1/25/2021 0 Comments The importance of taking a breakIt is Saturday January 2nd, and I am cooking lunch before going into the lab. I had chatted with a friend a few hours earlier. “What are you up to today?” she asks. “Not much, I need to go to the lab” I say. “Why do you need to go to the lab if it is a Saturday?” “I need to go on most weekends” I explain. “The cells I am growing need daily attention.” My friend is a training surgeon, she understands and experiences an extensive work schedule, but she still says, “wow, if I had to go in every single weekend I would not like my life.” Interesting, I think, I know she works crazy hours and weekends, but the idea of going to work every single day upsets her. As postdocs, especially if working with living organisms that need daily attention, do we ever have breaks? I tried to remember the last time I had a full day without replying to an email or going to the lab, or writing a grant, or a paper. I couldn’t, even though I try very hard to have at least one day off every ten. As I thought about why it’s so hard to take a break, an experience from a few days earlier came to mind: it is December 22nd and I am in a meeting. Over the last couple of years, I have been fortunate enough to work with a multidisciplinary team, and am often the only life science expert. Currently, we are working on the development of a compound, and it is important to obtain one last bit of result before our imminent deadline. It is nearing Christmas, but the necessary experiment takes at least a week and requires an extremely difficult protocol, which was developed by one person and was not yet made available to the whole group. Unfortunately, we find out that this person will be busy and on holiday until the deadline. The team is upset and struggles to understand why the experiment can’t be run by somebody else or why this person can’t just make themselves available. Both of these conversations led me to think that there is a general misunderstanding on how much work and skills go into a lab-based research project. We, the postdocs, are often the people responsible for at least a couple of these, developing new protocols, studying one tiny detail after another to make experiments work, troubleshooting when they do not work (which is very often!). In our job, often one scientist holds most of the knowledge regarding a specific topic and can rarely be replaced without a substantial amount of training. In contrast, I think of jobs that are organized in shifts; at the end of a shift, the duties are passed to someone else who knows how to pick up where the former left off. Sometimes I think of what that would be like in my job, if I am in the middle of a complicated experiment and somebody comes to finish it off or more feasibly I need to change the media to my cells on a Sunday after a long week and somebody else is scheduled to do it instead of me. Wouldn’t that be nice! Of course, most jobs contemplate shifts because the service provided has to happen around the clock so overlap is necessary, but scientists often experience long hours and very rarely have anybody to pass the baton to. Holding most of the knowledge for one project means that when that project is urgent for whatever reason, it is hard to take breaks. This is often caused by self-induced stress for wanting to see the end of a specific experiment, or project, or wanting to meet a deadline. Sometimes this pressure can be triggered by a supervisor’s behavior, which creates a toxic environment and pushes their trainees to their limits. My science journey has taken me around six different labs and three different countries. Thinking back to my experiences, the labs with the most toxic environment were the ones where trainees were not willing to go that extra mile, there was no enthusiasm and, therefore, there was no self-induced pressure. There was, however, a lot of energy spent getting angry and frustrated resulting in poorly executed work. On the other hand, I have seen colleagues spending their nights and weekends relentlessly pursuing one project that was close to their heart, which showed passion but would also generate exhausted scientists not performing to the best of their abilities. It has taken me a long time to realize how fundamental time management is in our job. In fact, it wasn’t until the end of my PhD that I realized how important breaks are and how widely the amount of work someone can endure varies. A further confounding factor is the fact that often the work of a scientist, especially in academia, is taken for granted. A few generations of scientists think that, because we are often motivated by passion, it is only normal that we would spend nights, weekends, holidays in the lab. And it would be shameful to do otherwise. In my opinion, the new generation of scientists has the important task of drawing the line where it has not been drawn before. We must understand and educate our colleagues on what our limits are and how much work we are prepared to do. We owe it to the next generation of scientists and to science itself! AUTHOR Martina de Majo Photo by Manja Vitolic on Unsplash
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