Silver linings - a brief post about our team of researchers

While I've openly shared troubles with obtaining funding for the lab on academic social media, I remain optimistic that one of the two grants that are currently under consideration will get funded. We will also apply for more this year. While I see many posts on Twitter about how frustrating the grant writing experience is, I actually enjoy writing grants for the sole purpose of refining my ideas and making them more concrete. So I don't mind continuing to apply until we find some success. This post however is about something different. 

In the three years of our existence, students have gone in and out of the lab. In the initial few years, I accepted applications very liberally thinking that it was my duty to help whoever came to me but it turned out to be a very counterproductive exercise. I ended up spending tens and hundreds of hours trying to motivate a few students who inherently had very different goals from what they told me in our initial meetings.  Even more problematic than the time I spent was that other lab members also had a difficult time with some interpersonal issues cropping up frequently with some of these folks (see https://mandalabodyssey.blogspot.com/2023/12/create-positive-feedback-loops.html for a related post). It took me time to understand this and have better hiring practices in the lab. A PhD and a postdoc don't train really you for such HR stuff, the only way to learn it is through experience. However, now, we have more robust processes in place to ensure that the people who do join the lab do so with the right intentions and are able to get along with others. This is extremely important to ensure a good working atmosphere for everyone. 

Sometimes, things did not work out simply because of mismatches in expectations and in such cases, I've tried to find those students a place in another lab that better matched their skill set and expectations. Recently, one such student graduated from another lab and came to me wanting to fund a student in my lab out of their own pocket (!). I was surprised and said "I thought you didn't have a good time here in the lab" and they said that it was quite the contrary and that they appreciated the time I put into their training while they were in the lab and for making sure they found a position elsewhere that put them on a path to success.

With that context, I am extremely happy that our team has now expanded by adding two PhD scholars to the lab. It is absolutely clear to me that all three of our PhD scholars are ambitious and have genuine interest in the field. So it is now up to me to ensure that I don't kill that enthusiasm (often mentors just have to get out of the way and that is something I'm still learning to do well). Our MS by research students are also doing quite well, IMO. Dual Degree students have their own challenges to meet (a post for another day) and our current DD students are making reasonable progress towards their thesis. So, it seems like we have steadied our ship somewhat by assembling a great team despite the hiccups in the first couple of years. Most gratifying to see is that most of them seem to be really good friends with each other. This really is the sort of team I've been wanting to assemble. We've had many great meetings over this last summer and developed some good lines of research. Many experiments are being designed in the lab. We are currently restricted to doing behavioral studies with participants drawn from courses in exchange for course credit where appropriate due to not having money to run paid studies. We have also started collaboration talks with like-minded teams from better funded labs who have machines lying unused and some spare funds for running studies. I'm hoping that some of those materialize and keep us going at least until one of our grants gets funded. I also plan to ask IIITH for some money for these studies as I really think it is just a matter of time before a grant agency sees value in our ideas and has confidence in our ability to implement them but we need to be able to generate data and papers if we are to convince grant agencies of our ability! This is why institutions need to invest some money into their new faculty and help them set up their laboratories and data collection infrastructure but not every institution is rolling in money like the IITs and IISc's of the world. Regardless, we will find a way forward. Good teams make things happen.