With this entry, I’ll finally address one of the themes I promised I’d discuss in my indulgent blog intro post— the good and bad of being in a rich, high-powered, famous person-led lab. I was kind of saving some of this for my goodbye speech, to be delivered in about 3 years from now while fairly crocked at a fancy-yet-reasonably priced Manhattan restaurant, but I’m interested to hear what people think about this topic. Also, I want to know if the stuff I’ve got to deal with is a function of being in a Big Lab, or just the reality of being a grad student circa 2008. Or if I’m just being a big baby, which is possible.

I’ve taken to making a lot of lists in recent months in order to organize my thoughts about the work I need to do. I have four projects I work on, some more and some less in collaboration with others, and outside of those, I’m doing a few experiments I like to think of as “favors with authorship” for other people in the lab— control-like stuff requiring a moderate-to-strong amount of effort for a least a couple of months, but not reinventing the wheel. The lists go like this: the shorthand title I used to refer to the project goes at the top of the page; then, I list the control experiments I need to do for the project, followed by the materials I still need to order, followed by the code I still need to write for data analysis, and I end with a list of questions I want to answer with the project (a.k.a, why are we doing this again?). I do this probably twice a week.

All of the projects require the development of at least one new technique, and they range from going-to-take-a-lot-of-time-and-dextrousness-but-probably-doable to nobody’s-been-able-to-do-this-yet, let’s-hope-it’s-because-nobody’s-tried-too-hard. I’m in the lab at least 6 days a week. All is going well, so I really can’t complain; I should be able to graduate in about 6 years, and I imagine several papers will come out of the work.

Fine. I tell you all this because it brings me to the question I want to ask: is this what graduate school was designed to require in order to achieve the PhD? The obvious answer is no; plenty of people graduate with less, some without a first-author paper, some without any publications at all.

So why don’t I take my foot off the gas pedal? Two reasons. The first is global— if I take my foot off the gas pedal, what happens when I go to apply for competitive postdoctoral fellowships and positions? PhD programs may not like the fact that students have to take on more and more ambitious projects that take longer to complete in order to publish well (at least in neuroscience), but unless we find a way to universally lower people’s standards for what needs to be accomplished to be successful in science— for publishing, funding, and securing faculty positions— which sounds like a dicey proposition to begin with, I don’t see any way around it.

The second is more local: unpublished data suggests that the only way a graduate student can get out of the Axel lab, and I imagine other high-powered labs as well, if they don’t want to leave academic science or gnaw their foot off at the ankle like a fox in a bear trap, is to do really good work. You are ambitious because you have to be; you work hard because your goals require it; and if you succeed, it’s only because that was your only option from the start.

So now, to my final point: are great expectations something to complain about? I pretty much knew what I was getting into when I joined the lab; I knew that it was, to borrow a phrase used in sports ad nauseaum (or is it Nike ads?), a situation that required me to go hard, or go home.

Yes, the expectations are high, and great work is demanded from you. But you have all the money you could ever need— and that’s only a slight exaggeration— to purchase equipment and supplies, and to pay your way through grad school; you have lots of connections with other great labs, as well as journals; you’re surrounded by incredibly talented and smart postdoctoral fellows, some of the best in the country; and you’ve got the ear of one of the best scientists in the world. So, complaining about having to meet high expectations when you’ve got every imaginable resource at your disposal? Sounds kind of lame, doesn’t it?

Should we as graduate students shake our heads in dismay when we’re forced to be truly ambitious in our goals, either by local or global factors, or should we suffer with a smile on our face because, in the end, it’s going to make us produce better work, and better scientists, too? I know that, if I had to make the decision all over again, I’d choose the same exact lab, and the same expectations… but I’d better save it for my farewell speech. Three or four years from now.