Doing science on the cheap

What to skimp on and what doing without looks like

I feel like I’ve spent most of my career working on groundbreaking questions without the kind of money that people imagine goes into the breaking of new ground. Some moments have been more flush than others, and I fortunately know what it feels like to be able to afford the supplies, hire the people, and travel to the conferences without having to fuss. But I’ve also had extended periods between grants, so I know how to run my lab in those times too.

I came into science with a history of want. Up until and through grad school, spending money on anything that wasn’t meeting basic needs (sleeping, eating, transportation, etc) was an extravagance. I think I was introduced into research with a similar mindset. When I was doing my dissertation work, my project was my own and not under the umbrella of my advisor, so it was up to me to get grants here and there to make ends meet. I didn’t have a GRFP or a DDIG but did pull together a large number of little awards to be able to afford to work at a field station in Costa Rica. I relied on volunteer field assistants who covered their own expenses (which is an inequitable practice that I should never have engaged in. Hey, I’ve grown.) I cobbled together small amounts of funding for several years as a professor before I picked up my grantcraft mojo. I’m just saying this to point out that I’ve known how to science happen with little budget.

I’m going to suggest two guiding principles that seems obvious, but if you see them as guides they might be useful:

1. If you don’t have the money for a particular thing that you want to do, recognize that you’ll have to do things differently.

2. If you don’t have the money, you can still plan for great science. Don’t design science that is just okay but would be great if you had more money. Do science that is exciting even without the expensive stuff. It’s easy to get in stuck up in your head about, “if only I could afford this particular piece of the project,” or “the only way to answer this question is to do [this expensive thing].” Great science is creative, and I believe that a lot of that creativity can be applied to doing cool science with few resources.

Sure, some things will always cost money, but on an individual level, there are some very cool things that can happen at the intersection of creative experimental design and thinking outside the constraints of the dominant paradigm. Admittedly I think these low-cost research possibilities might be easier to come up on in ecology, evolution, and organismal biology. I realize that so much cell/molecular work requires not only reagents, but also consistent labor to keep the lab ticking, in a way that eco/evo/behavior people don’t necessarily have to deal with.

The stickiest part is labor. If you ask anybody who’s put together a budget for a project, they’ll tell you that people are what takes up most of hte budget. This makes sense, as science is done by people. As you scale up, then you have more people involved, so it gets pricier. It’s that simple. This means that doing science on the cheap means finding ways to do science with fewer people or just on your own, or to find creative ways to develop a scientific workforce that don’t cross ethical lines.

Here are different approaches to not having the grant funding to hire people:

-Do it yourself. I know some scientists who choose to work with trainees even though it slows down research. There are some fields of work (especially computational and theoretical) where doing it yourself is the most efficient way to get stuff done. Those of us at primarily undergradaute institutions will recognize that at least some of the phases of a project go much much faster if we just do them ourselves. It’s like you are your own postdoc, and you’re doing your own project. You just knock it out. There are oodles of data available in the world. Data generation is often the most time-intensive part of doing research. If you are able to leverage existing datasets to ask new and cool questions, it’s quite possible to do cool stuff without the resources.

-Collaborate. I would say that most of us who have been doing this for a few years don’t have the time to write up work that’s already been doing, as the train just keeps moving forward. If you don’t have the labor, then it shouldn’t be too hard to find a collaborator who has the labor part figured out and needs the writing/analysis on the back end. Also, it’s likely that you have skillsets that are useful to people who are doing related work. A lot of projects don’t necessarily need funding, but they need leadership to see them through. If you’re missing some combination of the samples, instrumentation, or labor to process samples, then it could be that finding a collaborator with complementary needs can see a project through. At times, I’ve collected for samples for someone else to process, and at other times, I’ve been the one to process samples others have sorted. Both can be fruitful approaches.

-Students powering the work. We all know that students are what powers the scientific endeavor. Without a cominbation of undergraduate and graduate student labor, I think the vast majority of science at universities would come to a screeching halt. I think there is a lot to be said for hiring technicians, postbacs, postdocs, research scientists, and other non-students to power a project, but I think most of us rely on students to push our research agendas forward.

I don’t think we should make decisions about uncompensated student labor without looking at the causes and consequences of the system that we’re operating in. The ethics of student labor are a morass filled with historical precedent, the norms of traditionally exclusionary educational systems, and evolving standards for equitable access to science as a profession.

Access to scientific work was once reserved for wealthy folks who scienced as a pasttime. Once in a while, outsiders made their way in despite a bunch of obstacles thrown their way, and oftentimes their perspectives were so fresh they resulted in huge advances. Let’s be real with one another, and accept the reality that much of this historical legacy has stuck with us to this day. The best predictor of whether you become a professor is whether your parent was a professor. Despite all of the money we’ve been pouring into DEIJA+ efforts, we still have a lot of disparities (and the moderate progress that we’ve made is fueling the rage of an authoritarian regime).

Keeping that in mind, we’ve got to be really careful about how we go about recruiting students for our labs, and the extent to which they are being exploited for labor versus receiving genuine research experiences with quality mentorship. And how these students are compensated for their contributions. Because you can’t pay the rent with academic credit, acknowledgment, or authorship.

The part where inequities come in is that some undergraduates and postbacs are more than willing to volunteer their time, labor, and intellectual work towards a project without financial compensation. That’s because these students don’t need to work. They are somehow making ends meet because the come from wealthier backgrounds. If we give this category of student advantages in access to research opportunities, this gives them a leg up on applying for graduate programs, and advancing in their careers. We all want to help people out, and lift other people up. But what if the systemic effect of us lifting up those who don’t require compensation is reinforcing the system that prevents others from having access? I don’t think working with students on a volunteer basis is inherently wrong, but in many cases it’s done in a way that amplified inequities and keeps the sciences white and wealthy. That’s bad for all of us.

What are some guidelines for working with undergraduates when you’re not giving them a paycheck? I don’t see this as hard guardrails, I think that would be a thing I’d want to write collaboratively and with some peer review (any takers?) but here’s a start.

-The number of hours that you’re getting from students shouldn’t surpass the amount of work that they are investing into a single course. It’s fine to associate this work with academic credit, and a number I’m familiar with means that one hour of semester credit comes with 3 hours per week. So a student spending 10 hours per week on a project (including reading, data entry, etc) is about right about 3 units of credit. If a student is including this credit along with other courses as a part of a full courseload, it shouldn’t be costing them financially.

-If you’re working with a student and you’re not paying them, then they should be getting training in the form of a mentored research experience. If you want someone to wash dishes or perform other rote tasks without the associated intellectual work, then pay them an hourly wage. If someone’s giving you their time for academic credit or as a volunteer, then compensate them with real training.

-Make sure that you’re making avail of institutional resources to support student workers, such as work-study and other institutional funds.

-If you are consistently running your operation so that any aspect is powered by volunteer student labor, you’re doing it wrong and you’re a part of the problem.

-You’re taking a wealthy high school student into your lab to help them get into a Ivy League school? GTFO, you are the problem.

-If you want to work with volunteers, then engage with your community beyond the university, such as retirees. Lead an Earthwatch group or something like that. If your work isn’t interesting or cool enough to bring in volunteers from the community, then what makes you think that it’s okay to exploit your students for the same tasks?

It is wrong to expect or even ask to people to do work that deserves compensation without providing pay. If you can’t afford the work of employees, then the bottom line is that this labor is simply not available and we need to find a path forward (or no path forward) without that labor. If you don’t have the money for staff, then you don’t have the resources for staff. Simple as that.

There are a lot of ways to be creative and keep your science going without funding, but when the times get hard, this isn’t the time to engage in practices that amplify inequities in our field. Be creative and find another way to get the science done.