Janey Dike: On feeling like a real scientist

This narrative was written in 2021 by Janey Dike for GRAD 5144, Communicating Science, in response to an assignment to write a story about her research.

This photo shows a young white woman with long blond hair clad in a short-sleeved pink t-shirt and seated at a computer desk. She is typing on a laptop keyboard and on the desk behind the laptop are two larger monitors. — Clinical psychology graduate student Janey Dike at her computer, her typical place of work. Photo courtesy of Janey Dike.

For a long time, I never really felt like I was a scientist.

Even after starting my Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Virginia Tech, “research” still felt like this intangible concept that I couldn’t quite pin down. It was hard to imagine that the work I was doing was actually an important part of science.

It could have been because most of my time was spent sitting in front of a computer screen reading articles, writing, coding, scoring, or keeping up with any number of bureaucratic tasks. It could have been because my research interests in trauma and interpersonal violence were issues that had me working with surveys, interviews, and clinical manuals, as opposed to test tubes, microscopes, and supercomputers. And, of course, it could have been the ever-present, all-encompassing monster that plagues even the most competent of graduate students: imposter syndrome.

No matter the reason, I still struggled to find my footing and to feel like I had the brains and the knowledge to do research. I shied away from calling myself a researcher or a scientist, choosing to downplay my role to family, friends, and fellow grad students. I disregarded the emails and flyers I received aimed at women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math)--because it couldn’t really be me they were trying to reach!

This photo shows a young white woman with long blond hair clad in a blue blouse and smiling at the camera. She has wires and electrodes taped to her forehead and cheek and a black apparatus draped over her shoulders and around her neck. — Janey Dike wearing some of the physiological measures used in a study she helped with, including an air blast harness and electrodes to measure startle through eye blink responses. Photo courtesy of Janey Dike.

Toward the end of my first year, another graduate student, Alisa Huskey (now Alisa Huskey, Ph.D., with her doctorate in hand), took me under her wing and asked if I wanted to collaborate on a trauma-related study she had created in her lab. I quickly agreed.

Her study wasn’t like any other study I had worked on before. Not only did she have participants fill out a long list of psychological measures, she also had them come into the lab to undergo a “fear-learning paradigm,” a conditioning procedure that caused participants to associate a previously neutral stimulus, such as a triangle shape, with something negative. And yes, it’s just as intense as it sounds! The study fell under psychophysiology, which is a fancy way of studying the connections between the body and the mind. It included methods that captured measures like heart rate and how intense an individual’s startle response was.

To best learn the ins and outs of the study, I acted as a guinea pig so that I’d be able to understand what the participants experienced. One of our undergraduate research assistants hooked me up to a bunch of electrodes and wires that were placed on my forehead, right underneath my eye, on my collarbone, and below my ribcage. I then put on a Velcro breathing belt that measures respiration and is pulled tight at the center of the ribcage.

Right when I felt like I couldn’t possibly move an inch without messing up the wardrobe of equipment I was wearing, the research assistant put the air blast harness around my neck, bending the wiry end so that a small tube the size of a straw rested a couple of inches away from my throat. An air blast harness is exactly what it sounds like: It pushes out a quick, pressurized puff of air!

This image shows a drawing of a young white woman in a purple long-sleeved blouse. A wide band is fastened around her ribcage, two of her fingers have electrodes and wires attached, and there are three additional electrodes on her face. She is wearing headphones and has an apparatus draped around her neck. — This diagram provides researchers with information about what a participant looks like with all of the necessary equipment attached for the protocol. Image courtesy of Janey Dike.

Finally, I sat in front of the nearby computer monitor with a pair of headphones on and began clicking through the fear-learning procedure. In short, this required me to look at different shapes and colors that appeared on the screen two at a time. Certain patterns of shapes and colors resulted in an irritating static-like sound coming through on the headphones, followed by an uncomfortable blast of concentrated air aimed at my neck. Over time, I learned the pairings of shapes and colors that would result in these aversive stimuli. Toward the end of the protocol, the noise and air blast stopped altogether, even when those specific shapes and colors appeared, and I slowly re-learned that the shapes and colors were actually neutral once again, instead of negative.

Later, my grad student mentor showed me what the data output of all my measures looked like and how to interpret them. I also learned how some of these physiological measures related to the psychological measures I was more familiar with, such as depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and anxious distress. I learned how to run statistical analyses using both the psychological and physiological measures. The more I learned, the more questions popped into my head.

This study, so different from my usual day-to-day research, allowed me to feel like a “real” researcher. It taught me how to connect the dots between disparate bits of information and how to develop research questions and methodology that I cared about.

I know now that it doesn’t take a hands-on study like this, with its electrodes and machines and rubber gloves, to do research that is important. But at the time, it gave me the confidence to conduct research and the permission to feel like a woman in STEM. It gave me skills that I could translate to the work being done on my computer, and it taught me that I could get creative and out-of-the-box with my research.

It reminded me that I was a scientist.