Until now I have been doing my research as a computational biology PhD student for roughly four months. It is an undeniable fact that 2020 is an unusual year for everyone. Even for people like me who working with computer for most of time and requiring less physical interaction with colleagues, challenges are still unprecedented and different!
The first challenge come from things which I'm not familiar with before .I'm not totally a newbie in the field of bioinformatics. While my PhD group are doing more computational intensive projects compared with my precious projects. Many of these works are so called "Big Data" project so it's not rare for me to wait hours or days for computation results. I always feel bored at the time of waiting and basically wasting my energy on something more fun and easy in the meantime (Many possessing phones should understand this feeling). This is not efficient at all. I should figure out a better way to use this type of "free time" that my CPUs bring me. One efficient practice I can think of so far is to produce as many intermediate results/logs as possible (for both large time or memory requirement job ). Based on these intermediate data, I could debug problematic codes in the early stage instead of spending days to wait results and then realise all I got is wrong and have to run jobs all over again and wait for another several days for new results. Some intermediate data are actually part of final result to be collected and cured. Depends on project, there should be various ways to build pipeline to analyse final result based on these intermediate data or find a way to properly benchmark these data to think about potential improvement and possibly reasons when program doest not produce something as I expect.
Second challenge might be more common--social interaction with other people. It's not a secret that many PhD have less social events thus some of them may lack the essential opportunity to develop their ability to network with others. Of course this entirely depends on personalities of individuals and on their working environment. At least for me, I consider myself more introvert and need more chance to make improvements. The only way I find works for me is to push myself to join public events and group activities. The participation itself could only do me few benefits. The more important thing is to force myself to be more active in these event. For example, trying to ask some questions in meeting and seminars. The main goal of doing this is to improve my soft skills. But somehow I find this can also make me more concentrated so I can really learn something in these events. But again, deal to breakout of covid-19 in this year. Everything become unnormal and we may never go back to "normal situation" again. Many activities are now becoming virtually hosted. I'm still in the way to find best ways to improve my soft skills in this circumstance. Any feedback and suggestion would be appreciated. But in any sense, I guess trying to ask some questions should still be a good option although it's less challenging now.
Third challenge and this maybe the most difficult challenge for me as a PhD student. That's how to keep motivated and stay ease at the same time. Well, for the most of time, I'm interested of my project and PhD direction as more comprehensive understanding of protein networks will definitely benefit the whole human race in one way or another. Recently, I heard many young researchers said they are more frustrated than usual in the lockdown because they feel other professions are more essential and important for the society such as courier, cleaner ,cashier and so on. To some extend, I do agree they are right as personally I own many people a big thanks during quarantine. It's easy for me to picture myself a miserable life during lockdown without bus drivers, pharmacists, police, doctors, nurses...... However I do believe every profession is invented to fulfil social needs. We bioinformaticians or more generally speaking researchers, though we sometimes or even many times find our works are less practical and "useful". But everything we do will help us to understand our world and universe more. Every milestone technological revolution in the history is lead by scientists and researchers, which all tremendously helped to shape our world. Inevitably that only few researchers will lead these scientific breakthrough. But for sure everyone is building foundation and create conditions for the future geniuses to open the last door of next revolution.
But motivation and love of science is not everything , at least for me. Although I love my research , but occasionally I also feel stress out. I'm worried out my productivity. Am I as efficient and competitive as others? Could I produce something nice out of my projects? Have I really built right skills that will help me to find a jobs after graduation? There are just so many things I could be worried about. There are very tough moments for me to get over these ideas and these things make me really unrest. I sometimes become very inpatient and only want to produce result thus ignore to carefully analyse result and improve quality. What I can do so far is telling myself my ultimately goal is to do something I could be proud of myself instead of something easy to do but with little meaning of the community. What I really need to chase for not only in research but also in my life is to pursuing personal satisfaction/fulfilment instead of "achievement/success". I still have a long way to go in term of this. But this is life. I will survive.