You Caught Me I'm a Fraud

When nagging my siblings and I to do a chore or simple task, my mom frequently whips out “you can do it, not like it's rocket science”. Until I began college, I never felt that I was challenged enough for some assignment or activity to reach the “rocket science” hardness level. Then I waltzed, metaphorically because class was on zoom, into a physics class freshman year and I realized “holy shit, I’m doing rocket science”. From then on more and more of my coursework met my completely subjective threshold of “rocket science” difficulty. I found that there were no more easy classes I could put on the back burner. I really had to hunker down and dedicate lots of time and energy to even grasp many concepts. 

My biggest challenge to date has been organic chemistry. The content pace and four hour labs proved to be grueling every week. Looking back, that's when I began to cut corners or take some “researcher degrees of freedom”. Rather than getting points off my lab reports for producing incorrect hypotheses, I’d write them at the end of my experiments. I’d stop reaction refluxes at the “correct” temperature rather than actually watching the mixture and determining if the reaction was complete. I’d conveniently only report two or three successful experiment steps rather than documenting observations from the whole procedure. At the time I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, as my actions only led to favorable grades and ultimately allowed me to pass the class. I now realize along the way I missed out on so many learning opportunities and compromised the integrity of my experiments.

I made all of these choices in the pursuit of a grade. Maybe that’s on me for forsaking learning from my failures, but I believe it speaks to a conundrum in the education system and greater system of scientific discovery. Since everything is results driven, people will take extreme measures to achieve results. If a student doesn’t pass a certain number of classes, they’ll be expelled, just as a researcher will lose funding if they don’t produce a new discovery or product. It takes an immense amount of discipline and compartmentalization to preserve the scientific process when you know that a non-result could impact your future. 

When you add pride into the mix things get ten times worse. My pride led to my mistakes. Remember when I said I passed my organic chemistry lab? Well I didn’t just pass, I got an A-. Please hold your applause, it's an A-. After that semester I got to go around telling all my friends and family that I got straight A’s. For a few brief moments I got to hear all the oohs and ahhs about how smart I was, but was it worth it? Could I go back into the lab and redo one of those experiments without error, nope. The fact that I tie my academic success so tightly to my sense of self has led to me being a not so great student. I assume this is true for researchers too. When thousands of submissions are being sent to the proportionally small amount of journals, some researchers may sacrifice their integrity to ensure that they can add another publication to garnish their resume. Others may be so passionate and engrossed in their work that they unintentionally apply their bias to the research. Regardless of the intention, allowing one thing to dominate your sense of self can lead to crossing lines and losing the true purpose of the pursuit. 

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