I thought ‘I don’t know’ signaled scientific incompetence. Now, I know different

From ScienceMag:

When I interviewed for my postdoc position, the group leader gave me a hypothetical research problem and asked, “So, Jingkai, how would you approach this?” I opened my mouth but didn’t know how to answer. To fill the silence, I scrambled to connect half-formed ideas, experimental techniques, and bits of terminology into something that sounded vaguely convincing. He smiled and proceeded to tell me he didn’t know either, which was why the question was interesting. I got the job. But afterward, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t been good enough in that interview. It left me with a lingering sense that I couldn’t reveal any more gaps in my knowledge if I wanted to build my credibility.

Previously, as a Ph.D. student, I had sometimes felt embarrassed after asking questions that I feared came across as overly basic or ill-informed. Being hired into a postdoc position didn’t make that feeling go away. Instead, I felt I had reached a professional stage where I was supposed to know the answers, or at least look as though I did. So I made every effort I could to present myself as knowledgeable to those around me.

I brought a notebook to every seminar. I rarely wrote anything in it, but holding it made me feel protected. In meetings, I nodded in slow motion. Even coffee breaks became performances. As colleagues talked, I would stand there smiling and nodding while my coffee slowly went cold. During these conversations, questions would pop into my head, only to be cut off by the same inner voice: Don’t show your cards.

The performances were exhausting. But I kept them up for months, until I started to notice how one of the senior postdocs in our lab approached uncertainty. One day, a persistent leak crippled one of our laboratory instruments. I watched him investigate the problem and waited for the confidence I associated with experience. It never arrived. “I have no idea yet,” he said cheerfully. The sentence caught me off-guard. I had spent months trying not to say those words myself. He spent the morning testing one possibility after another. Most of them failed. Yet he never seemed bothered by that. Each dead end simply led to another attempt. Eventually, he figured it out and laughed with genuine satisfaction.

As I worked with him more, I found that “I don’t know” seemed to be one of his favorite phrases. I also noticed the same comfort with uncertainty in researchers further along in their careers. In meetings, our group leader often became most animated when discussing projects we had not yet figured out. His eyes would light up as he described a question we might pursue, a mechanism we might test, or an uncertainty we might turn into an experiment. He did not speak about the unknown as something embarrassing, to be hidden. He spoke about it as something worth moving toward.

Only then did I understand what I had missed in that interview: I had treated the moment like a test I had failed. But my group leader had admitted he didn’t know the answer and seemed genuinely excited to explore it.

After that realization, I began to change my approach. When I started to work with colleagues in a research area that was unfamiliar to me, I resisted my old instinct to search for every answer on my own. Instead, I asked questions openly. Those questions often led to discussions, and the discussions to ideas we could test. My colleagues, in turn, shared their own perspectives more freely. I got up to speed faster, avoided unnecessary detours, and, perhaps most important, stopped feeling that every gap in my knowledge had to be hidden.

For a long time, I thought becoming a scientist meant learning how to appear certain, composed, and knowledgeable. But the people I came to admire have held on to their willingness to ask questions and to be excited by what they did not yet know.

I still bring a notebook to seminars. But now it reminds me how much I have left to learn, rather than helping me pretend I already have the answers.

Read More