Derek Lowe offers another Law of the Lab, and it’s a good one:
Today’s law is: You are in real trouble if someone knows more about your project than you do. That’s a realization that hits people at some point in their graduate school career – preferably not much past the midpoint. It marks the transition from being a student to being a working scientist.
Back in grad school, I had a slightly different spin on this. I used to say that getting a Ph.D. requires that you become the World’s Leading Expert in something that nobody else cares that much about. It’s a cynical spin on the same basic idea: the important thing is really that you be the World’s Leading Expert in whatever it is that you’re doing, because if you’re not, you’re not doing the job right.
That is what my PI tells me – at the time of the defense, there will be nobody in the world, him, included, who will know my stuff better than I do. If I can remember what my stuff was…
This is quite timely. I just got the preliminary speaker list for a conference I’m attending. The speaker right before me is presenting a talk in which she is discussing similar data to mine but from a different organism. I also think she may present the same model I will to explain her data. That said, my stuff is cooler because I think I go beyond what she is doing (judging from the titles, because they do not provide abstracts on the website).