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HA. This allows me to tell my favourite story from my PhD that will hopefully be reassuring to other PhD students/ECRs out there. During my 1st/2nd year, when I was still using Excel, I discovered I'd been using the wrong version of a data sheet for some of the analysis... (1/n) https://twitter.com/AnnaLSchubert/status/1281144543409250305
It meant the results of our already drafted manuscript no longer held and the paper would have to be rewritten entirely/further experiments. I was heartbroken, cried, decided I was not fit to be a scientist, had been kidding myself, should leave science... (2/n)
Emailed my supervisors explaining my mistake and how sorry I was that I could be so careless. They organised to meet the next morning, one of them memorably saying "this has happened to EVERYONE, and anyone it hasn't happened to is no fun to talk to at parties"... (2/n)
In the meeting I started crying before I could even explain what had happened. My supervisor told the story of a correction she had to make to an already published paper once, and stories of other lecturers' errors in the department, how it was a normal part of science (3/n)
I felt better. Later that week, an old PhD student from the lab (then a postdoc, now a very successful Assistant prof) emailed me to tell me his top 3 errors of his PhD / Postdoc. One included wasting 000's of dollars of participant fees on data that ended up being useless (4/n)
Another included a single line bug in some code that meant the entire analysis was wrong and had to be redone, while the manuscript was under review. He ended the email with "human error is everywhere, it can't be avoided, don't beat yourself up about it" (5/n)
Conclusion:
Human error IS everywhere,
Scientists are HUMAN,
...(and don't use Excel for data cleaning, or, anything).
And as you can see from this thread, I'm still making mistakes (7/7) !
Human error IS everywhere,
Scientists are HUMAN,
...(and don't use Excel for data cleaning, or, anything).
And as you can see from this thread, I'm still making mistakes (7/7) !
ADDENDUM
Also: ALWAYS SHARE MISTAKES. It makes people feel like humans. We are all hoomans.
Also: ALWAYS SHARE MISTAKES. It makes people feel like humans. We are all hoomans.
