finished 95% of your project to start writing because you’ll probably waste a lot of time if you do. By that time, a lot of data you collect may not be relevant to your narrative. Periodically you have to step back [from your bench work] to ask yourself: “What aspects of my project remain new and exciting?” By about midway through your project, you should start to see the big picture — which may be different than your original idea! — and you should focus your energy on that.”
“The writing that I’m most proud of was the same writing I struggled with most. It is a story for Notices of the American Mathematical Society about the research I’ve done, why I find problems in biology to be interesting to mathematicians, and how I learned to work with interdisciplinary collaborators. It was very daunting — there’s so much vulnerability in telling your story. What really helped was participating in the spring 2022 faculty writing retreat. It was great to be part of a writing community — to come together, set goals, learn some strategies. But mostly it was great just having people there and establishing that this is what we’re doing for the day. Writing doesn’t have to be miserable!”
“What I’d like to say to new graduate students rotating in my lab is: ‘What you’re really going to be doing over the next 4 – 5 years is you’re going to write a lot, so let’s focus on that.’ But I think that would scare a lot of people off. Recently I did focus on writing with a rotation graduate student – which I had never done before – and it worked pretty well. I had an idea for a synthesis paper that I wanted to work on and he wanted to engage at that level. He reviewed the literature that is relevant to the work he’d do if he joined my lab and, although I guided him to topics that I wanted him to think about, the project was open enough that he could explore and incorporate his ideas. It was fun! We had a live document and co-wrote it as a team.”
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