What have you done that you are proud of?
I find trying to motivate my kids with their school work really tough. There's a balance to be struck; pushing them to achieve the best they can without making them feel that I only value their achievement. I was reasonably self-motivated at school (although I'm not sure my mum would agree) and I largely achieved what I set out to do. I was happy enough with my grades and thought they were reflective of my ability (except English Literature, I'm sure I should have done better at that). However, grades encourage us to judge ourselves against others - there were others with higher grades than me - does that make me inadequate? To try to mitigate this self-condemnation or a sense of value from the achievement rather than effort, we (mostly my wife) try to get them to focus on whether they are proud of the result of their effort. Do you think you've done the best effort you can? If so, the absolute grade doesn't matter, you can still be proud of the achievement because you put your best into it. Effectively this is the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. It got me thinking about what I'm proud of workwise - does it stack up with what I'm trying to sell to my kids?
I was asked that in an interview once - what paper am I most proud of? I'm not very good at blowing my own trumpet - I'm English. (My guitar teacher of my youth would tell you I'm not very good at strumming my own guitar either.) But I'll give it a brief go:
Cited: 2, one of which is a self-citation.
In that interview, many years ago, this was the paper I said I was proud of. I still am. I like this paper because it answers a simple scientific question for which the answer was not known. It generated new knowledge. The method was straight-forward, and I have high confidence that if anyone repeated it they would get the same, or very similar, result. I'm proud because I did proper science!
Cited: 28
I really liked this work, again because we derived new knowledge. In fact, it was better than that, it challenged the accepted knowledge of the past 150 years about the anatomy of the breast. My only slight disappointment is that Ramsey et al. had published the observation first, meaning this work was only a validation of their finding, rather than the new finding I thought it had been. But I’m proud because we applied a new technology to help improve the state of human knowledge, the finding of which has impact guidance on breastfeeding.
More recently, as my work has focused on auto-contouring in radiation oncology, I've had quite a few publications in this space. I'm not the first author in most of them as I led the research team, rather than did the hard work. Generally, I'm proud of the work my team at Mirada Medical did in launching the first commercial deep-learning-based (#AI) auto-contouring for radiation oncology. I'm sure others would have done this without us, but I'm proud that we helped change a field for the better, and kick-start a change in technology for the benefit of clinics and patients. However the papers related to this that I'm most proud of are perhaps a little surprising;
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Cited: 22
While most of the heavy-lifting was done by Bas Schipaanboord, this work was credited to me by a colleague as one of the "two good ideas" I had had while I had worked with him. I'm proud of this work because we approached an existing technology from a completely new perspective. Rather than asking “Can we tweak it and make it better?”, we started at the other end and tried to see what the limit of performance would be. That helped guide our direction of research - if there is no room for improvement, why try?
Cited: 58
This paper was the other one of the "two good ideas". I liked this idea, not because it is particularly novel - it's based on the idea of some chap called Alan Turing - but because, as with the previous example, it reframes the problem. What is good enough when it comes to contouring? Likert scales (e.g. rating quality on a scale of 1-5) had been used for assessing contouring in radiotherapy for quite a while prior to this, but changing the question to whether the observer can tell the difference between the machine and a human contour starts to address the problem that an observer might have some prejudices that can't be seen on a Likert scale. What makes me proud to have done this work is that it is about impact - it moves from how good is the auto-contouring towards the deployment in the clinic and what the impact might be.
Cited: 2 (Nobody cites the book, they cite the chapter!)
Ok, so this isn't a paper, it's a book, and although I contributed a few chapters, I didn't write most of it. However, I'm really proud to have participated as an editor, and very grateful to Jinzhong Yang for having invited me to join him in this endeavour. Why am I proud? That probably stems back to my poor grade for English Literature at high school. I've never been particularly good at writing (my wife will have proof-read this for me) and I never imagined I'd be involved in publishing a book. It's a sense of pride for doing something that stretched me, and doing it successfully.
I included the number of citations along with each of those papers. I have more highly cited papers, which while I don't think they are bad, I'm not as proud of. Reflecting my reasoning makes me appreciate that on the whole I am intrinsically motivated. I'd like some of these papers to have been cited more - who doesn't like a bit of extrinsic motivation too? However, I know that some are pretty niche - the speed of sound in ovarian follicular fluid, while new knowledge, isn't something that most people need to know. But really my personal intrinsic motivation comes from making a contribution (discovering new knowledge) and from having a beneficial impact on the world.
How about you? What papers are you most proud of? And why?
Good subject Mark! Trying to motivate the kids for homework is challenging! I'm very intrinsically motivated now, partly genetics but partly learned (mostly through my athletics endeavours). Not sure I was this way in my teens.....