Good hard vs. bad hard: What type of research challenges are you experiencing?

In a laboratory setting, researchers, postdocs, and graduate students can find themselves alone and lacking confidence in the face of some common challenges. Those difficulties are often lumped together as an inherent part of pursuing a research career, but we think they could be divided into two types—challenges that are hard in a good way or in a bad way.

Good-hard challenges include rigorous tasks that lead to scientific discovery, and can be surmounted with discipline and focus, while bad-hard challenges are those that are extraneous to the research process and can lead to debilitating personal stress, poor self-image, and stagnation in the work.

We’ve created a partial list of both types to help researchers differentiate between the two. Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education.