Friday, December 30, 2016

2016 year in review for The New PI

And there is goes: 2016 in posts...it sucked, and I should have guessed from how it started, but I'm starting 2017 on the upswing and with a lot of hope :)
Happy New Year, everyone!!

January: This blog post has been brewing in my head for several months.
And a big one it was. By far my 2016 greatest hit with almost 4,000 reads...

February: The second R01 is done and it was very different from the first one.

March: Lately I have spent a lot of time thinking about expectations and "fit" in academia. We are interviewing faculty candidates and a huge amount of scrutiny is put in figuring out how their research and their personalities will fit with ours.

April: I'm official mid-tenure track and probably need to officially update my Twitter handle to The Newish PI.

May: With one R01 application waiting for additional experiments before resubmission and one R01 submitted, I received the dreaded email from the NIH saying that my ESI (early stage investigator) status had ended.

June: The hashtag #academicselfcare reminds you that it is your responsibility to take care of yourself, because academia will rarely do it for you.

August: "Midway upon the journey of the tenure track I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost." (adapted from D. Alighieri, Inferno, Canto 1)

September: The more I move forward in this crazy voyage which is the tenure track, the more I realize how absolutely critical your personnel is.
2nd greatest hit of 2016

October: My R01 resubmission went from scored to not discussed. I don't know why yet, but this hit me hard.

November: I never thought that these three little words could carry that much innuendo, but "Are you happy?" turns out to be one of the most revealing and difficult questions you can ask a scientist.

December: I cannot deny that 2016 has been an annus horribilis at the personal and professional level, but I am trying to find some meaning out if it.

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