Common challenges - ganong-noel/lab_manual GitHub Wiki

Becoming an RP is a new and different challenge from what you have done before.

Here are a few common aspects of what is challenging:

1. When you are assigned a task in a class, the professor (hopefully) has a clear idea of what the answer is. In research, by definition we don't know the answer. Often we don't even know what the right question is! We hope you will ask clarifying questions about the task and propose an alternative question if you think we have assigned the wrong task to achieve the objective.
2. Sometimes you might be afraid to ask questions. We expect you to ask lots of questions as do your peer RAs; it is hard to do good work (at least in the collaborative approach that our lab takes) without asking questions.
3. Sometimes you might go too fast. We expect you to go slow and check your work. For example, write unit tests and communicate what those tests were your readout.
4. Fixed costs. There are fixed costs to learning about the background that motivates the project and to the lab's highly-involved IT setup. You should feel good about time spent paying these fixed costs.