How do people learn to be scientists? We’re very good at teaching our students how to titrate a solution, take a derivative, label a dissected earthworm, or calculate the p-value from a one-way ANOVA. One might get the impression that learning these skills is an important part of training to be a scientist. Well, arguably they’re not unimportant; but they’re more skills used by scientists that they are skills that make us scientists. In Being a Scientist: Tools for Science Students, Michael Schmidt tackles the much more interesting question of that latter set.
Being a Scientist covers the softer skills that let scientists do what they do: philosophy, creativity, reading and writing, and so on. Continue reading