I’m going to share a little secret. Your PI does not care about hours in the
lab. Your PI only wants one thing from
you – Data.
This may seem obvious, but below I’ll discuss what type of
data I’m talking about, and how you might approach your boss with it. The goal here is that you work less and have
your personal time without ever being on your boss’s radar.
1.
I’m NOT talking about emailing your boss a data
dump. It is annoying to get an email with four Excel files and a message
saying, “Here are my four experiments.
Check them.” The first thing the PI will think is why are you sending this without
putting any effort into analyzing it yourself, or in other words, why aren’t
you working more? This is exactly what
you don’t want your PI to be thinking about you.
2.
So how should you approach your boss with
data? Try this approach. “Dear Boss:
Attached is a figure I made from my last four experiments on XYZ. I think it’s clear that X enhances Y by
acting on Z. I’ve also attached the raw
data files for you to look over. Let me
know if you have any suggestions on the analysis or the figure. Next week I’m going to test effects of W on
Y.“ The key here is that you made a
figure, you’ve offered up an interpretation of the data, and you’ve made a plan
for the future. Your PI is not going to
be looking for you in the lab over the weekend. They’re too busy looking for the Data Dumper.
3.
What is the type of data that your PI really
wants? They want something new to
present at a conference. Something that will make the lab look good. Something that is publication quality. Something that can be used as preliminary
data for a grant. Nothing will make your
PI happier than data that can serve one of these purposes. All of this means that you should be thinking
about how exciting your results would potentially be when you start a project
and when you design each experiment. You
do not want to be the person in the lab generating mountains of boring data
that the PI will never want to talk about at a conference and that will always
be on the back burner to write up for a low impact publication. If you’re this person, your PI is going to
want more from you no matter how many experiments you're doing. Instead, be the person working on the high
impact project.
4.
So how do you get a high impact project? Here are some ideas/strategies that I think
are worth considering.
a.
Have multiple side projects at all times, and
follow through on the one(s) that are turning out to be the most exciting.
b.
Abandon boring or dead-end projects before
you’ve wasted too much time and effort.
c.
Go to lots of seminars. These will give you new ideas and reveal
potential links between your work and theirs that you never would have thought
of.
d.
Present seminars at every opportunity you
get. This will give you extra external
motivation to get exciting results so that you have something interesting to
present.
e.
If someone else in your lab has an exciting
project, talk to them and the PI to see how you can get a piece of it for
yourself. Or even better, come up with a
new angle or direction on this topic that you could pursue on your own.
5.
Strive to
collect real data every single day that you’re at work. I’ve seen people go for weeks in the lab
without collecting any data. They use
excuses like mice not being ready, cells being contaminated, the reagent they
need is backordered, etc. But here’s
what the PI is thinking… Why don’t you
have 5 experiments worth of samples in the freezer ready for you to run tests
on when you have down time? Why don’t
you have in vitro experiments to fill in the gaps between your mouse
experiments? Why aren’t you borrowing
that reagent or designing other experiments in the meantime? If you want to work less, give your PI data,
not excuses.
6.
My last piece of advice regarding your data is
that you should always have publications in mind. Always be thinking about the narrative that
you are going to tell in your paper. Also,
don’t wait for your PI to tell you to write it up. When I thought I had enough
for a manuscript, I wrote it up. This
included methods, discussion, figure legends, a letter to the editor –
everything that was needed to submit. I’ve
watched certain colleagues toil for years without publications because they
didn’t take the initiative to write up their own results. I may have said this before on this blog, but
a PI is almost never going to prevent you from submitting a paper if you’ve
already written a high quality draft. Who
do you think the PI is going to be looking for on nights and weekends – the
person who sends figures and manuscript drafts or the data dumper with the
boring project and lots of excuses?
