success and personality

One of the department's students (he's taken, I think, all of the advanced-level classes everyone teaches so I can't really call him "my" student) stopped me in the hall the other day to let me know he got into grad school.

Not only "got into," but was offered a research project with a tuition waiver, a decent stipend and summer housing at the site where he does his research.

I'm tremendously happy for him but I'm not surprised at all.

A while back - probably over a year - he had asked me if I thought he had what it took to succeed in grad school. I kind of chuckled to myself before answering because of all the students I've seen, he's one of the MOST likely to succeed in grad school. (And I told him that).

Grad school success - and this often comes as a surprise to people - isn't all about intelligence. It may not even be mostly about intelligence.

Oh, being intelligent and especially having a good memory help. I credit the fact that I have a prodigious memory and that I'm good at forging "links" between different bits of knowledge as the main brain-related reason for my success.

But there are personality reasons that I think override intelligence. Oh, don't get me wrong - if you were a D student in college you'd probably not be likely to succeed in grad school - but that's because I think many D students are not D students because they're not SMART but because they don't have the personality traits necessary for academic success.

The biggest one is that you have to be willing to work hard. You have to put in the hours every day. You have to spend hours in the library reading journals, you have to be willing to try things out that might not work, you have to be able to sit and enter data (or measure turtles, or hand-pollinate flowers, or transcribe interviews, or whatever) for hours upon end and just tell yourself, "I AM going to get this done."

You also have to WANT the degree for reasons internal to yourself. You have to have set it up as a challenge for yourself. You have to want, on a very deep level, to be able to say you did it - and have that be enough of a reason to pursue the degree. (I am speaking about research-based Master's degrees here, and doctoral degrees. The Master's where you do coursework in a pre-set program's a little different; it's more cut and dried).

You can't go into it solely because you believe the M.S. after your name will allow you to make more money. You can't do it solely because your parents - or your spouse - or your significant other - want you to. YOU have to be the one who wants it. (Oh, it helps if parents/spouse/SO want you to have it as well - in fact, I think it would be much harder to do a degree if you had parents telling you you were wasting your time - but I've seen people in that position do it. They grit their teeth and say, "My parents don't understand but I WANT this" and they do it)

The student I'm referring two has both those qualities. He's an extremely hard worker - he's volunteered as "research help" for just about everyone doing field research in my department. And one thing several of us have noticed about this guy is that he can go out on the WORST research day ever - I mean, the most unpleasant conditions - and he can ENJOY himself. And at the end of the day, he thanks you for the opportunity. I've seen him on 100*, high humidity days collecing soil samples using a heavy bulkdensity sampler in grasslands - and he remained cheerful to the end of the day. I've seen him in incredibly sticky days squelching through a half-flooded forest, looking for trees to sample, and he's not complained one bit. I've heard of him going out when it's 40* and windy to collect limnological samples and he's not said anything bad about the work.

Dude. Just. Does. Not. Complain.

And it's a lot easier working with someone like that. And I'm sure the work's easier for him - it IS a lot easier if you just kind of grit your teeth against the unpleasant conditions and think, "I am not going to let this beat me."

The other thing he has that I think will serve him well in grad school is that he has what I call "the tinkerer mentality." By that, I mean the kind of person who when they're faced with some kind of low grade problem - the data won't run in the analysis, for example - they kind of step back and go, "Okay...that didn't work. What can I do to fix it?" And they try stuff. They don't just shut down, they don't go running for help immediately. Maybe "resourcefulness" is a better word for what I'm describing. They can build things. They see, for example, a need for some kind of piece of simple equipment, and they cobble it together out of pvc pipe and scrap wood and it works. Or they figure out ways to "hack" a system that doesn't work as-is. They're not afraid of a little experimentation and they feel a certain triumph when something they try, works.

This was brought home to me last week - how important this mentality is to success - because I was working with some other students. One of whom had the absolute OPPOSITE of the tinkerer mentality. Every little thing he did, he had to come and ask me first. Even though he had each step written down. When something didn't work, he totally shut down and just stood there in the lab, his hands hanging limply at his sides, like he couldn't believe that the thing would work by trying it again with a slight modification. He had NO independence. And I have to admit to being slightly annoyed by that - most of my students have enough independence and self-reliance to know, "Okay, that didn't work, but if I do it again and change x, y, and z, it should work" or "Oh, that really didn't work. I better got get the professor..."

With this student, everything defaulted to "I better go get the professor."

The grad-school-bound student, though, totally knew the difference between "Let me try something else" and "maybe I should go get the professor." And that knowledge - which I suppose comes with experience - is important knowledge to have. You can't go through graduate school running for your major professor every five minutes.

Persistence, and a tinkerer's mentality, and the ability to just dig in when things go badly - all of those are qualities necessary for success. (You know? It strikes me that perhaps some graduate programs might benefit by doing some basic psychological tests on applicants to see if they have those qualities). I've seen my share of VERY smart people wash out of grad school - in some cases it was because they'd never met with a "failure" in their lives before, and then, in their first or second year, they couldn't get the data to run, or the experiment to work, or all their crickets died unexpectedly, or something. And they figuratively ran screaming from the room.

I also saw my share of "smart people" who didn't have that visceral WANT of the degree - they didn't feel like their lives would be incomplete without being able to say "I succeeded at this." Again, they often folded when things got difficult.

I also have seen people start on a degree because they thought it would lead to them making more money in the long run. It's generally true (but not true across-the-board) that you earn more with a Master's than a Bachelor's. But there are also easier ways to increase your income. While I won't say that all the people in it for purely monetary or career-advancement reasons washed out, some of them did.

A lot of this opinion, I admit, is shaped by my own grad school experiences. I HAD failed at a few things before, so having the data set hang up in the computer wasn't such a tragedy. I'm also the kind of person who becomes VERY stubborn when things like that happen - "okay, dammit, we'll change the parameters of the program and see if it works now."

I remember many, many times, while working on my Master's, of writing the program in SPSS (on the mainframe; I had a hugacious data set), sending it off to run, going and picking up those green-and-white striped accordion-fold printouts, and finding that the program had stopped midrun because of some error in the programming or some fault in the data set. And I'd curse a little, and troop back to my lab, and sit down and write down what DIDN'T work (yet again) and try to fix it, and run it again....and it was kind of like a GOTO loop for a while: write program/attach data/send to run/go get printout/find that program DIDN'T run/curse/go back to lab and try again.

But - eventually I found all the bugs and got rid of them. And I got the data analyzed. And I got the thesis written up. And somewhere during the writing of my master's thesis, I nervously approached my major professor - I had decided I wanted to do a Ph.D. I asked him if he thought I was "capable" of it. And he kind of chuckled and said that he had figured that I wouldn't be satisfied with a Master's, that for what I wanted to do, I needed a Ph.D.

And so, I did a Ph.D. In some ways, it was easier than the Master's because I kind of knew what I was doing. I was familiar with the whole literature-search. I knew the ins and outs of dealing with computer programs that didn't analyze when you wanted them to.

But the big thing - what I think got me through both programs - was my fundamental stubbornness. My "not knowing when you're beaten" (which is another piece of advice I've given to would-be grad students: sometimes you have to hang up your common sense a little bit and keep going when any "reasonable" person would say, "You're beaten; give up." You have to pretend that you don't know when you're "beat."). The fact that I was willing to go, "Okay, dammit, that didn't work, but maybe THIS will." To just brute-force try things until something worked.

I think I DEVELOPED a tinkerer's mentality while in grad school. I'm often the one people come to in the department when one of the computers won't work or when one of the projectors in the smart classrooms won't project. I'm not any kind of a computer genius by any stretch but I'm good at systematically going through a problem and finding the little stuff that people overlook (and that's often what causes the problem; I can't tell you how many times I've "miraculously healed" the faulty projectors just by tightening a connection). One thing I learned in grad school is you start by eliminating the LITTLE problems first - because there's no sense in, for example, climbing up and changing a projector bulb when it's just a loose connection to the back of the computer that's affecting it. (It actually surprises me that so few people seem to have this attitude; I have one colleague who will practically disassemble a computer before he tries rebooting it to fix a problem.)

Another thing: taking setbacks as challenges to be overcome rather than obstacles blocking your way. It helps a little if you can visualize it as sort of a game, where the setbacks are, I don't know, the different castles where the princess ISN'T, or something like that, rather than "But I worked so hard and still I have nothing to show for it!"

Perhaps it's that I'm fundamentally an optimist - and perhaps that's another necessary trait. You know the old joke about the optimist and the room full of manure, don't you? They grab a shovel and go, "There must be a pony in here somewhere!" That's actually a pretty good allegory for a successful way of dealing with setbacks in grad school: keep thinking about the pony as you shovel.