The questions of all questions

What is the research question you want to address in your future?

At the moment I hear this question quite often, and it always induces a quite high level of stress. My heart rate increases, I am blushing, I start sweating and my english sentence structure could be downgraded to level A. I always thought I am prepared for this question but until now I have no way how to deal with it. This question is even worse than 13 years back after finishing high school when parents and teachers (and all other sorts of adults) asked, “What do you want to do with your future?” The plain and simple but very true answer is, “I have absolutely no idea!”

Although I clearly did not feel like that during my academic training, but now looking back starting an Undergraduate, a Masters and even a PhD was relatively easy. The only thing you needed to do is finding a rough topic you like (let us take Microbiology as an example), finding a supervisor that seems not evil (most likely a lecturer that did not make 50% of the students fail in every exam and you did not fall asleep during lectures) and maybe having some good grades in your most important exams. Once all the formalities were settled, the supervisor came up with a brilliant project that was ready to go and you could dive into labwork immediately. Very often, a previous student did even acquire some preliminary data for you and you felt like the raising star in science. Although PhD life is clearly more frustrating than that (this is completely different topic on its own), the intellectual parts of your project – at least from the beginning – were done by someone else.

Starting a postdoc was already more difficult, although also here there were quite some suggestions of what could be done. With some help from fantastic people I somehow managed to write my first own fellowship application for a research project of 2 years and to my surprise, it was successful. Already then, I had quite a high number of sleepless nights before the project plan was defined. I realized that this was literally the first time in my scientific career where I had to do the thinking. I am not talking about coming up with your next experiments and how to interpret some weird looking (and most likely controversial) data; I was working independently on that early on in my PhD. I am talking about developing your own research idea from scratch, which is highly innovative and exciting, a little bit risky but not too risky to achieve, doable in a specific amount of time and most importantly indispensable for the continuation of mankind ( we all want to cure cancer of course!) As I had already started some work and some more experienced people had their magic hands involved, I managed to come up with “my own” project. And still I am pretty proud of this.

Now, I want (I really do want! However, in stressed times I need to remind myself every day.) to start my own research group. My supervisor and mentor is very supportive and clearly helps me finding my way and encourages me to do this step. I have published well, presented my work at important meetings to be visible in the community, shown that I can get some money, have supervised some people, so I am all ready – although I am in a constant fight with my inner self to find out if I really feel ready. The only thing that is missing is developing my own research idea from scratch, which is highly innovative and exciting, a little bit risky but not too risky to achieve, doable in a specific amount of time, indispensable for the continuation of mankind (rember to cure cancer), outlined not only for yourself but for other people you want to employ, well costed, collaborative, better than 80% of all other research proposals, backed-up by some preliminary data to prove that your crazy idea is doable and most importantly completely independent from your previous supervisor but not too far off your topic as otherwise you would not have the expertise. That sounds impossible – at least it does to me. I have quite some ideas about what I want to do (and at least I think they are quite exciting), but whenever I walk into the office of my supervisor, convinced that this is the genius breakthrough idea that will win me every grant in the world, I come out in tears with the echo in my head. “So what is your specific question you want to answer and what is your hypothesis?” After these meetings, I blame myself for shooting so high. Why am I so stupid that I want to apply for research grants after only 2 years as a postdoc? Why did I not become a lab tech that can forever work in the lab without doing all of this? Or even better, why did I not become a baker? I love getting up early and there is nothing better in the world than the smell of freshly baked bread in the morning.

Is this only so difficult for me? Am I just not good enough to become an independent scientist yet or will I ever be? I wished that our academic training would prepare us a bit better for these tasks so that we don’t need to jump into the cold water when there is no other way out any more. I know that my mentors are right and this is what I need in order to be successful and I am grateful that they push me into this direction, but it is really difficult. I am really nervous and scared that I will never come up with my own idea, but for now I just chose the male approach: I get it out of my head, pretend that the problem does not exist and hope that this issue will be solved on its own at some point. In the meantime I am working happily in the lab on some exciting new experiments that were made up in my own head.