"Grit" and success

Apparently a new educational buzzword is "grit." That people who have this elusive quality are more likely to succeed than those that lack it. And of course, the big concern: how do we develop grit in students who otherwise might not have it.

(I suspect really it's something learned in early childhood, and therefore the parents are more responsible for it. I remember my father saying to me MANY times, "You're smart; you can figure this out" when I was bordering on melting down over my math homework (FRACTIONS!!!!) or something).

There's a little online test you can take. I think this link will work, though every time I click it it gives me the score I earned. (If that doesn't work, there are .pdf versions of the tests linked here, but you have to tot up the scores yourself).

I earned a 5/5. (I'm "very gritty"! Yay!)

I'm actually a tiny bit surprised it's that high, because they ask you if you get distracted by other projects and stuff like that, and really, sometimes I do - I'll be working on something and get bored or frustrated and find something new and shiny to work on instead. On the other hand, I usually go back to the frustrating project later, unless I think it's reasonable to cut my losses and end it. (There have been one or two research projects I dropped a few months after starting them when I realized the methodology was not working or the results I was getting were trivial).

But I do tell students, when they come to me and ask me if they're "cut out for" grad school (and I have to laugh; one of my early students who asked me that was a man who DEFINITELY needed to go to grad school and if ANYONE could succeed, it would be him), I tend more to ask them about their ways of dealing with setbacks, or if they have a high tolerance for repetitive tasks, or if they get bored with things that are a lot of work for a still-off-in-the-future result.

One thing I learned in grad school - though I probably already "knew" it, but I realized it explicitly in grad school - a lot of life is just showing up and doing the work. Ten-keying in the reams of data (that was a lot of my Ph.D. initial research). Hunting through the soil for invertebrates. Spending hours out looking for a particular flowering plant in flower.

One of my grad-school colleagues used to have a little sign up over her computer that said "Detachment from outcomes." That worked for her; it kept her doing the work without worrying about what eventually would result. I guess I managed to keep going with the work because to me, everything that was moving me forward, well, it felt like it was moving me forward. Every prairie that I got the relative frequency data entered on, that was one prairie closer to finally finding out what the analysis was going to tell me.

(Heh. Now I'm reminded of the old definition of an optimist: "There's a pony in here somewhere.")

Actually, maybe curiosity played a role - I have great tenacity (gesundheit!) when I am trying to find something out that I WANT TO KNOW. And I was curious about the end-result of the ordination analysis I was going to do on the prairie. And I always get excited when I'm going to statistically analyze data, because I want to see what it's going to show me. I'm also really good at finding information; sometimes I actually "waste" time doing that and go down a lot of rabbit holes because I get engaged in the process of finding the thing I'm looking for - but I think that's another form of tenacity, not just looking at the first page of web-search results and going "Meh, it's not here, I give up"

And actually, another big thing I learned in grad school was that I could withstand setbacks. I've joked about how analyzing my master's thesis data - which was done on a mainframe version of SPSS (yes, even as late as the early 90s, we were still using mainframes for some things). I'd write my program (yeah, that was before all stats programs were menu-driven, and yeah, it was a pain), submit it, hike over to the computer center and pick up the enormous stack of white-and-green striped paper that was used to print out the results, and start sorting through. Most of the time I'd hit a point where I'd made an error, or forgotten a semicolon (though maybe it was just SAS that used semicolons; I forget), or something, and the program would terminate without doing my analysis.

So then I'd mutter a curse under my breath, hike back to my lab, find the error, fix it, run the program again. Then find the next error, fix it....and so on. It took several days to get the thing to do what I wanted. But somehow I managed to keep at it. I don't know if it was that I felt like washing out of a second program was not an option (I've shared the story of my brief unsuccessful first attempt at grad school before, don't feel like sharing it again....) or that I figured if I just kept going, eventually I'd beat the program and get my data analyzed. But I did keep going, and eventually it worked. (And ironically, the "easiest" publication of my life - in terms of having the fewest revisions and being accepted without tsuiris? Was the one based on my Master's. Perhaps Someone felt like I'd been through enough pain and needed a little encouragement....)

But now I do research part-time (and actually, am in today doing some counting and identifying of soil inverts). And you know? When you're out in the workforce doing more or less others' bidding, it's a real relief to work on something that (at least at this point in time) is "just" for you. (Yes, eventually this will generate another publication, I just don't have enough data yet).

Research is actually....kind of peaceful. It's a task you have to focus on while you're doing it, no one can interrupt you. And with each sample I crack open I don't know what I will find - there's a bit of the treasure-hunt aspect. Yes, superficially, it looks tedious - but compared to grading, it's tons of fun.