Advice From Dr Chris Hooley
By Dr Chris Hooley
You have to understand when you are shying away from something for emotionally driven reasons. It is very easy to make your mind think about other things in the academic environment, and to be instinctively repelled by something because it failed in the past.
Focus on things that are not working, because they are often the ones that bring interesting and unexpected results. When everything is going according to plan in academia, it is boring, because you are not discovering anything. Learning and discovery come through the process of making mistakes and taking risks. In the end, failure is often a short-hand term for not doing what you expect. Nine times out of ten, the reason for something going wrong will be really boring, but the tenth time the result will be the most interesting thing you could have ever imagined.
Cultivate a spirit of dispassionate enquiry, because if you let your emotions take over and discourage you from doing things out of fear of failure, you are automatically blocking yourself from potentially discovering something interesting.
In the end, failure is often a short-hand term for not doing what you expect.
The failure of an experiment doesn’t equal the failure of a student. I try to make students aware that they may get lucky and their experiment will work, or they may find themselves in a situation when everything gets out of hand. If the latter happens, almost always it is not really a reflection on the student. However, what you can judge a student by is how they respond to it. If something fails, it is always good advice to engage sooner rather than later. If there is something you suspect you need to talk to your supervisor about, why not do it right now?
A difficult aspect of academia is working with other people. Students often struggle doing group projects, and if something goes wrong, the situation can become intense. If that happens, remember to respect both the others in your group and yourself. If you disagree with your peers, do not give up on what you think is important because you did not manage to convince the rest of the group at first. At the same time, don’t assume that the other people do not have a genuine reason for the view that they are taking. Make it a conversation about where the differences in principles are coming from; don’t decide that they are wrong without having proper evidence and an explanation of how they are wrong.
Failures will happen occasionally, and all you can do about it is to develop the most resilient attitude possible. Sleep well and eat well. There is a huge chemical-emotional thing going on in your body all the time, and it has a huge effect on your judgement. After two days of not eating and not sleeping everybody feels like they are failing at everything irrespective of the circumstances. In contrast, after two days of sleeping well and eating well, our attitude changes and we tend to view the world in a much more positive way.