If I were to look back a few years to the final year of my undergraduate degree I would not have thought that if I choose to do research in psychology then majority of my time would be spent on creating stimuli using 3D modelling software, programming experiments and writing code for data analysis. I was so concerned with learning theories that I did not pay attention to how exactly those theories were tested out and the amount of effort and skills that are involved in designing an experiment. Rewind the time one year forward, to my master’s degree, my eyes were wide opened, and my confidence received a knock down as I realised how multifaceted research is and how limited my skills are. In that time, I was introduced to the great and wonderful world of R (those were not my initial thoughts about R and it took me over a year to appreciate its true magic). This was one of the most useful things that I have learned as it has improved my understanding of data analysis, made my research more reproducible and has allowed me to develop logical thinking that I can transfer to other programming languages. And I firmly believe that this is a skill worth persevering with as it is a skill that will be used again and again, and it is relevant outside of a research setting. However, there are many other things that I have attempted to master and will need to master, the utility of which is not that clear.
Now that I am half way through my PhD (scary) I am no longer oblivious to the time and effort that is needed to design good experiments that would allow me to address the questions that excite me and got me to the PhD in the first place. And given this increased understanding, a question that I ask myself very often is: What skills should I develop in the limited time that I have during my PhD and what things are better left to the experts?
In my field, virtual environments are very frequently used in experiments as they allow assessing navigation abilities and spatial memory in more immersive and realistic setting. Many of those environments are very complex and take months to be developed. Letting an expert do it, has many benefits with the most important being TIME (the most valuable commodity during a PhD). Even familiarising oneself with particular software and figuring out the jargon takes a while (usually longer than anticipated), whilst someone who has spent their whole degree doing this will be able to create those environments at a fraction of that time.
Given my own personal experience of creating some fairly simple virtual environments, they are likely to be sub-optimal, as one has to get by with limited skills and that is what I have been doing so far when creating my own experiments. As a result, leaving something that requires specialist and complex skills to an expert can also improve our research by making the stimuli that we use better and more realistic! This, however, can be two-sided as I’ve heard of stories where game-design students were paid to create an environment for a navigation experiment, and although the environment looked great and was super realistic, it was unusable for research purposes as the textures were too heavy and the experimental software couldn’t handle it. This is amongst other difficulties that can arise if we get experts in other areas to create things for us, it is easy to forget that they are not necessary experts in experimental design!
Other difficulties that can arise are inability to make minor changes due to specific ways that the specialist has gone about creating the task, meaning that your progress becomes dependent on their willingness to respond and help you out once their main job is complete. There are also extra complications that come with ensuring that the tasks are completed on time and to the agreed standards and given the relatively low position of PhD students in the food chain, it is often difficult to manage people.
However, I think that the question is a philosophical one. It is common to feel, especially during a PhD, that everything should be done by yourself and there is almost a negative attitude towards getting help and especially paying someone to help you. I sometimes find it difficult to avoid thinking that at if I get help that would mean admitting that I am a failure and not smart enough. This is largely fuelled by the pressure to be good at everything to even have the slightest chance of securing post-doctoral employment. Amidst all of that it is easy to forget that we should primarily focus on advancing and improving science and potentially addressing questions which have important implications for humanity. With that thought in mind, the prospect of spending less time on technicalities and more time on coming up with research questions through reading, thinking about the paradigm and best ways to analyse and interpret the obtained results might be more valuable then learning yet another software programme, that you might only use once in your entire career. After all we are also experts in our field, with certain skills that other specialists do not possess, and we should use those skills.
My personal verdict is such: If I choose to follow an idea in my PhD which requires some more complex 3D modelling and use of virtual reality software, I will learn the basics to have an understanding of what the expert has done and to enable me to observe their progress to ensure that the environment will be usable for experiments but I will leave the complex model to the experts. And the reason why I would do this is because for me it is more important to spend the limited time that I have left on designing the best paradigms and data analysis plans to address the questions that have arisen from my previous experiment and will benefit my research field rather than spending weeks on the technicalities and most likely ending up with a sub-optimal model due to my lack of knowledge and experience in this area.
With that in mind, my take home message is that we should remind ourselves that one cannot be an expert at everything leaving us with a difficult choice of which battles are worth fighting for!
Psychology from room 207A 