Hello, you researcher. Awesome that you are exploring new frontiers and putting yourself at the edge of current knowledge. But working in academia, in addition to allowing the exquisite opportunity of learning something new every day and getting paid for that, may also take more time and energy than your average office job. Have you ever wondered why you sometimes (or oftentimes) sacrifice evenings, weekends and holidays to work? Have you ever felt underappreciated by your supervisors? Are you sometimes wondering whether you are doing the right thing? Then the Squeak may support your needs as one of the guinea pigs, yes – guinea pigs, of academia.
The Skinner box
A series of well-known experiments in psychology revolved around putting mice or guinea pigs into a box to get them to only show particular behavior. If you want a guinea pig to run on a treadmill before entering the next room in the box, you give it sugary water every time it shows this favored behavior, while giving it an electric shock every time it does not.
Such learning is termed operant conditioning and the box has been rebranded the ‘Skinner box’, after the psychologist who invented the technique. Although this guinea pig experiment may seem trivial, its relevance for daily life is evident when you find someone (or worse: yourself) in the candy aisle with a child that has been getting what it wants way too often.
Varying reinforcement is key
Strangely enough, if you really want a guinea pig to keep running a treadmill, you need to reward the wanted behavior only every now and then, and in an unpredictable manner. Only accepting one in ten grant proposals will make sure that a researcher just keeps writing and submitting manuscripts until she is successful. Sound familiar?
Starting off with a first internship, young researchers are taught to work hard, keep trying in light of failed experiments, and do better. They are rewarded mostly for the final product: the thesis. The five, thirteen or sometimes forty-six failed experiments are not acknowledged or reinforced in the thesis, nor are they explicitly rewarded as important parts of the research in conversations with supervisors. Varying reinforcement continues during the PhD project, where the first manuscript rejections based on soft criteria (what is ‘innovative’ or ‘impactful’?!) appear, the postdoc period characterized by ‘publish or perish’, and the conversion to faculty after which grant rejections greatly outnumber accepted proposals.
Guinea pig for life
There are few jobs that allow for such ephemeral, irregular rewards: most companies and employers have clear, SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based) goals for each worker that are regularly reinforced. (Positive or negative) results are measured and evaluated every week, month, quartile at the most, whereas scientific papers (and grant proposals, promotions, tenure tracks) may take years to be evaluated on rather loose criteria and are accepted only in a minority of trials.
Guinea pigs also have needs
This inherently delayed and rare reinforcement leads to perpetuation and persistence of the hard work that is needed to ultimately reach rewards, but it also impacts how we feel from day to day. It is sometimes pretty hard to get rejected more often than being rewarded. Some anonymous reviewer calling your work ‘the worst they have ever seen’ is not fun. And when all of our colleagues are also frantically pushing their levers, you might feel all alone. This may be one part of the reason why high rates of work-related mental health issues, including anxiety and depression, have been reported by graduate students (see here, here and here, amongst others).
Ask yourself: when was the last time you really felt appreciated by your supervisor, peers or colleagues otherwise? What was the appreciation shown for? How often do you congratulate your peers, not only on their measurable successes, but also on tackling the little hurdles that fill each of a long string of days or months leading up to a publication, and just hanging in there?
What is your skinner box?
And even more important: what do you do yourself to stay true to your own intention and motivation, instead of becoming a guinea pig just running the treadmill that your supervisors, journal editors, university board of directors, funding agencies put you in? Do you feel like you have the job control to make your research the best it can be, despite the selective reinforcement of particular behavior, and many other aspects of academia?
The Squeak
The Squeak caters to all researchers who want to run the treadmill every now and then, but also want to keep their own inspiration, intuition and investigation at the center of their academic life. The newsletter and its homebase (the Go Go Guinea Pigs website) aim to provide the next generation of researchers with insights on how to practically and emotionally deal with being a researcher in today’s academy.
But be warned: The Squeak will not contain numbered lists with ready to go solutions that apply to everyone, nor will it be a simple aggregation of the plethora of resources already available online (although interesting resources will certainly be shared). Every last guinea pig in the current academic system is running on his/her/their own special treadmill, which asks for a tailored escape plan. Up to you to craft yours!