I remember, a while back, visiting a friend in his office. He had just became a professor, and was still setting things up. I noticed a list on the chalkboard, taking up almost one whole side. Taking a closer look, I realized that list was a list of projects. To my young postdoc eyes, the list was amazing: how could one person be working on so many things?

There’s an idiom in English, “too many irons in the fire”. You can imagine a blacksmith forging many things at once, each piece of iron taking focus from the others. Too many, and a piece might break, or otherwise fail.

In theoretical physics, a typical PhD publishes three papers before they graduate. That usually means one project at a time, maybe two. For someone used to one or two irons in the fire, so many at a time seems an impossible feat.

Scientists grow over their careers, though, and in more than one way. What seems impossible can eventually be business as usual.

First, as your skill grows, you become more efficient. A lot of scientific work is a kind of debugging: making mistakes, and figuring out how to fix them. The more experience you have, the more you know what kinds of mistakes you might make, and the better you will be at avoiding them. (Never perfect, of course: scientists always have to debug something.)

Second, your collaborations grow. The more people you work with, the more you can share these projects, each person contributing their own piece. With time, you start supervising as well: Masters students, PhD students, postdocs. Each one adds to the number of irons you can manage in your fire. While for bad supervisors this just means having their name on lots of projects, the good supervisors will be genuinely contributing to each one. That’s yet another kind of growth: as you get further along, you get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t, so even in a quick meeting you can solve meaningful problems.

Third, you grow your system. The ideas you explore early on blossom into full-fledged methods, tricks which you can pull out again and again when you need them. The tricks combine, forming new, bigger tricks, and eventually a long list of projects becomes second nature, a natural thing your system is able to do.

As you grow as a scientist, you become more than just one researcher, one debugger at a laptop or pipetter at a lab bench. You become a research program, one that manifests across many people and laptops and labs. As your expertise grows, you become a kind of living exchange of ideas, concepts flowing through you when needed, building your own scientific world.