“Starting at the beginning again can be exhausting and stressful. But, opportunities are finally coming into focus . . .”

Ashley Steel writes:

Walking away from science or walking away with science?

This is an essay about career transitions and the value of statistical thinking in, perhaps, surprising places. It is written in hopes of opening a conversation.

When my father, a kind and distinguished academic physician, gave me a chemistry set for my 12th birthday, it came with a notebook in which he had neatly written out on separate pages “introduction”, “methods”, “results”, “discussion.” I was only 17 or so when he called me into his office to question me as to why I had not yet published a peer-reviewed paper. He was holding a stack of applications and, apparently, several candidates for whatever position he was trying to fill had published scientific papers when they were in high school. When I tell co-workers that “publish or perish” is in my blood, I’m not sure they really understand how deep the roots run. And yet, one year ago, I sent a resignation letter to my scientific supervisor, packed up my entire house, and moved across the world for a position in international development.

A lot of people wanted to know why, including me. It was obviously the right decision but it was a difficult one to articulate, even in my own head. There were personal reasons such as the desire to live internationally and to be part of a global community. Those were the easy reasons. More problematic was an internal fear that I was running in the wrong direction. I was succeeding well enough in all the metrics: my H-factor, my ResearchGate score, the number of pages of my curriculum vitae, but the public’s mistrust of science, consistent and costly failures in statistical thinking, and the rapid pace of climate change were proving the entire endeavor to be, somehow, ineffective. The world was not broken for lack of scientific papers. The world was broken despite them.

When I was offered my new position, it was difficult to unearth much detail from the HR department. To gain insight, I sent an e-mail to the most senior person in my potential new department whose contact information I could find on-line. Within hours, we were on the phone. The job opportunity and the fast response had caught me a bit off guard and, in fact, on vacation in Scotland. From the back corner of a café-with-wireless in Glasgow, I plugged one ear with a finger, tried to sound both organized and dignified, and asked as many questions as I could. I learned a good deal about the new job but I was unable to convey my deepest concern.

After we hung up, I wrote this in an e-mail “My deepest concern is a potential loss of my identity as a scientist. It’s a bit silly on some level as I would gain a new identity. However, in all honesty, being a scientist is more of an identity than nationality or even topic of scientific research.… Would it be possible to be at [this job] and have an identify as someone who publishes the occasional paper, contributes to publications, and associates with students and universities? Although it is a challenge, I think it is both possible and in the best interest of [the agency] and students/universities. I am wondering if I am perhaps naïve to think this?” When we got back on the phone, she quite earnestly explained to me that the agency I was contemplating joining was a knowledge-generating agency and not a science agency.
Knowledge without science? For some inexplicable reason, this question motivated rather than undermined my desire to join the agency. Not because I thought there could be knowledge without science but because it was so clear in that statement that I had much to learn and, likely, much to contribute. I could bring my obsession with statistical thinking and apply it in a new way.

Six months later I was sitting in a community center with a dirt floor in southeast Zambia engaged in what I call “my second job interview”. I was initiating a relatively small field project and a senior leader from our partner agency had come across the border from Zimbabwe to meet me while I was in-country. I figured out as we were talking that his purpose in that community center was not to nail down project sampling details as I had originally thought but, rather, to ascertain whether I was worth his time at all. He had a lot of questions, mostly aimed at uncovering whether I had arrived in Zambia thinking I could save the world and whether I realized just how large the problem of poverty reduction really was. Sometimes I am tongue-tied but, occasionally, I know exactly what I want to say. Perhaps because these questions had been fermenting in my brain for half a year or more, it just bubbled out of me. I told him that so many well-meaning efforts ended in unintended negative consequences. There were only three things I was absolutely sure were positive: education, data, and collaboration. I must have passed the second interview because, now, I have a project in Zambia. And, I was on my way to, finally, being able to articulate my new mission.

As a professional research scientist, I was involved in education. I was educating undergraduates, who otherwise had lots of existing opportunity, about statistical thinking. I miss that but those students surely will get educated whether I am there or not. I was also educating interns and other scientists through mentoring and statistical consultation. My hobby was judging at science fairs. Some of these things are not possible in my new position but, with a little creativity, it is certainly possible to contribute to science and statistical education in new ways. Again, mentoring interns and informal statistics education are open doors. What about simply supporting and inspiring my field crew in Zambia to really understand random sampling or to go on for more formal education? What about designing a lecture series on statistical thinking that is relevant to staff at national statistics offices or to the knowledge-without-science thinkers at international agencies? Hard, but not impossible.

Data. I love honest data and I believe it is the only way to knowledge. Thoughtfully structured observations, compiled, analyzed, and well-communicated have been one of the few things to ever change the world in a positive way. There are mountains of data available in disciplines and arenas rarely touched by trained statisticians. Science is the way we can make those data useful. Clearly, a scientific approach to data is priceless in development work.

What about collaboration? When done well, science involves miraculous collaborations but collaboration and fostering collaboration have tremendous value well everywhere. I recently read a beautiful interview with a Tlingit native in which she recalls her father telling a politician to be more like a tree – holding hands in the roots, joining hands to prevent avalanches and soil erosions. I struggle to come up with an example in which collaboration is not positive. Sure, it is possible for two people or a group of people to conspire for sinister purposes. But, almost always, when people come together across belief systems, across continents, and across disciplines, the sharing of knowledge and the coupling of insight is positive. The newest and biggest challenges in science demand this type of cross-pollination and, although messy and complex, scientists rapidly gain experience in working across technical languages to generate new ideas that are bigger and better than the sum of the little ideas each individual scientist brings to a project. All stereotypes of nerdy self-serving scientists aside, collaborating effectively is something we know how to do and we know how to do well!

On, approximately, the one-year anniversary of the knowledge-without-science debacle, I’m hoping to open the conversation about career transitions and statistical opportunities in unexpected places. First, I am asking myself if I did the right thing. No. I am still sure I did the right thing. I am asking myself if I can finally articulate the reasons why it is a good thing. The answer, if you haven’t guessed it already, is that I was in no way walking away from science but rather I was walking away with science. Scientific, data-driven processes are in my blood. I suppose this is similar to the way an artist might feel about color. By choosing to step away from the world of H-scores and impact factors, I have dropped the metric-centric approach to science and am now trekking into new territory with old skills and experiences at my disposal, looking for exciting ways to inject science education where it is uncommon, advocate for unbiased data and analysis, and collaborate across worlds.

Perhaps a scientific career can be a process that begins with one’s first observations about the world and then moves from elementary science class to master’s thesis to post-doc. The next phases of a career are often about publishing simple papers, asking questions worthy of big grants, publishing more papers, and then publishing synthesis papers. Finally, one has to figure out how to leverage all that experience to make an impact in the larger world. Of course, many people get a master’s degree or a PhD and go on to use that scientific and statistical training directly in a wide variety of disciplines. Happily, those career paths exist, perhaps increasingly. Here, however, I am talking about those individuals who choose, as the main activity of the first 10 or more years of their career, science as a verb: the process of making structured observations in order to answer questions and then publishing descriptions of these endeavors in scientific journals.

Some of these scientific careers culminate in ever more impressive keynote lectures and others culminate in advocacy for facts and scientific content. Scientific careers, it turns out, might also culminate in advocacy for the process of science, the actions of science, in new and diverse arenas. Science pollinators perhaps? As a discipline, we have valued the careers of those who stay inside traditional confines over those who wander into new worlds. There are inspirational exceptions in scientific communicators, e.g. David Suzuki, and policy-makers, e.g., Jane Lubchenco, but the vast majority of scientists work mainly with other scientists. Science has, perhaps more than other disciplines, been cordoned off to universities, research institutes, and think tanks. Looking at the state of the world today, I think we can all agree that this has not worked well.

I’ve spent a lot of my career dreaming about how to wonderful it would be if lawyers, nurses, politicians, journalists, teachers, economists, social workers, writers, and international NGO staff had had better training in the process of scientific inquiry. I still dream about this and believe we should keep up the work in science and statistical education. Many great improvements have already been made. Science fairs, for example, can provide hands-on experiences that may be a reference point for life. But we can do more. We can incentivize and inspire humans long-trained in the process of scientific inquiry and statistical thinking to venture out beyond the scientific comfort zone, bringing their science with them. Just imagine an invasion of Congress by ex-science nerds, a hospital run by doctors and nurses who deeply understand p-values, or an NGO full of staff demanding confidence intervals and high-quality assessments of project effectiveness.

It’s not easy. It will demand some “significant” humility. Stepping into a world where no one really cares about your ResearchGate score or understands a little statistical joke can bring on an identity crisis. I speak from experience. And most of us don’t actually know how to do any other kind of job. Who knew? Starting at the beginning again can be exhausting and stressful. But, opportunities are finally coming into focus and, while I certainly don’t yet speak from the experience of having made an impact, I am watching a few role models carefully with hope and inspiration. It’s a path rarely discussed and not well-understood amongst those of us who trade in peer-reviewed papers and conference proceedings and so I am sharing my thinking, happy for the warnings and insights of others. Knowledge without science makes no sense. The world desperately needs an injection of science and statistical thinking well beyond the confines of the publish-or-perish world.

“Starting at the beginning again can be exhausting and stressful. But, opportunities are finally coming into focus . . .”

Ashley Steel writes:

Walking away from science or walking away with science?

This is an essay about career transitions and the value of statistical thinking in, perhaps, surprising places. It is written in hopes of opening a conversation.

When my father, a kind and distinguished academic physician, gave me a chemistry set for my 12th birthday, it came with a notebook in which he had neatly written out on separate pages “introduction”, “methods”, “results”, “discussion.” I was only 17 or so when he called me into his office to question me as to why I had not yet published a peer-reviewed paper. He was holding a stack of applications and, apparently, several candidates for whatever position he was trying to fill had published scientific papers when they were in high school. When I tell co-workers that “publish or perish” is in my blood, I’m not sure they really understand how deep the roots run. And yet, one year ago, I sent a resignation letter to my scientific supervisor, packed up my entire house, and moved across the world for a position in international development.

A lot of people wanted to know why, including me. It was obviously the right decision but it was a difficult one to articulate, even in my own head. There were personal reasons such as the desire to live internationally and to be part of a global community. Those were the easy reasons. More problematic was an internal fear that I was running in the wrong direction. I was succeeding well enough in all the metrics: my H-factor, my ResearchGate score, the number of pages of my curriculum vitae, but the public’s mistrust of science, consistent and costly failures in statistical thinking, and the rapid pace of climate change were proving the entire endeavor to be, somehow, ineffective. The world was not broken for lack of scientific papers. The world was broken despite them.

When I was offered my new position, it was difficult to unearth much detail from the HR department. To gain insight, I sent an e-mail to the most senior person in my potential new department whose contact information I could find on-line. Within hours, we were on the phone. The job opportunity and the fast response had caught me a bit off guard and, in fact, on vacation in Scotland. From the back corner of a café-with-wireless in Glasgow, I plugged one ear with a finger, tried to sound both organized and dignified, and asked as many questions as I could. I learned a good deal about the new job but I was unable to convey my deepest concern.

After we hung up, I wrote this in an e-mail “My deepest concern is a potential loss of my identity as a scientist. It’s a bit silly on some level as I would gain a new identity. However, in all honesty, being a scientist is more of an identity than nationality or even topic of scientific research.… Would it be possible to be at [this job] and have an identify as someone who publishes the occasional paper, contributes to publications, and associates with students and universities? Although it is a challenge, I think it is both possible and in the best interest of [the agency] and students/universities. I am wondering if I am perhaps naïve to think this?” When we got back on the phone, she quite earnestly explained to me that the agency I was contemplating joining was a knowledge-generating agency and not a science agency.
Knowledge without science? For some inexplicable reason, this question motivated rather than undermined my desire to join the agency. Not because I thought there could be knowledge without science but because it was so clear in that statement that I had much to learn and, likely, much to contribute. I could bring my obsession with statistical thinking and apply it in a new way.

Six months later I was sitting in a community center with a dirt floor in southeast Zambia engaged in what I call “my second job interview”. I was initiating a relatively small field project and a senior leader from our partner agency had come across the border from Zimbabwe to meet me while I was in-country. I figured out as we were talking that his purpose in that community center was not to nail down project sampling details as I had originally thought but, rather, to ascertain whether I was worth his time at all. He had a lot of questions, mostly aimed at uncovering whether I had arrived in Zambia thinking I could save the world and whether I realized just how large the problem of poverty reduction really was. Sometimes I am tongue-tied but, occasionally, I know exactly what I want to say. Perhaps because these questions had been fermenting in my brain for half a year or more, it just bubbled out of me. I told him that so many well-meaning efforts ended in unintended negative consequences. There were only three things I was absolutely sure were positive: education, data, and collaboration. I must have passed the second interview because, now, I have a project in Zambia. And, I was on my way to, finally, being able to articulate my new mission.

As a professional research scientist, I was involved in education. I was educating undergraduates, who otherwise had lots of existing opportunity, about statistical thinking. I miss that but those students surely will get educated whether I am there or not. I was also educating interns and other scientists through mentoring and statistical consultation. My hobby was judging at science fairs. Some of these things are not possible in my new position but, with a little creativity, it is certainly possible to contribute to science and statistical education in new ways. Again, mentoring interns and informal statistics education are open doors. What about simply supporting and inspiring my field crew in Zambia to really understand random sampling or to go on for more formal education? What about designing a lecture series on statistical thinking that is relevant to staff at national statistics offices or to the knowledge-without-science thinkers at international agencies? Hard, but not impossible.

Data. I love honest data and I believe it is the only way to knowledge. Thoughtfully structured observations, compiled, analyzed, and well-communicated have been one of the few things to ever change the world in a positive way. There are mountains of data available in disciplines and arenas rarely touched by trained statisticians. Science is the way we can make those data useful. Clearly, a scientific approach to data is priceless in development work.

What about collaboration? When done well, science involves miraculous collaborations but collaboration and fostering collaboration have tremendous value well everywhere. I recently read a beautiful interview with a Tlingit native in which she recalls her father telling a politician to be more like a tree – holding hands in the roots, joining hands to prevent avalanches and soil erosions. I struggle to come up with an example in which collaboration is not positive. Sure, it is possible for two people or a group of people to conspire for sinister purposes. But, almost always, when people come together across belief systems, across continents, and across disciplines, the sharing of knowledge and the coupling of insight is positive. The newest and biggest challenges in science demand this type of cross-pollination and, although messy and complex, scientists rapidly gain experience in working across technical languages to generate new ideas that are bigger and better than the sum of the little ideas each individual scientist brings to a project. All stereotypes of nerdy self-serving scientists aside, collaborating effectively is something we know how to do and we know how to do well!

On, approximately, the one-year anniversary of the knowledge-without-science debacle, I’m hoping to open the conversation about career transitions and statistical opportunities in unexpected places. First, I am asking myself if I did the right thing. No. I am still sure I did the right thing. I am asking myself if I can finally articulate the reasons why it is a good thing. The answer, if you haven’t guessed it already, is that I was in no way walking away from science but rather I was walking away with science. Scientific, data-driven processes are in my blood. I suppose this is similar to the way an artist might feel about color. By choosing to step away from the world of H-scores and impact factors, I have dropped the metric-centric approach to science and am now trekking into new territory with old skills and experiences at my disposal, looking for exciting ways to inject science education where it is uncommon, advocate for unbiased data and analysis, and collaborate across worlds.

Perhaps a scientific career can be a process that begins with one’s first observations about the world and then moves from elementary science class to master’s thesis to post-doc. The next phases of a career are often about publishing simple papers, asking questions worthy of big grants, publishing more papers, and then publishing synthesis papers. Finally, one has to figure out how to leverage all that experience to make an impact in the larger world. Of course, many people get a master’s degree or a PhD and go on to use that scientific and statistical training directly in a wide variety of disciplines. Happily, those career paths exist, perhaps increasingly. Here, however, I am talking about those individuals who choose, as the main activity of the first 10 or more years of their career, science as a verb: the process of making structured observations in order to answer questions and then publishing descriptions of these endeavors in scientific journals.

Some of these scientific careers culminate in ever more impressive keynote lectures and others culminate in advocacy for facts and scientific content. Scientific careers, it turns out, might also culminate in advocacy for the process of science, the actions of science, in new and diverse arenas. Science pollinators perhaps? As a discipline, we have valued the careers of those who stay inside traditional confines over those who wander into new worlds. There are inspirational exceptions in scientific communicators, e.g. David Suzuki, and policy-makers, e.g., Jane Lubchenco, but the vast majority of scientists work mainly with other scientists. Science has, perhaps more than other disciplines, been cordoned off to universities, research institutes, and think tanks. Looking at the state of the world today, I think we can all agree that this has not worked well.

I’ve spent a lot of my career dreaming about how to wonderful it would be if lawyers, nurses, politicians, journalists, teachers, economists, social workers, writers, and international NGO staff had had better training in the process of scientific inquiry. I still dream about this and believe we should keep up the work in science and statistical education. Many great improvements have already been made. Science fairs, for example, can provide hands-on experiences that may be a reference point for life. But we can do more. We can incentivize and inspire humans long-trained in the process of scientific inquiry and statistical thinking to venture out beyond the scientific comfort zone, bringing their science with them. Just imagine an invasion of Congress by ex-science nerds, a hospital run by doctors and nurses who deeply understand p-values, or an NGO full of staff demanding confidence intervals and high-quality assessments of project effectiveness.

It’s not easy. It will demand some “significant” humility. Stepping into a world where no one really cares about your ResearchGate score or understands a little statistical joke can bring on an identity crisis. I speak from experience. And most of us don’t actually know how to do any other kind of job. Who knew? Starting at the beginning again can be exhausting and stressful. But, opportunities are finally coming into focus and, while I certainly don’t yet speak from the experience of having made an impact, I am watching a few role models carefully with hope and inspiration. It’s a path rarely discussed and not well-understood amongst those of us who trade in peer-reviewed papers and conference proceedings and so I am sharing my thinking, happy for the warnings and insights of others. Knowledge without science makes no sense. The world desperately needs an injection of science and statistical thinking well beyond the confines of the publish-or-perish world.