Asking for help sometimes can save your life. But how, where, when ask for help is always a challenge.

Earth science is interdisciplinary field, which means you have to learn lots of skills to get jobs done. Unless you are completely dependent upon other team members, we must learn skills efficiently.

Having a PhD degree never means you know everything in your field. In fact, in Earth science, PhD is merely the starting line.

Below I will give a life example. As a modeler, I deal with lots of different technical problems and I have the opportunities to work with many great team members. But lots of time, none of member can solve your problem because maybe no one has ever encountered the same problem as you have.

For example, when I was trying to setup a E3SM simulation. Some of us use the CIME directly. And some use the bash script. Also there are also some prefer to use Matlab. My preference is Python. The problem is unless I talk to every single member of the group, I wouldn’t know who else has encountered the same problem.

Even you I know someone is using Python, he or she is not using the same configuration. In my case, I was using VS Code remote development.

So everyone somehow find a way to do their work but none of the solution can solve my problem.

I turned to Stack Overflow of course and got some helpful hint. The final problem and solution were shared here:

https://code.changliao.us/2019/10/battle-2-python-submit-slurm-job.html

Good luck!