A different kind of "behind the scenes"

by Tara Smith     Department: Behind the Scenes

While Ziya, Damon, and Chris fill you in on what goes on behind the scenes of WIRED SCIENCE, I thought I'd add a few cents with my own "behind the scenes" story--the nitty-gritty of being a research scientist in my field.

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I wear a lot of hats in my career. This semester, for instance, I've been more of a teacher, writer, and public speaker than a lab rat. I've given talks at a few different conferences discussing my work and science in general; I'm teaching a course 3 times a week for graduate students on molecular epidemiology; and I'm working on several manuscripts in various stages of completion. Those familiar with the funding climate also probably won't be surprised that I've sent off 3 grants in the past 6 weeks, with another 2 I'm working on to go out in the next month or so. I'm also advising grad students, and it's been a busy semester for that. One PhD student whose committee I sat on just defended her thesis, and two others are taking their oral qualifying examinations in the next week.

If you have scientist friends or read science blogs regularly, you've probably heard or read us complaining about grant writing. It's true that this can be extremely frustrating, but I honestly enjoy writing grants. It's incredibly exciting to me to have the luxury of dreaming up a novel research study and putting together a proposal to follow it through. The frustrating part is that so few of these proposals will actually get carried out, though--the funding situation is bleak, and it's tough when proposals come back with few constructive comments, and others saying the proposal looks good and improvements that could be made to it were minimal, but it's just not high enough priority to fund.

Still, I wouldn't trade this career in. It's difficult, it's tiring, it's outright crazy sometimes--like, for instance, now. In addition to everything I mentioned above, I'm also trying to get a new project up and running--one which I don't have funding for, yet. I'm taking a bit of a chance that one of my grants will actually come through with some funding, and I think the project is a hot enough topic to bring in money from somewhere, so I'm dipping into some of the funds the university has provided me and beginning a pilot study to get a bit of preliminary data. If things go right, it could be a very interesting study, but it will make the Christmas "break" yet another working one, and then I'll probably be holed up in the laboratory for much of January (and beyond!) culturing bacteria, extracting DNA, and carrying out various molecular tests on the specimens, trying to collect enough data for the next round of grant applications--and finding out something brand new in the process.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

Tags: Academia