This idea helps explain the tension between classroom work and career preparation.
A student building a career as a scientist needs one day to becomean interface to their field. A cancer researcher needs to be an interface for several players: their colleagues and lab workers, grant makers, institutional administrators, suppliers, doctors, and patients.
By contrast, a school is an interface to vet and route students according to aptitude + interest into further training programs or jobs. Students may perceive much of what they learn there as “training,” when in fact is is a vetting procedure. Hence, they gain misguided notions of where they’d put their time, if their objective was to make themselves into a useful interface for their intended field.
The principle of “becoming an interface” as a way to reclaim this lost purpose can help clarify a lot of scholarship tasks. For example, I strongly considered using flashcards to memorize entire textbooks, under the theory that if coursework is meant to build useful knowledge for scientific work, then the most efficient way to do that was with flashcards. A Fermi estimate indicated I could probably memorize about 1.5 textbooks worth of facts per year, with time left over for deliberate practice.
Yet is that the most useful way for me to build my skill as a “bioengineering interface?” Alternative forms of interface-improvement might include:
Networking with people in the field, making friends, learning more about particular schools/labs/PIs
Learning about how grants are made
Learning broad skills for organizing research, decision making
Reading articles on the economics, current projects, major medical issues, common techniques
Specifically investigating gears-level mechanisms for particular problems (aging, for example)
Read the abstracts of 10 articles per day, and turn each of them into 3 flashcards referring to the primary goal and finding of the paper, so that I can have a shallow but broad grasp of who’s doing what and decide where to allocate my own energy based on that.
Learn general-purpose skills: Linux, programming, productivity software, personal organization.
Updating 6 months later, now that I’ve had about 6 weeks in my biomedical engineering MS program.
Yet is that the most useful way for me to build my skill as a “bioengineering interface?”
Absolutely not!
Particularly for a beginner like myself, the first and most crucial step is to demonstrate credibility in lab procedures and calculations. Your colleagues—fellow grad students—need to trust that you’re capable of executing lab procedures competently. This allows them, or your PI, to give you projects, trust that you’ll make good use of resources, and produce high-quality data that they’re prepared to back with their own reputation.
The challenge of establishing your credibility never ends. As you gain competency in one area, you are then permitted to try your hand at more complex tasks.
Eventually, your period of being trained by others comes to an end, and it now becomes your task to develop new procedures and demonstrate that they work. Your ability to do this depends on the credibility you’ve established along the way. The real test of success here is refining your new methods to the point that other people can replicate them and put them into use for other purposes. Effectively, you create an interface to the method you’ve been developing.
Credibility is one essential component of this task. Another, though, is creativity, reasoning, collaboration, hard work, scholarship, and design that allow you to design the method in the first place. A person could in theory have the ability to come up with an efficacious method, but lack the credibility to get the resources to attempt it, or to have others trust that the method actually works. It’s also possible that a person could be credibly competent at the methods they’ve mastered in the past, but not have the ability to come up with new ones, or to communicate them effectively to others.
To make yourself into an interface to a scientific field, or to be able to create interfaces within that field, then, takes a combination of both design skills and execution skills.
Scholarship, of the kind I was focused on 6 months ago, is relevant to both of these skills. It helps you understand the mechanisms underpinning the techniques you’re trying to master, and also is essential to the design process.
However, it’s usually strategic to use the minimum input to get your goals accomplished, and in this case that means the minimum level of scholarship required to master the next technique or design the next project. The proof is in the success of your labor or of your project, not in the amount of facts you’ve got memorized to back it up in a verbal argument, or to impress the people who are vetting your background.
6 months ago, I lacked so many of the things required to choose or pursue meaningful scientific goals, so I was compensating by focusing on what was available to me: scholarship for its own sake.
Looking back on what I did over the last few years to prepare for grad school, I have learned SO much that would have helped me accelerate my growth if I could communicate it to my past self.
In particular:
Skills about breaking down and understanding the content of a textbook, paper, or protocol.
Ways to practice key skills even if you don’t have access to the necessary equipment or materials.
A greater appreciation for labs as a potential training ground for real-world tasks.
Focusing more on developing competency in basic, routine skills, and less on trying to learn about everything under the sun. A greater appreciation for beginners mind, and for learning before you try to contribute.
As a second note, one of the challenges, then, with school, is its mechanism by which it accomplishes vetting.
Vetting is a way of establishing the student’s credibility. But it’s a far too general form of credibility.
It’s the sort of credibility that gets you a foot in the door in another school, or perhaps in an entry-level position.
But once you’re there in that new environment, you have no specific credibility with the particular people in the new institution. Suddenly, you may realize that you failed to prepare yourself adequately to build credibility with the people in this new institution. You did what you had to do in your old institution to get become credible enough to be given the opportunity to try to prove your credibility in the new institution. Enough credibility to be permitted to try your hand at a more complicated task.
But the old institution was meant not only to make you credibly ready to try the new task—it was meant to make you credibly able to do the new task.
It focuses the mind of the students, and the student’s teachers and advisors, on a form of success (getting admitted to the “next step”) that will cease to be a meaningful form of success mere months after it has been accomplished.
A better approach to schooling would be one that helps the student focus on building credibility with the people they’ll be working for in the future. That treats coursework like a means to understand the purpose of a protocol or project you’re going to be involved in. That treats labs as preparation for actually doing the procedures in a repeated, reliable fashion in your next job or course of schooling.
Instead, the whole mentality of the institution seems geared around being “done with one thing, on to the next thing.” It does not almost at all reward reliable, repeatable skill in a given task. It only rewards accomplishing things correctly a single time, and then moving on from it, perhaps forever. Sometimes, it doesn’t even reward success—it just rewards showing up. Other times, it rewards success at a task that’s unnecessarily difficult, prioritizing abilities, like arbitrary feats of memorization, that just aren’t high-priority skills.
It doesn’t even suggest that you begin building relationships with people in the real world—only with teachers at your present institution, precisely the set of people to whom the real success of your training will not matter.
Could we potentially adapt schools to integrate better with the “next steps” without fundamentally altering the approach to education? Is there some low-hanging fruit here, once we frame the problem like this? Even if not, can individual students adapt their approach to being schooled in order to improve matters?
As I see it, there are some things a student can do:
Give themselves lots of reminders about the tangible reality of the next institution or role they’ll be jumping to. Meet people, understand the job those people do, identify the basic skills and make sure you’re practicing those ahead of time, understand the social challenges they face, and their ambitions. This is about more than “networking.” It’s about integrating.
When doing an assignment or reading for a class, focus a lot of time and energy on understanding the relevance of the material to the next step. That will often mean understanding what, in a real-world context, you could safely look up, ignore, or delegate. It also means building the skills to reliably be able to look up and understand new knowledge when necessary, and being able to identify the bits and pieces that are critical to memorize and deeply internalize so as to make navigating the domain relatively easy.
Focus on getting grades that are good enough to get where you want to go. Do not pride yourself on grades. Pride yourself on real-world abilities and relationships. A’s are for admissions boards. Skills and relationships are for you.
Figure out how to witness, experience, learn and practice skills that use equipment and materials that are inaccessible to you. You can create simulations, mockups, or even just act out the motions of a technique and playact a protocol. Learn how to train yourself effectively when mentorship or materials are inadequate.
This idea helps explain the tension between classroom work and career preparation.
A student building a career as a scientist needs one day to become an interface to their field. A cancer researcher needs to be an interface for several players: their colleagues and lab workers, grant makers, institutional administrators, suppliers, doctors, and patients.
By contrast, a school is an interface to vet and route students according to aptitude + interest into further training programs or jobs. Students may perceive much of what they learn there as “training,” when in fact is is a vetting procedure. Hence, they gain misguided notions of where they’d put their time, if their objective was to make themselves into a useful interface for their intended field.
The principle of “becoming an interface” as a way to reclaim this lost purpose can help clarify a lot of scholarship tasks. For example, I strongly considered using flashcards to memorize entire textbooks, under the theory that if coursework is meant to build useful knowledge for scientific work, then the most efficient way to do that was with flashcards. A Fermi estimate indicated I could probably memorize about 1.5 textbooks worth of facts per year, with time left over for deliberate practice.
Yet is that the most useful way for me to build my skill as a “bioengineering interface?” Alternative forms of interface-improvement might include:
Networking with people in the field, making friends, learning more about particular schools/labs/PIs
Learning about how grants are made
Learning broad skills for organizing research, decision making
Reading articles on the economics, current projects, major medical issues, common techniques
Specifically investigating gears-level mechanisms for particular problems (aging, for example)
Read the abstracts of 10 articles per day, and turn each of them into 3 flashcards referring to the primary goal and finding of the paper, so that I can have a shallow but broad grasp of who’s doing what and decide where to allocate my own energy based on that.
Learn general-purpose skills: Linux, programming, productivity software, personal organization.
Updating 6 months later, now that I’ve had about 6 weeks in my biomedical engineering MS program.
Absolutely not!
Particularly for a beginner like myself, the first and most crucial step is to demonstrate credibility in lab procedures and calculations. Your colleagues—fellow grad students—need to trust that you’re capable of executing lab procedures competently. This allows them, or your PI, to give you projects, trust that you’ll make good use of resources, and produce high-quality data that they’re prepared to back with their own reputation.
The challenge of establishing your credibility never ends. As you gain competency in one area, you are then permitted to try your hand at more complex tasks.
Eventually, your period of being trained by others comes to an end, and it now becomes your task to develop new procedures and demonstrate that they work. Your ability to do this depends on the credibility you’ve established along the way. The real test of success here is refining your new methods to the point that other people can replicate them and put them into use for other purposes. Effectively, you create an interface to the method you’ve been developing.
Credibility is one essential component of this task. Another, though, is creativity, reasoning, collaboration, hard work, scholarship, and design that allow you to design the method in the first place. A person could in theory have the ability to come up with an efficacious method, but lack the credibility to get the resources to attempt it, or to have others trust that the method actually works. It’s also possible that a person could be credibly competent at the methods they’ve mastered in the past, but not have the ability to come up with new ones, or to communicate them effectively to others.
To make yourself into an interface to a scientific field, or to be able to create interfaces within that field, then, takes a combination of both design skills and execution skills.
Scholarship, of the kind I was focused on 6 months ago, is relevant to both of these skills. It helps you understand the mechanisms underpinning the techniques you’re trying to master, and also is essential to the design process.
However, it’s usually strategic to use the minimum input to get your goals accomplished, and in this case that means the minimum level of scholarship required to master the next technique or design the next project. The proof is in the success of your labor or of your project, not in the amount of facts you’ve got memorized to back it up in a verbal argument, or to impress the people who are vetting your background.
6 months ago, I lacked so many of the things required to choose or pursue meaningful scientific goals, so I was compensating by focusing on what was available to me: scholarship for its own sake.
Looking back on what I did over the last few years to prepare for grad school, I have learned SO much that would have helped me accelerate my growth if I could communicate it to my past self.
In particular:
Skills about breaking down and understanding the content of a textbook, paper, or protocol.
Ways to practice key skills even if you don’t have access to the necessary equipment or materials.
A greater appreciation for labs as a potential training ground for real-world tasks.
Focusing more on developing competency in basic, routine skills, and less on trying to learn about everything under the sun. A greater appreciation for beginners mind, and for learning before you try to contribute.
Doing a whole lot more drawing when I take notes.
As a second note, one of the challenges, then, with school, is its mechanism by which it accomplishes vetting.
Vetting is a way of establishing the student’s credibility. But it’s a far too general form of credibility.
It’s the sort of credibility that gets you a foot in the door in another school, or perhaps in an entry-level position.
But once you’re there in that new environment, you have no specific credibility with the particular people in the new institution. Suddenly, you may realize that you failed to prepare yourself adequately to build credibility with the people in this new institution. You did what you had to do in your old institution to get become credible enough to be given the opportunity to try to prove your credibility in the new institution. Enough credibility to be permitted to try your hand at a more complicated task.
But the old institution was meant not only to make you credibly ready to try the new task—it was meant to make you credibly able to do the new task.
It focuses the mind of the students, and the student’s teachers and advisors, on a form of success (getting admitted to the “next step”) that will cease to be a meaningful form of success mere months after it has been accomplished.
A better approach to schooling would be one that helps the student focus on building credibility with the people they’ll be working for in the future. That treats coursework like a means to understand the purpose of a protocol or project you’re going to be involved in. That treats labs as preparation for actually doing the procedures in a repeated, reliable fashion in your next job or course of schooling.
Instead, the whole mentality of the institution seems geared around being “done with one thing, on to the next thing.” It does not almost at all reward reliable, repeatable skill in a given task. It only rewards accomplishing things correctly a single time, and then moving on from it, perhaps forever. Sometimes, it doesn’t even reward success—it just rewards showing up. Other times, it rewards success at a task that’s unnecessarily difficult, prioritizing abilities, like arbitrary feats of memorization, that just aren’t high-priority skills.
It doesn’t even suggest that you begin building relationships with people in the real world—only with teachers at your present institution, precisely the set of people to whom the real success of your training will not matter.
Could we potentially adapt schools to integrate better with the “next steps” without fundamentally altering the approach to education? Is there some low-hanging fruit here, once we frame the problem like this? Even if not, can individual students adapt their approach to being schooled in order to improve matters?
As I see it, there are some things a student can do:
Give themselves lots of reminders about the tangible reality of the next institution or role they’ll be jumping to. Meet people, understand the job those people do, identify the basic skills and make sure you’re practicing those ahead of time, understand the social challenges they face, and their ambitions. This is about more than “networking.” It’s about integrating.
When doing an assignment or reading for a class, focus a lot of time and energy on understanding the relevance of the material to the next step. That will often mean understanding what, in a real-world context, you could safely look up, ignore, or delegate. It also means building the skills to reliably be able to look up and understand new knowledge when necessary, and being able to identify the bits and pieces that are critical to memorize and deeply internalize so as to make navigating the domain relatively easy.
Focus on getting grades that are good enough to get where you want to go. Do not pride yourself on grades. Pride yourself on real-world abilities and relationships. A’s are for admissions boards. Skills and relationships are for you.
Figure out how to witness, experience, learn and practice skills that use equipment and materials that are inaccessible to you. You can create simulations, mockups, or even just act out the motions of a technique and playact a protocol. Learn how to train yourself effectively when mentorship or materials are inadequate.