My dreams 2016

Hope you don't get nightmares...

1.

I have to do an MRI experiment, of course. For that purpose I have to poke my participants with needels, lots of them, cause it’s fun to investigate suffering. But – oh shit, I think - the needels are magnetic. They’ll slice my poor participant into thousand pieces while being scanned. I lean into the MRI-scanner to my screaming participant and try everything to grap as many needels as many needels as I can reach but this hurts my participant even more. 

Versions of this dream include me trying to convince my colleagues that they can’t put the participant in the scanner prior to him being sliced up or added fun with two participants simultaneously. 

2.

My supervisor wants me to build an inside fantasy world on top of the research building. With parks and waterfalls and stuff. And of course an airport, cos s/he is busy so how else should s/he get there. I keep thinking that that’s impossible, an airplane can‘t land inside the top floor of a building. Furthermore the groundplan of that planned top floor is much greater then that of the building itself. I mention that, but my supervisor just says that if I’m too dump for that I shall just ask the experts. Unfortunately I’m having a hard time finding experts on top story fantasy word building. However, to my surprise one day the the site is finished and it looks good. However, I know that it isn’t, I know that it’ll turn into a disaster and of course I’m right. The plane flights through a tunnel, and which is connected to that top floor to land on the airport and first it looks like it might just work out but then there’s a wind or something, the plane bounces from one site of the tunnel to the other and everything falls into pieces. 

Versions of that dream include a lot of stress because the human recouses depart has disabled my card to enter the building and especially the top floor or me going for a check in the fantasy dream world before my supervisor visits and discovering plies of dead (park-) workers in a sideway. 

3.

I try to get somewhere. Home, to work, where ever. But of course I don’t manage to get there. 

I may take a plane, which flies way too low between the buildings of a random city. The plan has a steering wheel and somehow, I’m the one who has to control it and try to avoid hitting any buildings. But it doesn’t react to what I do. Furthermore I have to run back and forth between the uncontrollable steering wheel and the back of the plane where people want something from me, but I don’t understand what, so they get angry and everyone screams at me. It’s windy, too. Sometimes strong winds hit the plane from street canyons, and the damn steering wheel doesn’t react. Eventually the plane crashes, with its nose into the asphalt of a street. People are not pleased with that.

Or, I may try to take a train (maybe a good idea after all these crashed planes, one would think). But of course, it doesn’t work out. Purchasing a ticket can be a complicated matter, especially in (my) dreams. The ticket machine may calculate a ridiculously long journey with several overnight stays at scary rail stations for an actually short distance. Or the ticket machine explodes when I try to purchase my ticket. Or, what could be a nice dream but isn’t, the ticket machine gives me back way too much money. I don’t know what to do with it i.e. how to handle the situation and get the money I falsely received back to its rightful owner(s). I can’t leave it there, because then obviously someone will take it. I can’t take it myself because I don’t have enough pockets and I’m clumsy and drop it everywhere. While I try to pick one coin up again I lose 10 others. People chase me for the money. I forget the rest in the ticket machine. My trains don’t arrive and the prediction on which track they’ll arrive changes constantly. After some chasing over some tracks I decide just to wait on the track I’m at till my train arrives there. (Good plan, no? :D). But police is after me for the money I just wanted to bring to the lost-properties office. (Another great plan, right? …. That reminds me of a real situation in Munich where I found a 50 Euro note in a train (S-Bahn) station on the moving stairs. I was so confused by that, that I turned to the person next to me and asked him if it was his…..). I get arrested, my attempts to explain myself fail.

Alternatively I have a ticket, but I need to bring my little sister with me and like always the announced tracks change constantly. We chase through station hall after station hall without getting anywhere. I realize we need to get underground but the underground part of the station is all flooded. It’s supposed to be like that, it’s just me and apparently my sister who can’t breathe under water. Not only that, but there’s also an underwater obstacle course which we have to solve in order to get somewhere. Unfortunately I fail and my little sister drowns.

I spare you the versions of that dream in which I accidentally kill my grandmother, my father or other random people.

Sleep well.

What should you *ask* at an interview for a PhD position? (Part 1)

There are a lot of advice books out there which tell you what to answer to all those mean questions that you might be asked at a job interview.

They might be more or less useful. However, they never tell you what to *ask* in order to find out if a PhD-position is or isn’t a good one. (At least I haven’t found any book that tells that. And I read a lot of these books before applying to my PhD-position because relying on my social skills would have been foolish.)^[1]

But don’t worry, I’ll tell you ;).

Of course this list is subjective, but maybe it can give some ideas about what could possibly be relevant to someone who is looking for a PhD-position. Because at the time I didn’t ask any of these things. I was just glad they took me... :/

This first part is related to questions about the project you are applying for... further parts will be related to the supervisor/professor and the group you are (potentially) going to work with and the working environment.^[2]

Most often when you apply for a PhD-position in a specific project a short description of the project is given in the job-advertisement. But this description is generally very short and doesn't tell much at all what it's really about.

Therefore I think the supervisor or whoever does the interview should introduce you more to the topic, the background theories and how the specific question is planned to be answered.

With how I don't mean answers like "with fMRI" or "with TMS" (what most likely the job-description already tells), but a more specific explanation of the planned study design, so that you can (try to) judge if that is realistic to accomplish or not. For that purpose it would be useful to get a copy of the project-proposal. It would spare the supervisor time and you could assess by yourself if you think it's realistic. Yes, in theory any funded research project has already been through a selection process during which, among other things, the feasibility of the research idea should have been evaluated. However, that is the theory. It seems to me, that in practice no one in these selection committees does some basic reality checks. Therefore you’ve to do it by yourself. ^[3]However, a lot of researchers might not like to give their proposal out because they might fear that you steal their brilliant ideas. That is fine^[4], but in this case I still think they should give enough background information to make judgements possible.

Of course it is possible that the study design is not yet developed (though I think at least a rough study design should be part of the proposal). I think that that should be mentioned as it involves more uncertainty then.^[5]

So whether or not you get the research proposal, what are the critical points to check?

First, I think it is important information which population should be examined. Patients with rare disorders might be difficult or impossible to recruit for participation in a demanding experiment.^[6] That does not mean that such research should not be carried out. I doubt that difficulty in recruitment is related to the importance of the research, but it should be taken into account: You might end up with a very long recruitment phase and/or a very small sample size. So be prepared to conduct an underpowered study...

The other important factor is how many participants should take part in the study in total in comparison to the measurement time per participant and the available lab/MRI time. In general, the longer the experiment the lower the change to get enough time to do the measurements. Also take into account that one day has 24h available hours at maximum.

As next, I would consider number of methods to be learned. It takes time to learn to analyze an fMRI design, but there might be much more you have to learn. You might have to do additional MRI-recordings and analysis.^[7] Furthermore you may have to or want to run additional recordings in parallel to the MRI (like skin conductance, heart rate, breathing, or even EEG) or an additional part of the study might be done with EEG, TMS, eye-tracking, virtual reality or something like that. It might be exciting to learn a lot of methods; but it takes time. Therefore I think it is an important point to take into consideration. A finished PhD with just one or two methods is probably much more worth than an unfinished PhD with 10 half-learned methods. Of course a number of factors might influence how hard it is to learn various methods. I’ll speak about that in a later post.

It might also be important to ask if the project is already running and if so at which stage it is. I'm not saying it's good or bad if the project is already running, but it might be important information. You likely won't be involved in the experimental design then, but on the other hand data (to publish!) might be available faster (and: it's running!). The important question then is, though, to whom the data "belong", i.e. who is allowed to publish with them? This is a question that can lead to huge fights in some groups.

Speaking about already running experiments, I’d furthermore say that it is "dangerous" to start with any new method that has not been applied by anyone in the department/institute before. Even if it should work in theory (it surely should, otherwise no one would use it, right?) it might be that the hard- or software used at the institute is not compatible to what you (or the research proposal) plan. If you can check the compatibility, do so.

Also, whether you got the proposal to read or not, try to read background studies on the subject. If you got the proposal, you can find them by yourself, if you didn’t get it I think you should ask for them. The professor might tell you, that it is sufficient if you read them once you got the position (which may sound nice), but I think that is kind of too late.

Though it's still possible to terminate a PhD later (i.e. once you have enough insight into the project) it's harder because of the time you've invested.^[8]

So try to find out if the background studies are sound^[9], especially if it are background studies from the same department.^[10] And if you have to do a direct or indirect replication of work done previously by your supervisor, run away.^[11]

P.S.: Sorry for my english. I deleted about half of my text (bc too long), so I hope it makes still some sense...
And for the next post I'll complain about which handy feature the English language is missing.

P.S. 2: I really hope this is not misunderstood as advice on how to get an "easy" PhD. It's not meant to be! 

---

^[1] [Though, reading those books was already a good start into wasting a lot of time since I was not asked any of those weird questions during the job interviews (for what I should be glad). It seems social skills are not a selection criteria*. Obviously those questions might also be pretty unvalid and unreliable, especially if more people are like me and just learn the “correct” answer from a book, but considering all the unreliability of research I doubt that that is why they are not used to determine who’s a good candidate. *They might be success criteria though. More on that later.]

^[2] [This distinction is a bit artificial, but I didn't want to write an even longer post than I already wrote. Especially since not everything applies to everybody.]

^[3] [Although it would of course be better if a selection committee of experts did that and not a student who hasn’t even started a PhD-training yet.]

^[4] [I guess in some areas it's more realistic than in others.]

^[5] [If in need for a list what can go wrong, contact me ;) ]

^[6]  [For animal-studies it might be that some animals are difficult to get. For example mice with a specific gene modification. But I don’t work in animal-research, so I don’t know much about that.]

^[7] [Like, for example, morphometry, DTI (diffusion tensor imaging), functional connectivity (e.g. PPI), resting state analyses (e.g. ICA), MR spectroscopy, ASL (arterial spin labeling), or another fancy (new) method.]

^[8] [Time-investment sound way too nice... I don't want to scare anyone away from a PhD. Just choose the project carefully. Otherwise it might be more than just time.]

^[9] [or not less so than an “average” study]

^[10] [Which would not be surprising because it makes sense to build new work on previous work, but it can lead to a lot of trouble when they are... not good.]

^[11] [I think more replications should be done, because every study can have positive results just by chance. Together with a publication bias towards positive findings, this means that it is hard to know which findings to trust. However, I think that replications should be independent. Or preregistered with signed contracts that any result will get published from all parties involved.]