Saturday, February 19, 2011

My Ph.D. life

Today, I was trying to wrap up a manuscript that was done during the last year of my graduate study. I opened the fold containing all my Ph.D. research data. I started to look my lab presentations from the first year I jointed my Kentucky lab. I found that I really did tons of works. As always, particularly during my graduate study, I am trying to ask myself why many projects were not completed and published even I worked so hard. I only published one paper from the work of my first three years. Some project stopped in the middle because I could not connect a gene to its function (only cloning and expression data), while others are stuck by the technique problems...

In a word, 80% of projects are failure, only 20% are kind of completed..... I don't know if my case is special. But I do think I have learned a lot from those failure and matured from those lessons. I have learned that I should always pick up a manageable project regardless how ambitious I am. Like baby step, a small step at a time, I should accomplish one small experiment at a time and slowly accumulate each piece of data together to form a publication. Of cause, this requires the confidence and constant interest in the project and hard work.


I remember that there was a quote saying: "Vision without action is a daydream, but action without vision is a nightmare." I am probably the second one and now I am trying very hard to have both vision and action....