Side projects are a funny thing in graduate school. Grad students seem to commonly get sucked into a series of side projects, yet their “main projects” don’t just magically go away so there is no need to worry about them. So far in my research “career” of about 7 years, it seems that a mixture of side and main projects is important for research success, but that mixture should not be maxed out to the point of burnout. In this reflection, I will talk some about my experiences managing side projects, and how this balance leads to a greater chance of success because of chance of failure of both side and main projects. It is uncomfortable to talk about failure. Many people try to avoid it. However, it is important that researchers and future researchers hear about the near inevitability of failure in research. Sometimes, research projects fail. Academics also know the pain of rejection in the publication and grant application process. Acceptance rates are small for grant applications. Tenure track position applications are even worse. Many will apply for 100+ positions and only get 1 interview. Aspiring academics and researchers should be prepared to face that harsh reality. Thankfully, some academics are starting to talk more about failure in research by creating a “shadow CV” or “CV of failures” which is a list of failed projects, rejected grants and publications, etc. But here I will only talk about the first part, when research projects fail. Sometimes, main projects fail and side projects succeed. Other times, side projects fail and main projects succeed. (And maybe there are a handful of instances where they all fail or all succeed). It is hard to know from the outset which projects will succeed and which will fail, even when taking your advisor’s advice and guidance into consideration. I have had a decently wide array of success and failure in research projects, which I discuss below. When I worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 2017 and 2018, one of my side projects turned in to my main “success” (in the typical academic sense, referring to a publication). While my main project of about 6 months of full-time work, assisting in synthesis and characterization of PdSe2, was successful and led to a publication, I was not given authorship for silly political reasons, so I have little to show for it. One of my side projects, which was coding an in situ monitoring system for pulsed laser deposition synthesis of 2D materials, gave me not one but two co-authored publications (and an Outstanding Scholarly Output team award) for work that I did in the last three months of the 16 months I worked there full-time. In my 2018 stint specifically, I was in charge of building a scanning photocurrent microscope. While we did achieve some success, further refinement (particularly of the beam spot size) was necessary before publication quality results could result. I am unsure what happened to that project, as I did not receive a reply to email in September 2019 asking about it. Last I knew, an importance piece was ordered and set to arrive after my internship ended. I had two other side projects that I did not have sufficient time to complete or make significant process on, one of ended in a publication (though my contribution was negligible so I was unsurprisingly not on it). One final side project was writing a review paper on perovskite solar cells, which was an extraordinarily daunting task for an undergraduate with no experience in perovskite solar cells. Though I spent countless hours (including multiple sleepless nights over my Christmas break) reading hundreds of papers, and writing a forty-page literature review, I was unable to tun the review to be publication quality. The feedback I received from my mentors was less than enthusiastic (and were uninterested to help me finish), and looking back at the paper now, I can see their critiques easily. Going from not knowing anything about a field to writing a review paper on it in six months is…ambitious to say the least. Not smart and not a good use of time is probably a better way to describe it. However, that review paper has served as the primary motivation for my class project this semester for my Materials Design Studio course, as I am applying machine learning to a perovskite solar cell database using insights from I gained from that review paper process. The class project *might* turn into a publishable result, but it is far too soon to say (I am not even sure I will or should pursue it). Before my ORNL experience, I worked with Micah Green in the TAMU chemical engineering department. Early on, I hopped on to a PhD student’s project and helped him finish out the last steps of the project, earning me authorship on a publication. Then, I tried to expand this work, extending a nanomaterial ink coating method for 3D printing to produce conductive printed parts, writing my first undergraduate thesis on the topic. My lab partner and I were having some technical difficulties getting the conductivity we wanted, my partner graduated, and I was becoming more interested in fundamental science and physics rather than engineering, so I switched lab groups. The project was dropped by Dr. Green to focus on other projects, such as one of my earlier side projects. The side project was to create an array of carbon-based pixels that could be heated by applying voltage that could create a thermal image, and this project was carried on by a lab mate into a publication. Finally, that leaves my current research group with Xiaofeng Qian in the materials science department (at least for the part of my research experience I am going to discuss). I have had one main project since I started halfway through my 4th year of undergrad (January 2019). I wrote the first stage of the project for my second undergraduate thesis in spring 2020. I had a full draft for publication sometime that year. Long story short (which I may tell later), it was just recently accepted for publication, thankfully. I have started work in another primary project that is even more condensed matter physics-heavy, which I am excited about. One side project is currently being head by a lab mate. Another side project I hope to write up for publication this summer. A final side project, which I proposed to work on for the NSF GRFP in 2020, was scooped in March of this year. Although they did not do calculations on the specific materials I was interested in exploring (along with their stability), and we can do some calculations that the paper did not cover, it was the same general class of materials, pentagonal 2D materials. My advisor thinks that this is sufficient to neglect work on that project and focus on other more impactful and interesting projects. Reflections While my research experience is a bit of a graveyard of dead side and main projects, there are the gold treasures in there that were able to be published, and for that I am very thankful. My key takeaway is that even with equally good scientific basis for a project, you just do not know what projects will fail and what will succeed. Some perfectly legitimate projects may end up crashing and burning horrifically, while some stretch ideas might accidentally succeed through l̶u̶c̶k̶ divine providence. Sometimes, research projects might actually require decades of development in a neighboring field in order to overcome certain obstacles. Sometimes, you may get scooped. My takeaway: do not become so attached to a single project that your research career lives or dies with that one success. Get your hand involved in multiple projects, collaborating with lab mates, and your chance of publication will be maximized. On the other hand, there is life-work balance and issues with overcommittal. You don’t want to get involved to so many projects so that you don’t make progress on any. I like to have at least a solid 2 projects going so that I can work on one when another hits a brick wall. I can’t say I have settled into an optimal routine, as I transitioned in to graduate school during the pandemic, which contributed substantial mental stress and threw off my productivity quite a bit, which led to a runaway reaction of increasing activation energy to work on manuscript revisions that I had been staring at for way too long. Now that that publication has been accepted, I can hopefully reestablish a routine for the last months of graduate school. While graduate school can be high-stakes and high-pressure, constantly feeling like everyone is telling you that their project is most important, and your advisor may be inconsistent with trying to instill all six of your projects as being top-priority work, it is important to take charge of your life and your projects in a healthy way and find a system of productivity that works for you, and you can work with your advisor to come to a happy equilibrium.
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