 And you're back here on likeable science another Friday afternoon. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Thanks for joining us. And likeable science is all about how science is a vital, interesting, and dynamic part of everyone's life. We face the same kinds of challenges in science as we do in other parts of our lives, and we all overcome them too. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Joining me via Skype is Tanaia Valerie, who is a doctoral candidate in molecular physics and biochemistry at Yale University. Welcome, Tanaia. Hello, Ethan. How are you? I'm doing well. Very nice of you to join me. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So I had run into Tanaia through a column that she wrote. It was published in Science Magazine. There's a weekly column called Working Life, and Tanaia wrote about a column called Growth from Failure and talked about the struggles she'd run into with experiments not working and all kinds of difficulties and the frustrations and actually shame she felt about this and tell she sort of had a breakthrough and overcame that, began reaching out and getting some help from her mentors and some of her lab peers and has grown from this and become a better person and better scientist. Is that fair to say? Yes, definitely. That's where the growth comes from, right? Exactly. So I was so impressed by this because it harked back to an experience I had had as a graduate student when I realized somewhere in my about third or fourth year of graduate school that I gathered this mountain of data but I had been refining my techniques all along and finally was just going to have to throw all this data out and sort of start all over with basically now my finally refined experimental technique and it was very, very discouraging, but yes, we break on through these things. So why don't you tell us a little bit about this, Tanaia? Yeah, so this piece was featured in Science, so that's one of the top journals in our community and how it came about was that I reviewed, I wrote in about another working life piece and then I was corresponding with the editor and she asked if I had something to contribute and I said, sure. And so when we were talking, she's like, well, we really want to hear about turning points, you know, graduate student experiences that really change how you look at science or how you function at the lab bench and this was one of those crucial times. The time this piece was about one of the top most painful experiences that I had and the reason I chose to write about it was because I hoped it resonated with others. In fact, it took a lot, a lot of courage for me and I had to push myself to be really revealing about what happened because it was such a point of pain because it was a failure, I had failed but there was also growth and then I hoped to share that growth with everyone else and I would resonate with them. Yeah, absolutely. And it's an interesting point that people, as you commented in Type A, people don't like to admit that they are failing, they're having problems, they're reluctant sometimes to reach out, to ask for help and of course that you realize, of course, in your lab, you're surrounded by other people whose experiments all appear to be successful but then you realize they might just be hiding their problems, their failures from you. Just as you were trying to hide yours from them. Yeah, it's so much energy to keep up this illusion of perfection and what actually gave me courage to start asking for help or that sort of thing was actually paying attention more closely and seeing that my colleagues were in fact reaching out for help. So sometimes when we view the perfection in ourselves, we see it in others but when you start paying attention to what actually is happening around you, you might see that there is people asking for help and you just didn't pay attention. Right, you find that the apparently super talented superstar actually does have difficulty and they can't pipe out worth a damn or something like this. They're a terrible speller, whatever it may be. And fine, if you examine it, they are facing some challenges too. So do you find this has really now made a difference in your life? Are you now reaching out and trying to be more helpful to others? Well, I've always been very keen on helping others but for me what the turning point was that when I see myself creeping into that fear of failure and when I start closing up and not sharing what's really happening, I actually have this moment of like, okay, this is what's happening and we can't let this happen again. And what's positive reinforcement of that is that since I've started reaching out more and definitely being much more open about my failures during my weekly meetings with my lab, I'm very honest about, okay, I'm really scared about this coming out correctly or I say that lost sleep over waiting for these results but when I'm much more open, I've just gotten positive feedback back. It was just reinforced that if you're open, people are going to be open back at you and it's been a great experience because of that and I'm glad I've chose this way of talking about my science. Yeah, absolutely. I recall years ago being in a position in an organization and my boss, the Chief Operating Officer just sort of casually mentioned back when he got fired from this job and I was sort of taken aback. It's like, wow, this guy is saying I got fired from this job and I think I was very sensitive because I had shortly before been fired from the job and hearing him sort of told me, oh, this is okay, this happens to other people too. I'm not the only person who's been fired, right? And people live through it, they survive, they thrive, they go on bigger and better things, you know, and so that openness is very, as you say, it's sort of relaxing almost to do it. I agree because what's been a really cool, unforeseeable aspect of writing this piece is that people are reaching out to me. I had this fantastic email from a student, another graduate student who was going through a challenging time and he wrote to me saying that how he got courage or he was able to be more courageous in what was going on around him and his own difficulty in grad school because he read my piece and that's the sort of thing that you hope happens when you're open about these failures and it seems like that is a case in your situation too. It's got to be gratifying knowing that you're open like that has really done someone else some good and helped them survive a difficult time and make it through. So has this translated into other aspects of your life other than your research? Yeah, certainly. Besides the bench, there's other things that we do and one of them happens to be preparing for our career after we earn our PhD and so I'm talking about a kind of a student organization and postdoc organization at Yale where we work on networking and reaching out to people and working on software skills, business skills and so when I talk about some of the struggles that I had at first while I was learning some of these skills of networking that has been really helpful for some of the younger people that are joining and so yeah, I would definitely say that this sort of resilience and being open is applicable to any sort of aspect of your life and as we were talking about before off the screen we were talking about I have read books to help me get through these times and some of these books come from authors that are former Navy SEALs or someone that's also in a research position but you can get inspiration to overcome any sort of life struggle from other people that might not be scientists in the case for me everyone experiences these struggles. Yeah, everyone has to face challenges in life and learn to deal with them and not let them dominate their life and sort of ruin a life but just be a part of your life that you cope with maybe it's not what you want but you can get through it. Really I think this speaks to this sort of broader issue of and people call it different things people talk about collaboration people talk about strategic alliances people talk about friendship people talk about outsourcing and these things all to some extent can be the same sort of activities in the sense of reaching out and getting getting some help on some aspect that you may need where you find somebody who can do something better than you can do it more easily or more effectively and hopefully of course there's some reciprocity in the whole business, right? Yeah, collaboration is so key and that's the other thing that I've been really embracing is that as a community or in my case as a lab you work together to make things happen and it is so important and not only do you have to be willing to accept help that's number one but also just be grateful for it and then of course paying forward if you can't pay back you know you pay forward to help others and when you do that you just bring in so many different talents so for example we have a lab manager who works with sales reps to get our reagents at affordable price and if that person wasn't there and didn't have that sort of network I would struggle more on the bench and so having these key roles within the lab or any community is so important for keeping it all running smoothly in the end and then making it such a thriving environment for everyone to do well then it's actually really interesting I'm reading this book by Adam Grant and he's a professor at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania and in it was an interesting study with cardiac surgeons and also some financial analysts too and then what they found were the stars super outperforming stars of the cardiac surgeons that did really well and what they found was that if they were in a thriving environment that they actually had a lower incidence of death in their surgery they had nothing to do with practice like the common thought is that you practice to do better but also what he was reporting in the book was that the cardiac surgeons actually thrived and also depending on the hospital community there so it's important for all aspects I would say absolutely I've actually just been reading a little bit about Google's project Aristotle where they spent years actually analyzing what made it for a good team but I want to switch gears for just a moment here because we talked about persistence as part of resiliency and all and I want to tell one of my little campfire stories here a little peculiar science piece that perhaps will be of interest to some people this one is something I only recently ran into there are a little caterpillar that eventually becomes a moth they're called the woolly bear caterpillar I think that's the name that's applied to a lot of different caterpillars actually but the ones that live in the Arctic face a peculiar challenge these little caterpillars have a very very short time only a few months of the year when they can be active and as a caterpillar you have one job that's to eat a lot of food as fast as you can to get the energy to turn into a butterfly or a moth and there simply is not enough time from the time these things hatch until the upcoming fall for them to get enough food so come fall the woolly bear caterpillar crawls under a rock basically and then as winter sets in they freeze they freeze absolutely solid the rock is buried under snow the woolly bear caterpillar's body is completely solidly frozen and come spring everything begins to fly out and eventually the woolly bear caterpillar falls out and resumes eating and proceeds to keep eating even as fast as it can and it doesn't just do this once or twice these things go through 14 years 14 cycles of freezing and thawing for 14 years before finally one summer they had finally eaten enough that they are now ready they pupate and then they pop out as a moth live for a few more weeks and die but I thought it was one of the most amazing things I had heard in a long time and again it just I think it ties in with this whole business of persistence these things put up with being frozen solid 14 different times in order to sort of make it through their life and get to where they need to be anyhow on that persistent note we're going to take a short break here about a minute break and I'm talking with Tanya Valerie, a doctoral student at Yale and we're talking about setbacks turning into success we'll be right back I pity the fool who ain't watching this show at 12 o'clock on Friday afternoon Stan, the energy man, watch it I'm Jay Fidel and I'm here with Pete McGinnis-Mark to talk about HIGP and research in Manoa what about that show Pete? I think it's great Jay research at Manoa really provides faculty members at the University of Hawaii with an easy way of explaining some of the research activities we're conducting on the campus for example I do a lot of space research whether it's the moon and Mars but many of my other colleagues do other interesting kinds of work whether it's exploring the ocean floor in submarines studying earthquakes and tsunamis or other activities so research at Manoa really provides us with a way of telling the general public some of the activities which we're involved in as well as communicating to our colleagues and students this is a fun science and we really appreciate the activities which research at Manoa enable us to talk about I love research at Manoa come around, join us it's Monday, one o'clock p.m. every single Monday be there, we'll be square and we're back here at likeable science I'm your host Ethan Allen joining me today via Skype is Tanaia Ballery she's a doctoral student in molecular molecular physics and biochemistry at Yale University and Tanaia wrote this wonderful column in the working life weekly column in science published called growth from failure in which she very openly and honestly discussed her setbacks, her struggles, her failures and what this meant her emotionally and how she's worked through it and has grown from this and learned more to reach out to seek help when she needs it to look at other people for advice and assistance and it's great but there is a whole issue of course you can't just do this randomly you have to have the right people around you and of course you're working in a research lab where the head of your lab presumably has rather carefully selected folks and hopefully a good balance of people with complementary skills and personalities that don't create too badly at least because as you pointed out you have to have a good collaborative team there because you're all working on closely related projects you're doing supports some of your lab mates and their work supports yours and the PI is trying I assume to tell a particular story Yeah, definitely I would say my PI does an exceptional job in putting that in and that's something I hope to learn from her a skill of hiring someone from one interview or two and get to know who that person is and see how they would fit in your team and how they would thrive and what I've seen and this is with working with students as a graduate student we also teach and we teach undergraduates so for me that would be Yale undergraduates and it's interesting because when you approach these sort of situations where it can be difficult and challenging you often see the strongest characteristics of the people around you and what's really important is that everyone gives and gets back and is supportive of each other and tries not to judge each other and so I think those are really important characteristics to have in the team that you're working with but also the team that may be under you or even above you the leadership team and it's an important learning experience it's not something I appreciated when I was younger something that you kind of have to live That's intriguing to hear you say that because this is exactly what this project Aristotle found is that people have to make a good team people have to feel psychologically safe they have to have an environment where they know they can express their ideas freely and they're not going to be judged or laughed at or made fun of they've got to be able to share and communicate it doesn't work if one team member talks all the time and another never talks actually the amount of talking it turns out among team members has to be pretty much equal over the long term for teams to be successful and then the other thing they brought up is that the most effective teams have people who score very high on empathy ratings people who are very good at reading other human beings reading facial expressions, reading body language those are people who typically when you get a bunch of them on a team your team works quite well because they didn't have the other team members or feeling and can react more appropriately whereas people who are not empathetic will run roughshod over at a time when you're trying to reach out for help and they won't see it or hear it and may not respond appropriately and that will of course discourage you then from Yeah, I completely agree and there's even this fact where you kind of have to you know, you have to forgive your other teammates because sometimes we get really excited about the science and so someone might be really energetic and this is where criticism might seem harsh or negative, really negative but what's important when you're receiving that too is to remember that and if luckily if you're in that environment this is really important you have to have that trust already but you know that that person is coming from a good place and as you mentioned having empathy is a great characteristic and I've experienced this where another team member will come in and kind of smooth it out if one team member is really energetic about giving their criticism and maybe not be conscientious of how harsh they're coming across even though they have really good intentions sometimes it's really great to have that third person coming in saying, okay, you know what she's doing is really great and this is the focus that she needs to go in and kind of help bring because we're all human, we all make mistakes and I think working as a team it's so crucial in so many ways, yeah Absolutely and that willingness to understand that the other person well, it sounds like they're criticizing you harshly may not mean it that way they may be trying to be very helpful to you and just sort of stylistically they're sort of blowing it and yes, if you're lucky there's a third team member around to sort of mediate the whole thing tell the criticizer to tone it down a bit and highlight some of your good stuff too, right? But if there isn't, you just have to be able to do something that yourself and realize, no, this person, yeah they don't only mean to be this way they're just coming across that way so that's again why it is important to have good people around and to sort of choose your team members well and carefully, right? Because, yeah my wife likes to say she says, I love working with smart, good-hearted people and she says, I can work with dumb, but good-hearted people because they're good-hearted and you can get past things and I can work with smart, bad-hearted people because if they're smart, again you can help them see why they need to do it this way but she says there's no future working with dumb, bad-hearted people, right? Just give up on them right away, you know? They're not going to be good teammates Yeah, and that's something that I've also come to appreciate a good leader also needs to recognize when a team isn't working, right? Because we talked about how collaboration is so important, but sometimes you might not really get the good sense or like the right sense of someone and then knowing when to, you know call it quits too and knowing when like that interaction isn't working can also be a valuable skill. Yeah, and it's funny because scientists and scientists' training does not typically train them in those sorts of arts to be able to spot subtle human interactions to be able to be good empathizers and so it was interesting what you were saying earlier that you think your lab head is amazingly good at pulling people out after even a brief interaction and realizing if this person will work or won't work in your group and that is undoubtedly a valuable skill but it apparently is a skill too that can be taught a bit like the other, but Yeah, this is actually something that I think we need to work on in graduate student education. We need to have a course in this and how to manage a lab, right? Personnel, human management human resources I think is the official term and it is something we need to work on to incorporate into our education because as we've been talking about through this, our conversation is that an effective scientific team and this is true for any sort of discipline but definitely true for science that they're to thrive and do really well and ask really interesting questions that push the forefront of science forward and our knowledge base forward that you just, you have to have that, you know, and they'll take it for granted. Right, but it's true, I mean more and more and all the studies that are being done in the business world now suggest that more and more of our work is done in teams and less and less are we working on our own and therefore this idea of teamwork is more and more critical and yet again in our traditional schooling we don't typically do much of this at all we take, you work alone by yourself, you take tests by yourself you're not allowed to ask for help on some kind of assignments and so we don't get a lot of practice in it and you're right I mean sometimes working in a science lab is the first real experience of real sort of close collaboration that some people have and yes, I agree I think you should suggest that to the Yale administration they should do Yeah, I'll have to mention it to them Yeah There's so many other things too that we would need to learn but yeah, maybe even like a course in empathy as you mentioned would be great for us That would be a key aspect of the good teamwork above and beyond the communication skills and I used to do a little bit of that was working on graduate students with their communication skills because I have learned that it's all too easy to drift back into scientific jargon and so I used to when I would be at a party early in my graduate years and people would say, oh what do you do and I'd say well, I'm using upper and conditioning paradigm to study the photopic and scotopic spectral sensitivity of the African cyclic haplocromus brutonii and people were usually asleep or they wandered off by the time I got through that and I learned after a while to say instead I train fish There you go and that was much more effective way to communicate because immediately the questions would start flowing people, why do you train fish how do you train fish, what are you training them to do and the conversation flow and communication flourish so I learned that trying to simplify things down can be a very powerful thing and I used to work with the doctoral students at UW to train them to tell about their work in more accessible terminology and I think something because I can only speak from the scientist side and I know we're talking to an audience that might be able to know what makes this but we scientists actually really care that everyone knows what we're doing because we love it so much it's our passion and when they don't get it they have that starry-eyed look like oh yeah okay wow that's really cool but that's not what we like we actually like interacting with people and talking about our research because not only is it our passion and what drives us but we want other people to be enthusiastic too and for my case you're studying fish so I study RNA molecules and I think it's really cool how their structures work and how that goes toward how they function in a cell how they make things happen and it's just it's so important I'm so glad to hear that you're teaching these graduate students how to do it properly and I just want everyone to know that we actually do want we scientists, the scientific community really care about sharing our interests right I mean this gets back to Einstein's famous dictum that you really don't understand something well until you can explain it to your grandmother you know it is true well hey this has been a wonderful conversation and I very much appreciate your being on the show and sharing your very likable science and your very likable approach to science with me here and with our viewers and it's certainly I feel like I've learned a ton from you and that's that's always great I always feel like that makes for a good show I hope it's been a good experience for you and I hope perhaps I'll get you back at some point and you talk further thank you I appreciate that it's been a true pleasure to talk with you and I look forward to interacting with you more and I've certainly learned a lot too about what you said about the group Aristotle yeah really interesting so Tenea Valerie, a doctoral student at Yale University has been with us today and I hope you will come back and join us next week on likable science