Happy being "water divider" author of article in Nature

One of the things my late professor from graduate school taught me was to always be happy and grateful for every publication you get. Of course, you are more happy about your First author publications, BUT it's important to be happy about the publication that you are in the middle of the author list of too (and obviously if you end up on the TT, the ones where you are the LAST authors for).

When I wrote my thesis, it was a summary thesis of a number of published articles (as is customs for STEM in Sweden), every one on my committee made it clear to me that regardless of where I was on the author list of a paper I added to my thesis I was required and expected to be able to defend the WHOLE paper. It enforced the idea to me that if your name is on a paper, you are responsible for all of the paper. Similarly, they enforced that you should be happy and have pride in papers that you have your name on.

To me that was the start of being happy and celebrating every time I have had a paper accepted and published. (I actually celebrate both the acceptance "oh thank goodness no more resubmissions and revisions" and the actual publication "oh look, that's MY name, in print!".) I realized when I started my post-doc at the more prestigious institute(TM) that people pretty much scoffed at this idea and only celebrated the First Author papers in CNS journals. It seemed like they thought it was silly to care about these "smaller achievements", like celebrating finishing a race but you didn't get a medal. Or something like that.

After coming back to academia as a project coordinator, after my post-doc, I have been happy to continue my little mission "you should be happy with every publication" even when certain post-docs aren't as on board with the idea.

Maybe this is since I probably will never have a first author publication again? Maybe it's because I think it's important to show that a paper comes for a team effort? Maybe I just want to feel important and successful? Who knows. But I still think it's a thing to do. Celebrate the acceptance and then later the actual print coming out.

So, yesterday I had the happy times finding out that an article I am the water divider on (the one in the middle so when you go one from the front, one from the back you'll end up with my name in the middle) got accepted in Nature. Ha. There might have been a small dream of mine, back in the early days of my graduate days, to get my name as a first author on a Nature article - although to be honest, just getting my name on the author list was a pretty big dream as well. It's like saying you dream of receiving a Nobel prize, ending up receiving a national prize would still be pretty swell... And I'm not turning that down. And I am silly happy being part of an article in Nature and that my name will be there. Pretty nice feeling for sure.

As a kicker I decided to humble brag and posted my happy times on twitter. (I wondered if it sounded like it was my article or if it was clear "I'm one of many people on there" but I think it was pretty clear and shouldn't have to worry about it, right?!) Lots of people said congratulations and liked the tweet. And in the end I got my most viewed tweet as well. What a day. A little happy turning into more happy and a great start of the weekend!

THANK YOU for sharing my happy times! .... until printing time..... :)