it was indeed phrased that way. You are careless. You are not
smart enough, why don't you get this?! You are not focused."
This got me thinking because, honestly, I feel exactly the opposite. I think I learned how to take criticism in grad school partly by learning how to give it.
 |
| It's for your own good! (source) |
When I am editing a paper or grant for someone, I am
trying to help them. The more critical I am the better their paper/grant will be. The paper is headed to peer-review which will determine whether it gets published or not , and the grant is headed to a study section which decides whether it gets funded. Both are grueling and rigorous examinations of quality and scientific merit. These review processes are so important because published papers and funded grants are 'science currency' and will
determine your future. In some cases the funding status of a grant can determine whether a lab stays open or a PI gets tenure.
If there is a paragraph that doesn't make sense, or (gasp) a typo, it is obviously better for me to catch it than for
someone important to see it and get confused or frustrated.
Understanding this concept, that constructive criticism is the
nicest thing a scientist can do for another scientist taught me to take criticism much better than I had previously. I was one of those students who was always 'better enough' than the other students that teachers rarely bothered to push me to true excellence. So I was really not used to criticism, and the initial slings and arrows in graduate school did sting. However at one point it really sunk in that these criticisms were
making me better... better at everything: writing, presenting, scientific thinking.
So that is when being mean is actually being nice.
That said, I never had anyone tell me I wasn't 'smart enough' as Scicurious says. Just because constructive and thorough critique can sound mean, but actually be nice, doesn't mean that there is no such thing as 'meanness' in academia.
Sometimes being mean is really just being mean. A criticism that does not help me improve in any way is just mean. 'you are not smart enough to be a scientist' does not help anyone be a better scientist. It is a completely different kind of criticism than 'you really need to read more about X because you don't understand how X works.' Both are directed at 'you' personally, but one says you can't do it and the other says you can do it and even suggests
how you can do it.
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TheCellularScale
