Written by Ian Carter-O'Connell
October 24, 2023
I came into the Scientific Mindset Program after being recruited by Professor Korin Wheeler, who developed the program to serve research students working at Santa Clara University over the summer. Faculty members, like myself, lead discussions on what it means to have a Scientific Mindset. Then, during the lunch period other faculty members would lead more DEI centered discussions. This program was created to develop our students’ entrepreneurial spirit and how we can prompt students to see themselves as innovative thinkers in research.
What are the connections between an entrepreneurial mindset and being an academic researcher? The idea - create a sense of belonging, and increase equity and inclusion, by bringing diverse opinions and backgrounds together while thinking about innovation in the lab. Each Wednesday for 10 weeks students received discussion prompts through an email from Professor Wheeler. Discussion focused on a wide variety of topics, ranging from “Patent Law” led by Professor Eric Tillman, to what I focused on, which was “Understanding a Failure Mindset and Growth Mindset” and thinking about how to approach research.
When starting research, not everything works exactly how I imagine. I actually want to set up failure as part of my practice. It means that I'm learning something new- that I'm at the leading edge of discovery. Learning how to be comfortable with failure, to become resilient to those efforts, is what really excites me! It’s a good topic for bringing students together with an overarching theme by building a sense of belonging through shared failure. The Scientific Mindset is an opportunity to bring our students together across many different disciplines here in the STEM Center and connect Physics, Biology, Biochemistry, Environmental Science, etc. It’s amazing to see the students work together in a very collaborative way to solve problems and start thinking about challenges with 50 to 60 student participants.
"Mistakes support learning and growing. How can we learn from mistakes and become better? We can reflect and discuss a scenario where the science is failing and your experiments are telling you something. The negative data is not useless. It's telling you something interesting, something vital; you have to be open to hearing it and the idea behind that is really bringing in that innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit."
Many students struggle with failure. Feeling like imposters, feeling like they can't do science because their results aren’t working for them. We try to challenge that preconception. Using some of the tenants established by the research team behind FLAMEnet (Drs. Jen Heemstra, Lou Charkoudian, and colleagues), I built prompts for our discussion that would start from thinking about failures in the lab and normalizing a failure experience with students. To start our discussion I shared examples about the times I have struggled and felt like things were failing (a not uncommon experience for me).Then students were asked to share their experiences in groups with the idea being that if they start to see that everybody in the room, their advisors, the professor, their fellow colleagues, all deal and have dealt with failure, then their failures are OKAY! Both to vocalize and have those feelings.
Mistakes support learning and growing. How can we learn from mistakes and become better? We can reflect and discuss a scenario where the science is failing and your experiments are telling you something. The negative data is not useless. It's telling you something interesting, something vital; you have to be open to hearing it and the idea behind that is really bringing in that innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit. You can build success from failure, and in fact, the most successful people have often been the subject of extreme examples of failure and they learn from that. That leads to character development, resilience, and an understanding that you can fail and then have another idea. That is so empowering. I want to leave the student researchers with the idea that they should go into the labs immediately…and start failing. As fast and as often as they possibly can, because they're going to be the ones discovering something new. That's awesome. Students start to become more comfortable with approaching problems in the lab. Their community connection is essential for that type of development as a scientist.
"Negative data is not useless. It's telling you something interesting, something vital. Be open to hearing it."
The aspect that really attracts me to the Scientific Mindset program is developing critical thinkers and I think that we're seeding curious people in the world. These students are going to go out and even if they don't stay in the lab, even if they leave science and they’re interested in other pursuits, we've hopefully provided them with tools where they can engage with interesting problems throughout their lives.
I want our students to be internally resilient and know that they can have unique and interesting ideas and they can avail themselves of resources that will allow them to challenge themselves. Ultimately, I hope that what they're taking away from the Scientific Mindset program is an innate feeling that they are capable of tackling really challenging problems. If we see enough people like that, we can really address some of the bigger challenges that we face. As a community, as a nation, and then as a species. I really think the more curious people we have the better odds we have of succeeding at the most difficult challenges.
Professor Ian Carter-O'Connell leads the Carter-O'Connell Lab at Santa Clara University which is devoted to training the next generation of researchers at the undergraduate level. Ian is passionate about seeing our world change through our future researchers who will be leading the next innovations.