In French, explaining science to a broad general audience is called “vulgariser”. To me, this French verb has a very negative connotation. The word implies popularizing science is something dirty. Surely something that should be avoided at all times. If a scientist wants to stay clean, he’d better stay away from translating his abstract ideas and complicated experiments into the daily lives of ordinary people.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Dutch science was without doubt world-class. The first Nobel Prize for chemistry went to the Dutchman Van ‘t Hoff. The first three recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics were either Dutch (Zeeman and Lorentz) or were partly educated in the Netherlands (Röntgen).  All of them were born in upper-middle-class families.

Entrepreneurship is a personal character that is mostly used for businessmen, but can also be found in scientists. In fact, as creativity is an essential ingredient for a successful scientific career, I may even claim that there sit more entrepreneurs in a research institute than a company, but I do not insist.

Some business-psychologists describe entrepreneurs as fire-starters because they love to initiate new projects and are always eager to bring a new idea, which they never lack, into reality. But, unfortunately, as soon as the project is in action the joy is over for the fire-starter. Soon it happens that he makes himself busy with a new idea and abandons the older one, even though the harvest time of the previous project has just started.

My first university course was in elementary calculus. The course itself was foremost a repetition of what we had already learned in secondary school and was therefore in itself not very interesting. However, those first days did learn me a lot about physicists. I was surrounded by nerds, geeks, whizzkids. Badly shaved guys, elegantly dressed with shorts, white sport socks, and sandals. Since most of them used to be the best of their class, they (and I am afraid I should include myself in this category) thought they were to a large extent omniscient. During the calculus course, they considered everything to be self-evident, exclaiming phrases like ”of course, tell me something new”. It was absolutely not accepted to admit not to understand something. Our ego’s created a non-critical atmosphere, in which questions were looked upon with suspicion. Indeed it was very unscientific.

Young researchers always are worried about their career and this makes them mostly confuse in their research field. There are bunch of stuff that they should take care of them, publication, new finding, skill, being update, searching next job, getting match with new team and even new research field or culture, etc. If you look back then you can see each of them is a big barrier for others.

In a recent post in Science Careers Blog Jim Austin argued that young researchers should get easier funding with science supporting agencies. That would be the best way to get them into the system.

I strongly object and put a reaction there, that I hereby reproduce:

This would be age discrimination. I agree that there is problem, but I think I have a better solution, or at least a solution that is worth discussing IMHO. A remedy that does not suffer from this type of discrimination. In what I suggest it is not the old guy against the young guy. It is the established scientist against the newcomer. To solve the problem at hand, in the Netherlands (physics) granting organization FOM, has come up with a scheme in which newcomers get an advantage by giving them bonus points. With these bonus points starters get funded (considerably) more easily.

To the scientist, the lab is like a church or a sanctuary, a micro-world where he finds a safe environment to develop his ideas, and where his jargon is well understood by his colleagues. The gospel he preaches is illustrated with graphs, and is proven beyond reasonable doubt with experimental data, up to three digits after the comma. He has become a believer of his shared truth, and he is prepared to evangelize his work to make this world a better place. The people he wants to convince are first and foremost the facilitators of his own work, his sponsors. Also, his friends and family need to be made part of his considerable contributions to society. Finally, the man in the street, the voter, has to be convinced of the importance of science, since politics can retrieve the money plug at any point in time. To do that, the scientist will have to communicate.

In my previous post I described why I find a two-day course, an ineffective training for reducing PhD-supervisor miscommunications. In this post I like to present a suggestion, which I think may be more effective.

By my critical essay I did not want to question the good will of the FOM personnel service and the trainers. Indeed, it is a great challenge for many PhD students to stabilize their position in relation with their supervisors. With all the respect for all supervisors, I also think that they are not classified as the best human resource managers, which is the main duty on their shoulders from the time they become group leaders.

A few days ago, I participated in the second day of the training course “Taking charge of your PhD-project”. This is a one-time mandatory course for all PhD-students employed by FOM, which I estimate to be more than 100 persons per year.

To make a long story very short, I must say I was deadly bored.

My impression from the whole course was the following: “A successful PhD is one who can manage his/her supervisor in such a way that he/she can write a thesis within the exact four years of his/her contract (so no prolongation). Within two days we teach you, all 10 students at the same time, techniques and skills you will need to control your disobeying supervisor.”

Young people, in tenure track positions, feel they to have to collect as many authorships as possible. Questions like “Will I be a coauthor?” and demands as “I have to be a coauthor” are part of daily conversations in science institutes.

But not only junior scientists are eager to boost their cv’s with authored papers. Seniors use their social status to fight themselves into the list of authors.

In a number of groups the list of authors is not discussed but imposed upon. The boss decides. Him being the last author is an axiom. The issue of free riders imposed by the boss, gives rise to a lot of frustration on the side of the first author.