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.
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.