What I Learned From Leading A Failed Research Project

When I was accepted into the New York Academy of Sciences Research Program, I was thrilled to finally embark on another research project - this time with international teammates. I had all these expectations of working in sync with my team, having heated discussions and maybe even winning the prize but the entire one month journey surprised me - and not in a good way. In retrospect, I realise that even though the journey pretty much sucked and was filled with me writing really long stressed out messages at 2AM on our group chat, I did learn some helpful lessons from it which will hopefully ensure that I don't suffer from a repeat of this experience, and neither do you.

START BACKWARDS

When I first started my research, the first two hours were a big, confusing mess and that's when I realised that research is not meant for the light-hearted. Sometimes I had too much information about a particular topic and other times I had none, but no matter what the situation - I was perpetually confused and wondering whether I was even looking in the right direction or not. This is why, it's all the more important to begin your research in an organised manner. The best way to do that is to always start from the goal. First and foremost, understand what the goal is asking you to achieve and then work backwards from it. In my experience, it is always easier if you start from a mind-map and outline specific steps you would need to take to reach said goal.

For example, our goal for the Ethical AI Challenge was to "Design a technical solution that addresses and considers one clearly outlined and defined issue that AI poses in our global society."

Because I never bothered to properly go through the goal until it was too late, my project did not only deal with multiple AI-related issues (even though it is clearly mentioned that they want us to talk about only one clearly outlined and defined issue) but also did not go into much detail because truthfully speaking, I had a lot of generic information about a lot of things which weren't even required in the first place and which ended up messing with my actual goal and objective.

NEVER DEVIATE

This is, hands down, the worst mistake anyone could ever make in a research project and the cause of this mistake is not just NOT reading the goal properly but also not keeping the goal in mind while researching.

Imagine you have to walk to school and you have three roads which you can take to reach there. Road number one has a carnival going on, road number two has a beach party and road number three is where your favorite cousins live. Now, the difficult task for you here is not going to be walking on each of these roads but to ensure that while walking, you don't end up getting distracted and reach your school on time, no matter how interesting the other activities might seem.

Broadly speaking, our project was based on the use of Ethical AI in healthcare, particularly genetics, but over the course of our project, our focus unknowingly shifted more towards the healthcare aspect of it and our real objective - which was Ethical AI - became all the more blurred and difficult to spot out underneath the mountain of probably irrelevant information. Only when I showed my Dad the project near the end of the final deadline did I realize the magnanimity of what had happened. In a last desperate attempt I did try to make a few tweaks here and there in the final presentation but after all, the final presentation is only as good as the foundation which had already been tainted.

So, long story short, I reached school late because I was too distracted by not just the carnival but also the beach where I went to with my favorite cousins. And by the time I reached school it was pretty pointless because I was not just exhausted but also very, very late to make up for it.

UTILISE SKILLSETS (ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU HAVE A TRASH TEAM)

My dream team was genuinely "one-of-a-kind". You know, I still remember when I saw their individual CVs in the beginning of the program, I was left awestruck and a little (a lot) insecure. They boasted of all these achievements of writing countless research papers, winning coding competitions, building a vaccine for their community to fight cancer (I'm not even exaggerating) and whatnot but at the end of the day, the truth came out like a slap to the face.

First of all, for some reason, all of them seemed to think that the excuse of "I have exams" was valid here - I'm sorry, if you knew you were going to be having exams in the month you are supposed to be doing the project then why did you enroll in the first place?!

Second of all, turns out that all my insecurities of being the only person who did not know how to code were extremely invalid because when it came to making a website in the end, all of a sudden everybody forgot their coding skills!

But the most frustrating part was definetely the fact that neither one of them ever actively took part in the project. From encouraging them to speak up and appreciating their efforts to writing long, angry essays on the group chat, nothing seemed to get them working and there was only so much work I could do myself.

However, eventually, I did figure out a way out of this issue. I started assigning work strictly as per their skillsets (that's right, I had to assign the work like some kind of psycho, raging boss). There was one guy who was good at research but did not know how to write at all so I would tell him to gather information on a topic and then hand over that information to another girl who was good at writing (but not researching) and would refine the information as necessary. It was only when I started doing this that our team finally started working as a team. But even then, some people did not respond and I had to officially sacrifice my sanity at 2AM but I still managed to use my spamming powers and made them do the work, no matter how small it was.