Five Inevitable Tasks

Buckets on buckets on buckets. No matter how many you bring, you always need one more.

We’re so close to submitting our introgression manuscript!  This is always one of the most exciting, but also one of the most torturous stages of manuscript preparation. You’re so close to being done (at least until reviews come back), and at this point so tired of working on this one project. But, there are so many tiny little things you have to do before you hit submit- check, recheck, and triple check all your statistics, make sure the format is correct (every journal has their own requirements for what should be bolded, italicized, word counts, etc.), confirm the address of your coauthors, etc. The exciting science is basically over, and now it’s more administrational tasks. 
 
This is part of science and graduate school that I never knew about until I started down this path. I still have my fair share of days spent getting my hands wet, holding fish, analyzing data, and being generally confused. You know, all the things I knew science and research entailed. But, there are some jobs, and some parts of jobs, that I never really knew would be part of my career at this stage.
 
So, for all those out there feverously preparing their graduate school applications, or just wondering what it’s like to be an early career fish biologists, here’s the top five things I never knew I’d be doing at this phase of my career.

• Carry buckets of water- It’s the reality of fish biology. Field work of any sort is all about moving around heavy objects, the most common of which in fisheries is five-gallon buckets of water (and at over eight pounds per gallon, the weight stacks up quickly). It never ceases to amaze me that this profession revolves around $3 buckets from the hardware store, especially because they are not a particularly great tool for the job.  Buckets take up a lot of space in the truck, hurt your hand when full, and your data could instantly go swimming downstream with one wrong step (which isn’t hard to do when you’re falling over slippery rock all day…yes, falling…learning to walk quickly through a stream is just learning to fall gracefully all day). Nevertheless, a career in fisheries is a pledge to carry around buckets of water for the rest of your life.
• File permits- As an undergraduate doing research, I simply hopped in the truck and carried around the buckets of water.  I knew there were some important papers we needed to keep in the clipboard, but I didn’t think much beyond that. Nowadays, the behind the scenes responsibilities are largely mine, and a large part of that is filing for all the proper permits.  Scientific collections, state forest agreements, state parks, animal care and use, etc. There’s no end of people that want to know exactly what you’re doing and on what species. That’s probably not surprising- it’s important to have research accountability.  What is surprising is sometimes the level of detail the permits need. Number of fish of each species you plan to collect? Proof the project leader (usually the graduate student) has years of experience electrofishing and handling fish? Exact GPS coordinates for your 60+ study streams? How fish will respond to having three of their gill filaments removed? How your research could negatively affect the endangered flower species that might be there? All common requirements for the various permits I’ve done on this project, and in many cases all questions I had no idea how to answer at first.
• Email- Here’s another example of something I had the wrong impression of as an undergraduate. I used to check my account multiple times a day in anticipation for what new messages might be waiting. And, when I emailed professors, I didn’t understand why sometimes my message would get lost in their inbox or not get a response for days. My apologies to any professor who I made slighted comments about ten years ago. I am now living your email hell- albeit only a rookie version as grad students only receive a small fraction of the emails that professors do. But, I still receive hundreds of emails a day. About 80% of messages are academic spam- emails sent from the university, but not actually pertinent to me. But, I have to at least skim them because, unlike real spam mail, there is some chance I do need to know the information. The other 18% of emails need my direct attention, and usually need some sort of reply to acknowledge receipt. Often I just need to send a quick reply. Other times I need to craft a very thoughtful response, and so I save the email and hopefully (but not always) try to remember to respond later.  The other 2% of emails get sent to my junk folder, which I rarely check.  Most of those emails are truly junk, but every time I check the folder I realize that somehow the emails from a close friend, coauthor, or other legitimate person get flagged as junk and I have to apologize for not seeing their message for some embarrassingly long time. Between it all, it’s not hard to spend hours a day just interacting through email.
• Do the dishes- Literally, and figuratively. When I’m working in the lab, I do more loads of dishes for work than I do at home. But, I use this phrase a bit figuratively to mean “do the small stuff.” Label vials, charge batteries, pack the bags, gas and load the truck, create datasheets, order supplies, check the weather, clean the tools, etc. For every hour of field/lab work, there is probably five hours of preparation that goes on behind the scenes that is really hard to appreciate unless you are the one directly doing it. A lot of it is technician work, but as a graduate student you don’t often have someone working with you to get these tasks done. I often lack the time to “do all the dishes,” and so some of these tasks often get pushed to the side.  My truck is infamously messy (some of this is my personality, but you can also go to the field with a messy truck, you can’t go if you didn’t charge all the batteries) and I may forget to toss the trash at the end of the day.  One day I will have technicians to help with these tasks, and when I do I’ll try to remember that “dish skills” are just as important as actual data collection.
• Read Wikipedia- I’m not joking. When I started college I had no idea what Wikipedia was, but was quickly told that it was not to be used as a source of reliable information. What terrible advice.  Sure, I can’t cite Wikipedia for scholarly article, but where else am I going to find both a concise summary and very detailed explanation for all these terms and concepts that I never remember?  And, let me tell you, I NEVER remember a lot of things. I’m (hopefully) almost a PhD in Ecology and I’m embarrassed by some of the things I don’t know.  I thought I’d be smarter by now, but at least there’s Wikipedia. 

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