After months of work you have your plan, permissions, and pecuniary support. Now it’s time to get your project underway.

Running the Study

At some point, you might wonder just why you’ve voluntarily undertaken the task of not only monitoring the lifestyle and behavior of twenty to thirty college-aged subjects, but also of keeping up with your lab assistants.

First, the subjects. It’ll start well at first: high compliance levels on diet and activity, and there might even be a sense of nervous excitement in your subjects. Then they start dropping out. Maybe it’s the training regimen, maybe it’s getting biopsied, but at some point a few subjects will call it quits. Then another will sprain a knee playing basketball. Another starts showing up so hungover that his sweat smells like Natty Light, but he never mentions the drinking in his diet logs. Two of your controls turn up one day covered in bruises that look oddly like Greek letters—guess what, despite the odds, you have two whupped post-hazing guys from the same frat in the same group.

And somehow you’ve got to get this morass ferried back and forth between two schools for DEXA scans. Given your gaggle, that might mean contracting vans through your transportation department, and completing all the lovely insurance information that goes along with it.

At least you have three good assistants to play personal trainer and help collect samples—until one catches mono and drops out for the year. All of a sudden, you’ve lost a third of your team, and the two remainders are respectively considering taking Adderall and switching to a communications degree. It gets a little worrisome when you start finding pizza boxes and empty cans of Red Bull in the lab and realize your helpers are sleeping in the lab just to stay on schedule.

This wouldn’t be so bad if you had some flexibility.  Unfortunately, you’re locked into your budget and have to amend your methods and materials with your granting agency.  You can’t even just go out and buy stuff when you need it—you have to requisition through your school. And your frazzled assistants? If you want to treat them to a thank-you lunch, it’ll have to come out of your wallet or the department budget, because that kind of thing is verboten. Not to mention, you can’t cancel classes, kick out students, or sell your children on the black market to give you more time for your research.

Publish or Perish

When push comes to shove, though, getting your experiment finished is mostly a matter of elbow grease. Managing the stress to come is largely out of your hands.

In the grand scheme of science, publication in a respected peer-reviewed journal is just about the only legitimate way to communicate your findings. The field of scientific journals is awash in pay-to-play publications where the only criteria for entry is forking over hundreds of dollars. It’s also full of start-up journals with little or no historical presence or legitimacy in their field. For better or worse, neither of these journal types are good for getting your discoveries out there.

At this stage in your career, the professional aspect might be even more important than intellectual altruism. After all, it’s tough to focus on science when you’re unemployed and looking for work. ‘Publish or Perish’ is a common admonition for faculty of every field. The phrase is so telling it’s not even considered cliché. For an assistant prof like you, your toil in developing and executing your project might as well be figments of your imagination until the results are published in a journal. Without that publication credit (and without the citations and follow-up articles it’ll hopefully engender) your tenure case looks a lot less striking.

Sadly, the quality of your project’s methodology isn’t always as important as its outcome. Publications rely on a paying readership, and even scientific journals have to worry about maintaining an audience. For this reason, you’re more likely to get editorial attention if your project succeeds wildly or if it contradicts established studies or hypotheses.

Regardless of your results, you have to try. The process is a lot like submitting a grant proposal: you work up your case, get input from your colleagues, then mail it out to be savaged by peer reviewers at various journals. Best case, a prestigious publication accepts your paper with few or no edits. If that happens, celebrate, and then wait for your peers across the world to weigh in on your results.

What I’ve left unsaid is the sensation of truly changing the game. I’ve been fortunate the past few years to be involved in work that’s impacting entire fields of scientific and humanistic study. Even given that my contributions to primary academia are small (and that my outreach to the public targets a niche community of strength athletes and enthusiasts), there’s still an undeniable element of exhilaration to realizing that you’ve created a ripple in the oceanic body that is science. It’s a sensation that more than justifies the efforts touched on in these articles. For you readers who are undertaking your own research—from clawing through a capstone effort for school through running your own team—I applaud your efforts and wish you success.