Yuning Wang learned to rely less on her supervisor’s guidance during her doctoral programme, an important step on the road to research autonomy.
Credit: Monty Rakusen/Getty
One of the most important lessons I learnt from my seven years of graduate studies is the difference between simply ‘doing’ a research project and ‘owning’ one and how to make the transition from a doer to a researcher. I started as very much a doer. During my master’s-degree work studying proteins involved in Alzheimer’s disease, at Wuhan University, China, I relied on my supervisor — biochemist Yi Liang — to assign me to a research project, to propose ideas and sometimes to plan out sets of experiments for me. I simply had to follow protocols and produce data. I would read papers, but just the most relevant ones on the particular protein I was studying, or those involving the same methods that I was using.
There are advantages to this approach: once everything had been mapped out for me, I was well on my way to getting my name on a paper, thanks to the data contributions I’d made. But following instructions without developing a deep understanding is not how students become successful scientists, even if they get their name on a paper.My interest in protein structures continued during my PhD programme at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada.
Owning my project triggered some deep thinking that further inspired me to establish hypotheses, methodologies and collaborations with researchers around the world. In the last year of my PhD programme, I e-mailed neuroscientist Sandra Cooper at the University of Sydney, Australia, to discuss a few technical questions about her 2017 publication in the