So You Want to Be a Research Scientist

Here’s what they don’t teach you in graduate school

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Making a career as a research scientist can be the most fulfilling and life-affirming experience. Yet I have seen many students tempted by the prospect, only to retreat in short order to the relative comfort of engineering. They often interpret the pullback as a personal failure and a sign they’re not good enough. It’s never a matter of personal worth or talent, however. You need a different kind of temperament to thrive in a research setting, one that is often paradoxically orthogonal to what makes an engineer thrive.

Here are some of the dominant tensions I have seen researchers face at some point in their careers:

1. Research is about ill-posed questions with multiple (or no) answers

Your university training has largely taught you how to solve well-posed problems with unique answers. But treating research as an exam problem is a sure way to fail. Much of what you do in research does not get you closer to the answer, but rather enables you to understand the question better.

Measuring progress in units of learning, as opposed to units of solving, is one of the key paradigm shifts one…