The coordination problem

I started CompNeuroSociety in January 2025, during a week when Florida State University’s campus was closed for snow. There was no mission statement and no plan behind it, because I was mostly just tired of waiting for someone else to fill a gap.

The backstory is less romantic than the word “founder” makes it sound. I transferred to FSU because I wanted a statistics minor and my old school wouldn’t let me add it. Before that, in the summer of 2024, I did a computational neuroscience program at Carnegie Mellon University with almost no research experience going in, and when I got to FSU that fall I found maybe two to four people in the whole field on campus. I emailed faculty, and I tried to join a lab, but it went quiet on me. So during the snow week I made the organization myself, and then I spent four hours a day for a week reading textbook chapters and papers so that I would have something to stand on at our first meeting in March.

In its first year CompNeuroSociety grew to over 120 members across FSU’s colleges and departments, and running it has taught me things that never show up in a paper. A paper is the finished version of the work, so you don’t see the part underneath it, where a lot of what moves research forward is dealing with people.

Mostly, it taught me that motivation and follow-through are not the same thing, which I used to think they were. Motivation is cheap, because everyone who shows up is motivated (that is why they showed up), but it fades once the semester gets busy. People will hand you real ideas and then not touch them again unless you get annoying about it. I don’t say that with any bitterness, because at this point I see it as the base rate: twelve people say they’ll come, four do, and the four are never the four you would have bet on. Because of this, I stopped planning around the average and started planning around the variance.

Staying calm inside all of that was the hard part for me. Early on, I burned some bridges reacting to things that were genuinely done wrong to me, but being right about them cost me a lot more than letting them go would have. There is a line I keep coming back to, “turn the other cheek,” and you don’t have to be religious to see the math behind it: your own peace and your community are worth more than winning one fight. Take the action that stops it from happening again, and don’t become the asshole dictator about it. (I have been the asshole, and it is not worth it.)

The clean ending would be to say that the organization made me a better scientist, but I’m not sure I buy that. It reminds me more of a superposition, where two things that shouldn’t both be true are true at the same time. It is just a student organization, and I probably shouldn’t take it that seriously. However, it has also been the most useful training I’ve had in what research actually runs on, which is coordination much more than intelligence.

What I took from it is harder to put on a resume. I have a better sense of what knowledge costs when you count it in people and time instead of insight, which has made me more patient when results come slowly and warier of anything that looks too clean, and I hope that I keep both of those habits as my research moves forward.