When I started this blog in 2012, I did it to make sense of my thoughts about starting my first faculty position as an Assistant Professor and to share with a few friends. Never ever I would have thought 1) that I would still be doing this seven years later, 2) that the blog would have more than 500,000 total views, and 3) that I would have become part of a community of science bloggers and Twitter users who supported me scientifically and personally for this long. On a fateful day in 2014 when Melissa @biochembelle tweeted about my posts and introduced me to the scientific community on social media everything changed. I made lots of pocket friends, many of whom became real-life friends, and I was introduced to an extended support network full of information and new ideas, often providing respite from the lonely life of starting a lab on Twitter and via the @NewPI_slack. I met colleagues who were a sounding board for grant ideas and who helped with my career progression and transition (you know who you are). I found Peg AtKisson @iGrrrl who was hired as a grant consultant and was instrumental in helping me get 2 R01s. I watched science Twitter dynamics oscillate between chaotic good and chaotic evil sometimes, and tried my best to tip the scales towards good. I learned a lot about diversity and was inspired to build a more inclusive environment wherever I go. So first of all, thank you!
With the general decline of blogging and the trend toward shorter and more immediate forms of sharing information, I was wondering if this would still be useful, but when I asked 94% of respondents said they would still want a blog. And checking the stats I realized that this site still gets 3-4,000 hits a month despite me not having posted in 10 months...so I will keep going. Since I'm not a new PI any longer and readers asked to focus on mid-career faculty issues, I decided to start a new blog My Mid-career Academic Life. I will try and cross-reference the two blogs at the beginning to get clicks and get indexed and all the necessary internet things, but I didn't want to change the identity of The New PI blog and I prefer to move on. I've been meaning to unpseud for a while, but today is not the day and I promise it will be soon (-ish).
In following @drugmonkeyblog's tradition to list the posts of the month at the end of each year, I decided to link 12 posts to close this blog: the 6 most read and 6 favorite ones which may not have had as much attention. Here we go.
Greatest hits:
1) Submitting your R00 proposal to transfer your K99 to your new job: a survival guide - 12,547 hits as of today. I'm so happy this has been helpful for so many of you!
2) Interviewing for a postdoc: questions you should ask - 11,176 hits. This was for the trainees.
3) A compilation of K99 and R00 advice - 10,890 hits. This links to a lot of my other K99/R00 posts and other blogs/articles that could be useful in the process. I may skip some other popular K99 posts because they're all included here.
4) Where do you find grant money for your lab? - 5,939 hits. This is old and has not been updated in a while, but it's still a good starting list.
5) Tales of postdocs past: what did I learn? - 5,638 hits. Cultivating or identifying resilience in trainees is something faculty discusses ad nauseam and this was one of the first times I articulated some thoughts on finding the right lab peeps.
6) Will I have jumped the glass cliff in 5 years? - 5,554 hits. Looks like the answer to that question is NO, but this was definitely one of my most emotional posts and it struck a chord with many people.
My personal faves:
1) The New PI hits the 6 month slump: how do you keep proactive? - The first 6 months of a faculty position are so hard! Whenever I bump into friends at conferences who have just started a lab, I think of this post and I just want to hug them.
2) Musings about work ethics and an unstructured schedule - I still stand by this one.
3) Is resilience the name of the game in academia? - Yes, it is. Happy to report that yours truly, Doc Becca and my nameless friend in this post are all Associate professors and NIH funded.
4) The beginning of the R01 twin strategy - This sounded crazy and controversial and it kind of worked...not as I intended because they ended up being Irish twins. But yay, twins!
5) In the belly of the beast. NIH Early Career Reviewer - Part 2 of a two-part post on the NIH ECR program. What I learned about NIH review in my first experience is still helping me now that I've been Reviewer 1.
6) Deciding which university is the right fit for you - A more recent and mature post on how to decide which environment you want to be in and how to find it.
So long, and thank you for all the fish! 🐬🐬
Showing posts with label Tenure track. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tenure track. Show all posts
Thursday, December 26, 2019
Monday, December 16, 2019
Dissection of a mid-career transition: what I considered in my decision
This post has been sitting here since the Spring waiting for me to have time to finish it, and I decided to leave it as it was, pretending to still be in the past.
I missed my 6th lab birthday post back in April because things were insane. Moving a lab while you're running a lab is not for the faint of heart, despite already being battle-proof in university administration. To try and do my best to avoid the almost one year of downtime that all the young uns experience when starting a lab, I'm working on coming in with all my regulatory approvals, which with two animal models and human subjects is not fun. Plus, I need to manage some form of a mouse colony and thankfully, very minimal renovations. Plus, moving current manuscripts forward to keep up seamless productivity. And finally, of course, I have to uproot and transfer my entire life...
I'll write about that process later, but the first question is why do it? And how to choose where to go? It was a very interesting and somewhat validating process, so I thought I'd share an outline of what happened because it could be helpful to others in a similar situation or just entertaining...
During the 3rd-4th year of my tenure-track, it had become clear my university was not the right place for me to thrive. Some major faculty departures, some higher-level administrative decisions, and other factors made me look for greener pastures. I didn't feel at all like a viable candidate (reasonable productivity, but no NIH funding), but I wanted to test the waters.
I monitored job ads and started applying in Europe. In Europe because I was nearing the cut-off of an ERC Consolidator grant and it was basically now or never. Deadlines for big EU grants are tighter than in the US with 7yrs from PhD for early-investigator grants and 12yrs for mid-career, so you better hustle. Even though many national early investigator programs have the usual 10yr from PhD limit, these can be smaller awards. I only applied to places I knew and that would be a good fit...and I got an interview from the first one, which was beyond shocking to me! Eventually, the 10yr young investigator deadline is what did me in for multiple searches because you're not eligible to apply for the smaller safer grants. Betting everything on a massive super-competitive grant from a system I was not familiar with was too risky for me and the institution. Some places, I heard later, screened applications based on PhD award date and didn't even look at more "senior" people. But the fact that the proverbial toe found that the water was not too cold gave me the confidence to continue...
As the US job season opened in the Fall of 2017 I looked at what was available and again only applied to places I liked, where I knew I would be a good fit, and where I knew people. When it's not your first rodeo you have the benefit of connections developed over the years. One place hit because the search was later than others and I knew someone on the search committee. I could let them know when my study section would meet so that the Skype interview was scheduled right after. My grant got funded 😀 and from the initial chat, it sounded like a good fit and I was asked for an on-site interview.
Then the insanity began! I mentioned before that a newly funded R01 is like a disco ball hanging over your head casting sparkles everywhere. When you're a mid-career hire negotiation can take a while, so I did my homework. I reached out to multiple places that were of interest and was contacted by others who knew I was "movable". Some led to additional interviews and others to possible invitations that didn't pan out. When there isn't an official search, start-up funds are harder to come by, but there may be pots of institutional money set aside from previous failed searches or for diversity/opportunity hires. You just don't know. And you always need to impress those who guard those secret stashes of cash.
Overall, I was very lucky because I had the chance to explore multiple options and really dive down on the nitty-gritty of the financials, facilities, and culture of the different places. As a postdoc, I was just grateful I was asked to visit, but now it had to be worth my while to move. I was okay where I was, I had been productive, so a move had to be targeted to supporting the next 10-20 years of my career. Fall 2018 was a whirlwind of visits, Skype calls, and phone discussions to define offer details. Months and months of excitement, confusion, and soul-searching. I went to some places multiple times or was shown facilities via video chat, spoke to everyone I needed to about animal facilities, space, cores, administration, and upper management....and I waited. Waited for people to be available, for newly negotiated amounts to be approved, for offers to be drafted, so that I had all options in front of me. My first offer came 9 months after I initially interviewed and it was renegotiated for another 3 months as other offers were coming in.
What did I want? Primarily a place with a thriving scientific community supporting biomedical research where both myself and my trainees could be surrounded by enthusiastic colleagues and stimulating talks and symposia, a good mouse facility with dedicated space to run behavioral assays, a fully-staffed institutional zebrafish facility that could support our zebrafish research without having to run the facility myself, additional microscopy capabilities. I was also mindful to avoid toxic research environments because after a few years of working with a therapist just to be able to step into work I was mindful of my own mental health and I really wanted to be close to friends and family so that I could rely on my support network.
I think I found what I wanted, but only time will tell...
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Networking for mid-career academic job transitions
I have spent most of the past year interviewing for academic jobs, exploring new opportunities and negotiating start-up packages. Never as before I realized how valuable my network is.
When you go on the job market as a faculty member, everything is different. You are not scrutinized on whether you will be able to do the job, you are a colleague looking for new opportunities. You speak the same language as the other faculty and do not need to be interviewed to see if they understand the ropes of this business. Conversations are a lot more geared towards convincing you to bring your money elsewhere and you have the benefit of time for figuring out whether the new place has the colleagues and resources for your lab to grow, expand in new directions, and thrive. As a more senior faculty, you are also expected to contribute and your role will be very different from a newbie.
With an intimate understanding of the ins and outs of administration and power structures, and of the things that are important to you in running your lab, there are several questions that you need to be answered requiring input from inside or outside the potential new institution. In some cases, those are not questions that you can ask directly during interviews unless the person interviewing you is a friend or a trusted friend of a friend. For example, while you can ask an Associate Dean or Department Chair how they get things done to understand their leadership style, you cannot ask them how much power they really have to get things done. When they tell you there are training grants and internal grants, you cannot really ask them whether they are assigned in a meritocratic fashion or whether there are fiefdoms controlling them.
Often the people recruiting you will let you know very clearly who is who, who controls space, who controls money, and who controls promotions so that you can behave accordingly when you talk business with them. But members of your network with loyalty to you may also provide more insightful details about their personalities and the academic strings they pull and that pull them. As you go to conferences and study sections, you meet friends and future colleagues in an informal environment and can gather additional information from casual conversations on how things are going... little-known fact: when faculty get together for a drink/dinner most of what we do is complain about funding and other work things.
Because if my network, there were multiple people I could talk to honestly about my needs and my fears and who could give pointed advice. In addition, they could introduce me to their friends within the intended institution who could provide insider information. Surprisingly, without any news of my job search getting back to the relevant stakeholders in my institution (though some colleagues peripheral to me were contacted by their networks to investigate about me). This ability to be stealthy may not always be the case and it is entirely your choice how far you spread the word that you are looking. It depends on how afraid you are of your institution finding out and whether you are tenured or now. However, I highly recommend that you spread it with everyone you trust since there could be options popping up left and right. You use can your network broadly once the interview process gets serious (the second visit) and you need to find information about individuals you have met who could be in the position to make your life easier or harder and about individuals who have left. Everyone always puts their best face forward during interviews and no university is perfect, so you need to know whether a place is worth the time and aggravation of moving a lab. One great benefit of a mid-career transition is that you can take your time. You should use it wisely.
When you go on the job market as a faculty member, everything is different. You are not scrutinized on whether you will be able to do the job, you are a colleague looking for new opportunities. You speak the same language as the other faculty and do not need to be interviewed to see if they understand the ropes of this business. Conversations are a lot more geared towards convincing you to bring your money elsewhere and you have the benefit of time for figuring out whether the new place has the colleagues and resources for your lab to grow, expand in new directions, and thrive. As a more senior faculty, you are also expected to contribute and your role will be very different from a newbie.
With an intimate understanding of the ins and outs of administration and power structures, and of the things that are important to you in running your lab, there are several questions that you need to be answered requiring input from inside or outside the potential new institution. In some cases, those are not questions that you can ask directly during interviews unless the person interviewing you is a friend or a trusted friend of a friend. For example, while you can ask an Associate Dean or Department Chair how they get things done to understand their leadership style, you cannot ask them how much power they really have to get things done. When they tell you there are training grants and internal grants, you cannot really ask them whether they are assigned in a meritocratic fashion or whether there are fiefdoms controlling them.
Often the people recruiting you will let you know very clearly who is who, who controls space, who controls money, and who controls promotions so that you can behave accordingly when you talk business with them. But members of your network with loyalty to you may also provide more insightful details about their personalities and the academic strings they pull and that pull them. As you go to conferences and study sections, you meet friends and future colleagues in an informal environment and can gather additional information from casual conversations on how things are going... little-known fact: when faculty get together for a drink/dinner most of what we do is complain about funding and other work things.
Because if my network, there were multiple people I could talk to honestly about my needs and my fears and who could give pointed advice. In addition, they could introduce me to their friends within the intended institution who could provide insider information. Surprisingly, without any news of my job search getting back to the relevant stakeholders in my institution (though some colleagues peripheral to me were contacted by their networks to investigate about me). This ability to be stealthy may not always be the case and it is entirely your choice how far you spread the word that you are looking. It depends on how afraid you are of your institution finding out and whether you are tenured or now. However, I highly recommend that you spread it with everyone you trust since there could be options popping up left and right. You use can your network broadly once the interview process gets serious (the second visit) and you need to find information about individuals you have met who could be in the position to make your life easier or harder and about individuals who have left. Everyone always puts their best face forward during interviews and no university is perfect, so you need to know whether a place is worth the time and aggravation of moving a lab. One great benefit of a mid-career transition is that you can take your time. You should use it wisely.
Tuesday, February 5, 2019
The life of a double agent on the academic job market
This was written last Spring as interviews started getting serious, but of course I couldn't talk about it....
Academic job transitions take a long time! When I applied for my first faculty position, I started sending out applications in September, interviewed January through April and accepted a job at the end of May for the following April. 19 months, including almost a year after having signed an offer and waiting for admin processing, grant transfers, and lab construction. It was stressful, but I loved most of it. After the initial dreadful wait for someone to invite you for an interview, academic visits were a whirlwind of meetings, talks, and dinners. I'm an extrovert and truly enjoy interviewing. I got to talk to a lot of people about my science and I got to hear about their science. I also got to see different universities and departments, and I got to imagine myself there in a whole new life. While I was waiting to move, I was in the best situation possible: I had the prized academic job and I could still mess around in my postdoc lab with my friends spending someone else's money.
The second time is much different. Mostly because nobody at my institution or in my lab knows. It's the first time that none of my bosses or colleagues are expected to write me recommendation letters or act as references. Things that used to be open, like practices for job talks and chalk talks have been hidden on weekends and behind closed doors. I have been disappearing for interviews without much explanation or with some random excuse. I have a great network of local friends and colleagues outside my institution who have been phenomenal in helping me prep. But as much as I still really enjoy interviewing and I am stoked about the options available to me, the secrecy has been incredibly difficult to bear.
I have wanted to come clean many times, sometimes out of anger or frustration, and other times because I want my trainees to know what is going on. Everyone I talk to recommends I stay quiet until I have an offer I am willing to accept. I have seen friends be open about how much they hate their current situation and tell their chair they want to leave, and that generated a lot of animosities. Moreover, I still don't have tenure and if nothing pans out, I will still have to go up next year and will need the department to support me and the school to think I want to stay forever. But differently from the "real world" outside of academia, my job search, negotiations, and transition can take months or years. My lab has to keep going and publishing and I don't want them to feel uncertain about their employment until I know what is going to happen. I take on teaching responsibilities I may not be able to fulfill, and I am involved in discussions about future planning I have limited interest in, but I have to remain present in my department like nothing will happen. At the same time, I must appear excited about new positions, but not desperate, while being sufficiently aloof to obtain the best start-up package possible. If I am not given a great shot at success in a new university there is no reason for going out of the frying pan into the fire.
Don't get me wrong. I am complaining, but not really complaining. I am incredibly excited about this transition and I am getting better and better at this double agent life. There is so much relief in seeing a light at the end of a very long tunnel and in seeing that so many efforts may be rewarded. I just hadn't anticipated how emotionally taxing this could be and wanted to share the struggle with so many I know are going through the same thing. This job is amazing and sucks at the same time.
Academic job transitions take a long time! When I applied for my first faculty position, I started sending out applications in September, interviewed January through April and accepted a job at the end of May for the following April. 19 months, including almost a year after having signed an offer and waiting for admin processing, grant transfers, and lab construction. It was stressful, but I loved most of it. After the initial dreadful wait for someone to invite you for an interview, academic visits were a whirlwind of meetings, talks, and dinners. I'm an extrovert and truly enjoy interviewing. I got to talk to a lot of people about my science and I got to hear about their science. I also got to see different universities and departments, and I got to imagine myself there in a whole new life. While I was waiting to move, I was in the best situation possible: I had the prized academic job and I could still mess around in my postdoc lab with my friends spending someone else's money.
The second time is much different. Mostly because nobody at my institution or in my lab knows. It's the first time that none of my bosses or colleagues are expected to write me recommendation letters or act as references. Things that used to be open, like practices for job talks and chalk talks have been hidden on weekends and behind closed doors. I have been disappearing for interviews without much explanation or with some random excuse. I have a great network of local friends and colleagues outside my institution who have been phenomenal in helping me prep. But as much as I still really enjoy interviewing and I am stoked about the options available to me, the secrecy has been incredibly difficult to bear.I have wanted to come clean many times, sometimes out of anger or frustration, and other times because I want my trainees to know what is going on. Everyone I talk to recommends I stay quiet until I have an offer I am willing to accept. I have seen friends be open about how much they hate their current situation and tell their chair they want to leave, and that generated a lot of animosities. Moreover, I still don't have tenure and if nothing pans out, I will still have to go up next year and will need the department to support me and the school to think I want to stay forever. But differently from the "real world" outside of academia, my job search, negotiations, and transition can take months or years. My lab has to keep going and publishing and I don't want them to feel uncertain about their employment until I know what is going to happen. I take on teaching responsibilities I may not be able to fulfill, and I am involved in discussions about future planning I have limited interest in, but I have to remain present in my department like nothing will happen. At the same time, I must appear excited about new positions, but not desperate, while being sufficiently aloof to obtain the best start-up package possible. If I am not given a great shot at success in a new university there is no reason for going out of the frying pan into the fire.
Don't get me wrong. I am complaining, but not really complaining. I am incredibly excited about this transition and I am getting better and better at this double agent life. There is so much relief in seeing a light at the end of a very long tunnel and in seeing that so many efforts may be rewarded. I just hadn't anticipated how emotionally taxing this could be and wanted to share the struggle with so many I know are going through the same thing. This job is amazing and sucks at the same time.
Thursday, January 24, 2019
Changing institution as a mid-level faculty: a primer
I truly realized I was a New PI no more when I started looking for jobs 5 years in my tenure track. I wrote last year about whether the pre-tenure job search is a thing and it seems to depend on the university. I don't think it can ever hurt if you are in a position of strength, i.e. you are sure you will get tenure, and it may also help show your worth if you are borderline, but it could be riskier if nobody bites and word gets out.
I wanted to check what was out there because I wanted different resources for my research program and some key people had left my current institution. Overall, I was very excited to have options to explore, so I want to share some tips about what worked for me. While similar to what it takes to get your first job, moving later has a few added advantages and problems.
1) Everything is different the second time around. I hadn't realized how different the job search experience would be as a mid-career faculty. I'm one of those weird people who love interviewing because I'm really outgoing and I truly enjoy talking science all day long and seeing what other people are doing. This time because I had a job and I knew exactly what another faculty job would entail, a lot of the pressure of was gone and most of my focus was on information gathering. I was treated like a colleague, not a newbie that had to be tested on whether they could actually run a lab. I could have open and frank conversations, and ask pointed questions on resources and administrative support. I could truly look at options for collaborations and new projects because I don't have to "establish myself" to get my own grants and I can think about multi-PI grants and expansion of my research program. Instead of standing on a ledge and jumping hoping that someone will catch you, it was more like shopping for a rocket. Will this place get me where I want to go?
2) Use your network for intelligence gathering and sponsorship. After you've run a lab for a few years, you know what it takes, you know what you need to make your life easier, and you know what kind of resources must be available for you to thrive. The easiest transition options may come from colleagues, friends, and collaborators who can sponsor you within the department and give you honest information about the inner workings of the institution. You should come up with a checklist of expertise, facilities, and services you need and make sure they are in place. You should also reach out to people you know well and have them forward your CV around to their chair or search committees if there are positions opening. There are places with pots of money for "opportunity hires" especially targeted to women and minorities that can provide start-up money even if an official search is not underway.
3) Money makes everything easier. A new research grant is like a disco ball hanging over your head. You're bright, shiny, and fun. The best time to look is after you get your first big grant or right after you get the second. You will be bringing 3-4 years of funding which will likely offset a large portion of the start-up you will command. If you have any interest in moving, this is the time to look. If you are the end of a grant, you will be less attractive and the university may want to wait until renewal.
4) Apply even if you don't feel ready. As a counter to #2, you don't have to wait until the perfect time to apply, since you don't know what the university is looking for. You can ask around, see what's available and circulate your CV. You'll have a sense of the different places doing research in your field and probably already have favorites. Even if they don't pick you right away, you will 1) get feedback and 2) put your work out there so that places which would be a good fit know who you are. I started applying before I had my R01 when I saw positions in places I knew would be good for me. I knew multiple people there and I thought I'd put my name in the hat in case someone saw it and could mention me to others who would remember me in the future. I was thrilled when one school invited me for an interview without a grant and was not surprised when they scheduled the interview after my study section met. They bet on me which was very impressive. Would things have moved any further if I hadn't gotten the grant? Probably not, but I would have had a chance to talk to them and start a relationship for future recruitment.
5) Remember you know what you're doing and now you're worth more. I didn't quite appreciate at the beginning that my associate professor start-up was supposed to be bigger than an assistant professor's. I went through my budget spreadsheet from my previous search and added new equipment I needed and the personnel I wanted to do all the cool things I had outlined in my chalk talk. After having to make my projects smaller and more focused for the R01s, developing a big picture chalk talk which would let my vision shine was such a joy! But what did I need to actually get that done? So I made a wish-list and got to a new number, knowing fully well that with the new lab discounts I could negotiate a bit and also stretch that number to complete a couple of pilot projects. The best advice I ever got was "Know what you need and what you want. Negotiate for what you want and don't settle for less than you need." I had a chance to dream big and as I was adding things, I shot for the stars.
6) Make them feel you fill a hole. As I was practicing my chalk talk, a friend who's a senior scientist said "You must make them realize that there is a hole in their department they didn't even know they had. That you can fill it and that they can't let you get away". I laughed as it sounded too much like dating, but he wasn't wrong. This is easier done if the chalk talk is on the second visit and you had a chance to meet people to figure out the needs of the different faculty. However, the idea is to think of multi-PI grants and program project grants that could stem from your interactions with the existing faculty and outline how these could dovetail with your work. If this exercise comes easy and you can find multiple synergies, this is also a good sign that the institution would be a good fit.
7) Evaluate risk vs. benefit of a move. In the end, unless you are at risk of not getting tenure or are fleeing a toxic environment, you will be in a position of power. You have a job and you can continue to do what you've been doing, so a move is only worth it if the benefits outweigh the downtime and having to learn the quirks of a whole new system. The money and/or perks that are offered must make your excited about starting a new adventure and confident that you will succeed. Mid- to late-career negotiations can stretch for a long time. You can request multiple visits for you and your trainees, and you can delve into the administrative details with the deans and facilities. You are a colleague, you know how things work, and you may want to minimize the chances you will have to move again. Be honest and straight with them if you need to take your time.
Maybe 8) Negotiate a retention package with your current uni. It is likely that you are attractive to other places, you are also a valued member of your institution. They will have spent a considerable amount of money in setting up your lab in the first place and have been counting on indirect costs from your grants to keep going. By leaving, you are not only removing a colleague, but you are also disrupting their teaching operation and taking away current and future earnings. Once you have an offer in hand, you are in good shape to go to your current uni and see what they can offer in return. You may be uncertain about moving and may have a wish-list of things that they could give you to make you stay. They may be dismissive and you will be certain it's time to go. But it's still advisable to "play nice", since you will need to negotiate to move your equipment and people, and will need to stay a few months before you can leave.
I wanted to check what was out there because I wanted different resources for my research program and some key people had left my current institution. Overall, I was very excited to have options to explore, so I want to share some tips about what worked for me. While similar to what it takes to get your first job, moving later has a few added advantages and problems.
1) Everything is different the second time around. I hadn't realized how different the job search experience would be as a mid-career faculty. I'm one of those weird people who love interviewing because I'm really outgoing and I truly enjoy talking science all day long and seeing what other people are doing. This time because I had a job and I knew exactly what another faculty job would entail, a lot of the pressure of was gone and most of my focus was on information gathering. I was treated like a colleague, not a newbie that had to be tested on whether they could actually run a lab. I could have open and frank conversations, and ask pointed questions on resources and administrative support. I could truly look at options for collaborations and new projects because I don't have to "establish myself" to get my own grants and I can think about multi-PI grants and expansion of my research program. Instead of standing on a ledge and jumping hoping that someone will catch you, it was more like shopping for a rocket. Will this place get me where I want to go?
2) Use your network for intelligence gathering and sponsorship. After you've run a lab for a few years, you know what it takes, you know what you need to make your life easier, and you know what kind of resources must be available for you to thrive. The easiest transition options may come from colleagues, friends, and collaborators who can sponsor you within the department and give you honest information about the inner workings of the institution. You should come up with a checklist of expertise, facilities, and services you need and make sure they are in place. You should also reach out to people you know well and have them forward your CV around to their chair or search committees if there are positions opening. There are places with pots of money for "opportunity hires" especially targeted to women and minorities that can provide start-up money even if an official search is not underway.
3) Money makes everything easier. A new research grant is like a disco ball hanging over your head. You're bright, shiny, and fun. The best time to look is after you get your first big grant or right after you get the second. You will be bringing 3-4 years of funding which will likely offset a large portion of the start-up you will command. If you have any interest in moving, this is the time to look. If you are the end of a grant, you will be less attractive and the university may want to wait until renewal.
4) Apply even if you don't feel ready. As a counter to #2, you don't have to wait until the perfect time to apply, since you don't know what the university is looking for. You can ask around, see what's available and circulate your CV. You'll have a sense of the different places doing research in your field and probably already have favorites. Even if they don't pick you right away, you will 1) get feedback and 2) put your work out there so that places which would be a good fit know who you are. I started applying before I had my R01 when I saw positions in places I knew would be good for me. I knew multiple people there and I thought I'd put my name in the hat in case someone saw it and could mention me to others who would remember me in the future. I was thrilled when one school invited me for an interview without a grant and was not surprised when they scheduled the interview after my study section met. They bet on me which was very impressive. Would things have moved any further if I hadn't gotten the grant? Probably not, but I would have had a chance to talk to them and start a relationship for future recruitment.
5) Remember you know what you're doing and now you're worth more. I didn't quite appreciate at the beginning that my associate professor start-up was supposed to be bigger than an assistant professor's. I went through my budget spreadsheet from my previous search and added new equipment I needed and the personnel I wanted to do all the cool things I had outlined in my chalk talk. After having to make my projects smaller and more focused for the R01s, developing a big picture chalk talk which would let my vision shine was such a joy! But what did I need to actually get that done? So I made a wish-list and got to a new number, knowing fully well that with the new lab discounts I could negotiate a bit and also stretch that number to complete a couple of pilot projects. The best advice I ever got was "Know what you need and what you want. Negotiate for what you want and don't settle for less than you need." I had a chance to dream big and as I was adding things, I shot for the stars.
6) Make them feel you fill a hole. As I was practicing my chalk talk, a friend who's a senior scientist said "You must make them realize that there is a hole in their department they didn't even know they had. That you can fill it and that they can't let you get away". I laughed as it sounded too much like dating, but he wasn't wrong. This is easier done if the chalk talk is on the second visit and you had a chance to meet people to figure out the needs of the different faculty. However, the idea is to think of multi-PI grants and program project grants that could stem from your interactions with the existing faculty and outline how these could dovetail with your work. If this exercise comes easy and you can find multiple synergies, this is also a good sign that the institution would be a good fit.
7) Evaluate risk vs. benefit of a move. In the end, unless you are at risk of not getting tenure or are fleeing a toxic environment, you will be in a position of power. You have a job and you can continue to do what you've been doing, so a move is only worth it if the benefits outweigh the downtime and having to learn the quirks of a whole new system. The money and/or perks that are offered must make your excited about starting a new adventure and confident that you will succeed. Mid- to late-career negotiations can stretch for a long time. You can request multiple visits for you and your trainees, and you can delve into the administrative details with the deans and facilities. You are a colleague, you know how things work, and you may want to minimize the chances you will have to move again. Be honest and straight with them if you need to take your time.
Maybe 8) Negotiate a retention package with your current uni. It is likely that you are attractive to other places, you are also a valued member of your institution. They will have spent a considerable amount of money in setting up your lab in the first place and have been counting on indirect costs from your grants to keep going. By leaving, you are not only removing a colleague, but you are also disrupting their teaching operation and taking away current and future earnings. Once you have an offer in hand, you are in good shape to go to your current uni and see what they can offer in return. You may be uncertain about moving and may have a wish-list of things that they could give you to make you stay. They may be dismissive and you will be certain it's time to go. But it's still advisable to "play nice", since you will need to negotiate to move your equipment and people, and will need to stay a few months before you can leave.
Monday, January 14, 2019
Change is hard...
As the new year starts the looming possibility of moving to a different university is stirring a lot of feelings and not all of them good. In general, the idea of changing everything (city, home, friends, colleagues) once again is weighing on me. I wake up in the middle of the night full of questions: Do I really want to do it? Do I want to risk everything I have built to start over? What if it doesn't work out? What if I'm making a mistake? Why don't I just adapt and stay put?
A transition out of a postdoc is usually a given unless you're in the very lucky situation to be hired as a staff scientist in a wealthy lab. A transition from a faculty position to another is an opportunity and a risk. I know so much more now than I knew during my first round of job interviews. I know how things work and I know what could go wrong. I also know how fickle the academic environment can be, with leadership and rules changing seemingly with no rhyme or reason in the pursuit of "excellence" and tuition/grant dollars. Why change? It's a question I had to answer over and over again at every meeting in my interviews "You're doing so well. Why do you want to leave?"
The answer cannot be the real one, though I assume the reason is implicit. Thet I feel like a round peg squeezed into a square hole, that I just don't "fit", and that my current uni is not the place for me to thrive. My colleagues are great and they are wonderful people. I'm in a great city where I have built a good group of friends. But 1) I feel my expertise doesn't jive with the people around me and that my trainees and I are terribly isolated from my field so that we can't grow anymore, and 2) I want to move closer to "home" where most of my established personal support network is.
As I weigh the pros and cons everything is possible, the best outcomes and the worst outcomes mix up. I wish we weren't trained in considering all possible outcomes and pitfalls since life is not judged by an NIH reviewer. In the end, I have to go with my gut and trust the feeling that what I'm doing is right for me. I've learned a lot from this first faculty experience and I have grown enormously as a person, as a scientist, and as a leader. I need to trust my judgment and know that I will be able to handle everything life will throw at me...
I have not posted much in 2018, but that doesn't mean that I haven't written down my thoughts as I was going through the job search process, hoping this will be helpful for others in the same situation. There is really no rulebook for mid-career transitions, but I started putting together some advice and several posts on what I went through.
A primer for mid-career faculty transitions
On keeping quiet as you interview for a new job
Networking for mid-career faculty transitions
A transition out of a postdoc is usually a given unless you're in the very lucky situation to be hired as a staff scientist in a wealthy lab. A transition from a faculty position to another is an opportunity and a risk. I know so much more now than I knew during my first round of job interviews. I know how things work and I know what could go wrong. I also know how fickle the academic environment can be, with leadership and rules changing seemingly with no rhyme or reason in the pursuit of "excellence" and tuition/grant dollars. Why change? It's a question I had to answer over and over again at every meeting in my interviews "You're doing so well. Why do you want to leave?"
The answer cannot be the real one, though I assume the reason is implicit. Thet I feel like a round peg squeezed into a square hole, that I just don't "fit", and that my current uni is not the place for me to thrive. My colleagues are great and they are wonderful people. I'm in a great city where I have built a good group of friends. But 1) I feel my expertise doesn't jive with the people around me and that my trainees and I are terribly isolated from my field so that we can't grow anymore, and 2) I want to move closer to "home" where most of my established personal support network is.
As I weigh the pros and cons everything is possible, the best outcomes and the worst outcomes mix up. I wish we weren't trained in considering all possible outcomes and pitfalls since life is not judged by an NIH reviewer. In the end, I have to go with my gut and trust the feeling that what I'm doing is right for me. I've learned a lot from this first faculty experience and I have grown enormously as a person, as a scientist, and as a leader. I need to trust my judgment and know that I will be able to handle everything life will throw at me...
I have not posted much in 2018, but that doesn't mean that I haven't written down my thoughts as I was going through the job search process, hoping this will be helpful for others in the same situation. There is really no rulebook for mid-career transitions, but I started putting together some advice and several posts on what I went through.
A primer for mid-career faculty transitions
On keeping quiet as you interview for a new job
Networking for mid-career faculty transitions
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Is resilience the name of the game in academia? Part 3: Sophie is keeping both her kids, b!tches!
A year ago I wrote about the struggle to keep different projects going in my lab. I've been working on two separate and related lines of work that fit into the grander scheme of my lab. I like variety, and started with one scientific identity and then developed another. I kept both projects funded through my postdoc and at the beginning of my independent career, but it has been hard to keep them going lately.
Everyone was telling me to drop my original work and focus on the new one. Maybe it's silly, but it felt much like a failure. So, I threw a Hail Mary and pushed as hard as I could to sent out both R01 grants back to back...not quite twins in the same cycle as in my original plan to go for two R01s as a new investigator, but Irish twins. You see, if you submit as a New Investigator (NI), your grant remains in the NI pile for review even if the previous one was funded. I really wanted to make sure I sent something to the NIH in February because I heard that magical things happen in September/October when the fiscal year ends.
I almost didn't make it.
The grant just wasn't gelling and everyone's recommendations were going against my instincts. I decided to trust the coaching I was getting from colleagues in the field, and follow my PO's suggestions. If my PO had to choose to push for this grant, he needed to see that I listened to his advice. By the end, I was so exhausted, confused, and dejected waiting for the previous R01 to get reviewed on the same day the new R01 was due. One of my friends had to come to stay with me and watch me write. For a while, I didn't look at the grant after I submitted it. I wasn't sure if it was just word salad.
Then everything turned around. I found that the first R01 was going to be funded in the Spring. In July the second R01 was scored 1% from the payline! The NIH said that wasn't good enough, and I put on my big girl pants for the resubmission as an established investigator. But then, in an FY18 rebudgeting miracle the payline was changed! I didn't need to resubmit! And now everything will be funded again. I can't even express the joy at the idea of the science that we will get to do. The sense of wholeness and possibility.
I love and hate the emotional rollercoaster that comes with this job. But now I have 5 more years to keep going and do some very fun science. As we approach the holiday season I have been so thankful for this twist of fate, for my lab, for all others who have helped and supported me. It took a while to internalize this success after so many years of struggles, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel. And now I get to have fun at my job again!
I wish that 2019 will bring the same joy and awesome science to all of you.
Everyone was telling me to drop my original work and focus on the new one. Maybe it's silly, but it felt much like a failure. So, I threw a Hail Mary and pushed as hard as I could to sent out both R01 grants back to back...not quite twins in the same cycle as in my original plan to go for two R01s as a new investigator, but Irish twins. You see, if you submit as a New Investigator (NI), your grant remains in the NI pile for review even if the previous one was funded. I really wanted to make sure I sent something to the NIH in February because I heard that magical things happen in September/October when the fiscal year ends.
I almost didn't make it.
The grant just wasn't gelling and everyone's recommendations were going against my instincts. I decided to trust the coaching I was getting from colleagues in the field, and follow my PO's suggestions. If my PO had to choose to push for this grant, he needed to see that I listened to his advice. By the end, I was so exhausted, confused, and dejected waiting for the previous R01 to get reviewed on the same day the new R01 was due. One of my friends had to come to stay with me and watch me write. For a while, I didn't look at the grant after I submitted it. I wasn't sure if it was just word salad.
Then everything turned around. I found that the first R01 was going to be funded in the Spring. In July the second R01 was scored 1% from the payline! The NIH said that wasn't good enough, and I put on my big girl pants for the resubmission as an established investigator. But then, in an FY18 rebudgeting miracle the payline was changed! I didn't need to resubmit! And now everything will be funded again. I can't even express the joy at the idea of the science that we will get to do. The sense of wholeness and possibility.
I love and hate the emotional rollercoaster that comes with this job. But now I have 5 more years to keep going and do some very fun science. As we approach the holiday season I have been so thankful for this twist of fate, for my lab, for all others who have helped and supported me. It took a while to internalize this success after so many years of struggles, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel. And now I get to have fun at my job again!
I wish that 2019 will bring the same joy and awesome science to all of you.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Deciding which university is the right fit for you
I have been spending a lot of time recently thinking about how universities differ and about how to
find the right place for you. Like any other job the work environment and the culture will determine how you fit and how happy you are. I have been talking to so many friends grappling with the same questions that I decided to jot down some ideas that may help others in their struggles or their choices.
In a way or another, universities are corporations for higher-education and that they would do anything in their power to protect their reputation and appeal for students, including throwing their faculty under the bus or swiping problems under the rug. They are companies like many others, with often the difference that their products are teaching and research, and that their administration may not run quite right no matter how fancy they are. Being a great scientist and being a manager are two different things, and while you may be good at both, not everyone is. In addition, once you see how the sausage is made and the money is distributed at the Hunger Games of the Deans, you realize that even the best intentions can be foiled by institutional politics and that academia is most certainly not a "family"...
So, how do you find the right place, or survive until you have another chance to find it? Being on the job market as a faculty or postdoc can be quite scary and very "impostor syndrome"-inducing. You are terrified that nobody will want you, and if someone says "yes" you may feel obliged to take the job you can, even if you are not quite sure it's the right one. You might also think it is the right one, and circumstances will change due to the aforementioned Hunger Game results or some other issue.
The most basic criterion to be met is operations: a smooth process in grant submission and management, hiring, ordering and facilities including animal handling if necessary. I haven't heard of a single place that gets a five-star rating in all these things. If you know if this unicorn university, please mention it in the comments...or keep it to yourself so that nobody else can apply. Nobody tells you, but the single greatest source of delays in your scientific progress is having to spend a large portion of your time dealing with admin issues, and these issues hindering the work of your trainees. Plus, the possible development of multiple ulcers. Admins are critical and while there may be no place where they are all efficient, the efficient ones will save your life and help navigate the difficulties of academic administration. Depending on the needs of your research program, you need to find out as much as you can about the different aspects of operations. Ask everyone you meet and look for a pattern of consistency or elusiveness in their answers. Also, figure out if anyone is doing something similar to what you want to do and talk to them, because other people may have no idea of obstacles you may encounter.
Then, as long as you can get work done, there is the scientific environment. Are there people thinking about the same questions you are thinking about? Or tangential questions you would like to explore? Or questions you have never thought about, but sound really cool? Is there scientific and technical support around for you and your trainees? Most new PIs will tell you that their job is very lonely. Often lab heads are hired to fill a specific hole in the departmental expertise. Sometimes they dovetail nicely with other people already in place, sometimes not. The loneliest situation will arise if you are in a place where your expertise is not present and not understood, and where you cannot speak to anyone in depth about your research. Conferences, collaborations, and publications will become the only source of information on advances in the field, and you may be the only expert to provide technical help for your lab, which may slow innovation. There are multiple ways to adapt, such as developing extensive collaborations or changing research direction, but again, asking in advance and knowing what you are getting yourself into always helps.
And then there's culture. I may be hypersensitive, but I find that the academic culture of an institution as a whole defines how happy you'll be as a scientist there and will also define the scientific environment. In a siloed system, the culture of the individual department may be enough. By culture I mean the university's spoken and unspoken value systems. Do they claim to value research? Do they think research increases their prestige, but would rather not pay for it? Do they claim to value diversity? Do they claim to value collaboration and interdisciplinary team science? Do they want to subvert the status quo and hire scientists doing high risk/high reward projects? Do they have a focused mission (cure cancer, solve state-specific problems, etc)? Do they want their names on high impact journals no matter what? Do they aim to be a global or national leader? All these questions are part of different cultures I encountered, and everyone may elicit a specific reaction in you. You may be inspired, or annoyed, but overall how they answer will define whether you would like to be there or not. Even if the answers are great, the next step is to figure out if they are actually embodied by the employees, i.e. the faculty and the administrators. Every single place has a mission and vision crafted by a media office with upper-level dean-types. This doesn't mean the rest of the institution has bought in, and changing institutional culture can take a decade. On a 6-9 year tenure clock, you don't have a decade. Again, look for consistency in answers, but not so much consistency that everyone is giving you a memorized version of the mission statement.
If you found your magic spot, enjoy it. If not, you are most likely wondering how much to compromise and whether the job will provide a launching pad for another job. People in academia move around all the time and you don't owe the university anything, especially if they cannot provide a suitable environment for research. But the grass is not always greener. A university can support your career, be neutral, or be toxic. I am discovering much in this job is about compromise and being pragmatic, so if you are in a neutral environment, you want to think things through. If it's toxic, leaving is a no-brainer. The moment you get money, you have the option to search again and compare and contrast, but it's worth beginning to plot your escape the moment you decide you may want to leave. All information on operations, environment, and culture can be more easily obtained from friends and colleagues at other institutions. As your circle expands you can leverage these contacts for new opportunities. It may take a while for the right position at the right place to open up, and you want to be in the know. The more you go give seminars and meet other scientists at meetings, the clearer it will become what is a good fit...and also what is realistic, since that unicorn university doesn't exist.
Photo credit: By Diliff [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], from Wikimedia Commons
find the right place for you. Like any other job the work environment and the culture will determine how you fit and how happy you are. I have been talking to so many friends grappling with the same questions that I decided to jot down some ideas that may help others in their struggles or their choices.
In a way or another, universities are corporations for higher-education and that they would do anything in their power to protect their reputation and appeal for students, including throwing their faculty under the bus or swiping problems under the rug. They are companies like many others, with often the difference that their products are teaching and research, and that their administration may not run quite right no matter how fancy they are. Being a great scientist and being a manager are two different things, and while you may be good at both, not everyone is. In addition, once you see how the sausage is made and the money is distributed at the Hunger Games of the Deans, you realize that even the best intentions can be foiled by institutional politics and that academia is most certainly not a "family"...So, how do you find the right place, or survive until you have another chance to find it? Being on the job market as a faculty or postdoc can be quite scary and very "impostor syndrome"-inducing. You are terrified that nobody will want you, and if someone says "yes" you may feel obliged to take the job you can, even if you are not quite sure it's the right one. You might also think it is the right one, and circumstances will change due to the aforementioned Hunger Game results or some other issue.
The most basic criterion to be met is operations: a smooth process in grant submission and management, hiring, ordering and facilities including animal handling if necessary. I haven't heard of a single place that gets a five-star rating in all these things. If you know if this unicorn university, please mention it in the comments...or keep it to yourself so that nobody else can apply. Nobody tells you, but the single greatest source of delays in your scientific progress is having to spend a large portion of your time dealing with admin issues, and these issues hindering the work of your trainees. Plus, the possible development of multiple ulcers. Admins are critical and while there may be no place where they are all efficient, the efficient ones will save your life and help navigate the difficulties of academic administration. Depending on the needs of your research program, you need to find out as much as you can about the different aspects of operations. Ask everyone you meet and look for a pattern of consistency or elusiveness in their answers. Also, figure out if anyone is doing something similar to what you want to do and talk to them, because other people may have no idea of obstacles you may encounter.
Then, as long as you can get work done, there is the scientific environment. Are there people thinking about the same questions you are thinking about? Or tangential questions you would like to explore? Or questions you have never thought about, but sound really cool? Is there scientific and technical support around for you and your trainees? Most new PIs will tell you that their job is very lonely. Often lab heads are hired to fill a specific hole in the departmental expertise. Sometimes they dovetail nicely with other people already in place, sometimes not. The loneliest situation will arise if you are in a place where your expertise is not present and not understood, and where you cannot speak to anyone in depth about your research. Conferences, collaborations, and publications will become the only source of information on advances in the field, and you may be the only expert to provide technical help for your lab, which may slow innovation. There are multiple ways to adapt, such as developing extensive collaborations or changing research direction, but again, asking in advance and knowing what you are getting yourself into always helps.
And then there's culture. I may be hypersensitive, but I find that the academic culture of an institution as a whole defines how happy you'll be as a scientist there and will also define the scientific environment. In a siloed system, the culture of the individual department may be enough. By culture I mean the university's spoken and unspoken value systems. Do they claim to value research? Do they think research increases their prestige, but would rather not pay for it? Do they claim to value diversity? Do they claim to value collaboration and interdisciplinary team science? Do they want to subvert the status quo and hire scientists doing high risk/high reward projects? Do they have a focused mission (cure cancer, solve state-specific problems, etc)? Do they want their names on high impact journals no matter what? Do they aim to be a global or national leader? All these questions are part of different cultures I encountered, and everyone may elicit a specific reaction in you. You may be inspired, or annoyed, but overall how they answer will define whether you would like to be there or not. Even if the answers are great, the next step is to figure out if they are actually embodied by the employees, i.e. the faculty and the administrators. Every single place has a mission and vision crafted by a media office with upper-level dean-types. This doesn't mean the rest of the institution has bought in, and changing institutional culture can take a decade. On a 6-9 year tenure clock, you don't have a decade. Again, look for consistency in answers, but not so much consistency that everyone is giving you a memorized version of the mission statement.
If you found your magic spot, enjoy it. If not, you are most likely wondering how much to compromise and whether the job will provide a launching pad for another job. People in academia move around all the time and you don't owe the university anything, especially if they cannot provide a suitable environment for research. But the grass is not always greener. A university can support your career, be neutral, or be toxic. I am discovering much in this job is about compromise and being pragmatic, so if you are in a neutral environment, you want to think things through. If it's toxic, leaving is a no-brainer. The moment you get money, you have the option to search again and compare and contrast, but it's worth beginning to plot your escape the moment you decide you may want to leave. All information on operations, environment, and culture can be more easily obtained from friends and colleagues at other institutions. As your circle expands you can leverage these contacts for new opportunities. It may take a while for the right position at the right place to open up, and you want to be in the know. The more you go give seminars and meet other scientists at meetings, the clearer it will become what is a good fit...and also what is realistic, since that unicorn university doesn't exist.
Photo credit: By Diliff [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], from Wikimedia Commons
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Project Management in Academia 101: Getting people invested into the project
The thing about managing a project, any type of project, is that you cannot do it without the people who are actually doing the work. You can plan every step in detail and assign specific tasks and deadlines, but everything can come tumbling down because of lack of interest or miscommunication. Even when you're running an independent project, unless you work in a separate room with your own equipment focusing techniques you perform alone, you will need other people to help or provide services. In academic research, like in any business, personnel will always be the variable that makes or breaks your lab.
I have written extensively on how to hire a few years ago: some of those pieces are still timely and I wish I had taken the time to re-read them recently (here, here and here). Briefly, in an ideal world, you want lab members who are smart, engaged, passionate, and self-directed. Drive and intellectual curiosity are qualities that beat expertise in a job candidate, and in a training environment, independence and passion for a specific topic can be cultivated. But as I like to put it, if there is no wood, you cannot light a fire!
The issue of motivation fascinated me since I was a grad student. One night a new hotshot PI showed up in our lab, while a postdoc and I were working away and asked us "Why are you here? Your boss has been gone for hours and you're here. Everyone in my lab is gone and I'm here..." Our simple answer was "I don't know....we have experiments to do?" There are multiple reasons why someone would burn the midnight oil. Some have to do with carrots or sticks, but what would make someone WANT to work and do it happily?
Before I even started my lab I read "Drive" by Daniel Pink which I think is a necessary read for anyone interested in motivation. To foster workplace happiness and engagement, Pink proposes a motivation paradigm based on three principles: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. People want Autonomy: to be in control of their lives and of how they do their job. They also want Mastery: to be really good at something and to keep trying to achieve our goals. And finally, Purpose (a greater ideal to aspire to) brings it all together. Studies have shown that once the basic economic needs are met, Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose always trump financial gain.*
As a scientist, this made sense to me, since this is exactly why I do what I do. I am (mostly) in charge of my work and of my schedule, I love solving complex scientific problems with the final goal to help mankind better understand and treat neurodevelopmental disorders. Purpose is the hook and I find it's the way to get lab members engaged in a project starting with undergraduates and interns. If you do not give them the bigger reason, sometimes the slog of troubleshooting is too much to bear. Also, a lot of science tasks are boring, but still need to get done, and knowing why they are important helps get through them. Mastery gives a sense of accomplishments, and I tend to match projects to the techniques that someone is good at or would love to learn.
Sure, but in a small starting lab, how do you get Autonomy? What if you have someone picking up or joining an existing project? Or you need someone to focus away from what they are doing for the own project and help with something else? Again Mastery and Purpose come into play where clearly explaining the reasons why this is important and why a certain expertise is needed can get employees to buy in. "Ownership" of the research question and of the experiments is one of the most important aspects of getting students and trainees invested in the research.**
Finally, in a great piece on research motivation that touches some of the same topics, Uri Alon also discusses "social connectedness" as a motivation tool. We all know how much better it is to be in a work environment where everyone is invested in your success. While I don't buy the "My lab is a family" argument, I think a manager should strive to obtain a harmonious work environment by keeping conflicts in check, setting clear rules, and make employees feel listened to and appreciated. The right "vibe" in the lab will make people want to come to work.
Notes:
* Daniel Pink's newest book is When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing and talks a lot about when you should perform certain tasks depending on your circadian rhythm. I'll review when I'm done.
** As a disclaimer, even as a small lab I give everyone their own project which makes me much slower than I should be in publishing. I always had complete autonomy in my work, and I cannot bear to force someone else to do otherwise, but this may not be the best solution for everyone and many trainees may like working together and benefit from it.
I have written extensively on how to hire a few years ago: some of those pieces are still timely and I wish I had taken the time to re-read them recently (here, here and here). Briefly, in an ideal world, you want lab members who are smart, engaged, passionate, and self-directed. Drive and intellectual curiosity are qualities that beat expertise in a job candidate, and in a training environment, independence and passion for a specific topic can be cultivated. But as I like to put it, if there is no wood, you cannot light a fire!
The issue of motivation fascinated me since I was a grad student. One night a new hotshot PI showed up in our lab, while a postdoc and I were working away and asked us "Why are you here? Your boss has been gone for hours and you're here. Everyone in my lab is gone and I'm here..." Our simple answer was "I don't know....we have experiments to do?" There are multiple reasons why someone would burn the midnight oil. Some have to do with carrots or sticks, but what would make someone WANT to work and do it happily?
Before I even started my lab I read "Drive" by Daniel Pink which I think is a necessary read for anyone interested in motivation. To foster workplace happiness and engagement, Pink proposes a motivation paradigm based on three principles: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. People want Autonomy: to be in control of their lives and of how they do their job. They also want Mastery: to be really good at something and to keep trying to achieve our goals. And finally, Purpose (a greater ideal to aspire to) brings it all together. Studies have shown that once the basic economic needs are met, Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose always trump financial gain.*
As a scientist, this made sense to me, since this is exactly why I do what I do. I am (mostly) in charge of my work and of my schedule, I love solving complex scientific problems with the final goal to help mankind better understand and treat neurodevelopmental disorders. Purpose is the hook and I find it's the way to get lab members engaged in a project starting with undergraduates and interns. If you do not give them the bigger reason, sometimes the slog of troubleshooting is too much to bear. Also, a lot of science tasks are boring, but still need to get done, and knowing why they are important helps get through them. Mastery gives a sense of accomplishments, and I tend to match projects to the techniques that someone is good at or would love to learn.
Sure, but in a small starting lab, how do you get Autonomy? What if you have someone picking up or joining an existing project? Or you need someone to focus away from what they are doing for the own project and help with something else? Again Mastery and Purpose come into play where clearly explaining the reasons why this is important and why a certain expertise is needed can get employees to buy in. "Ownership" of the research question and of the experiments is one of the most important aspects of getting students and trainees invested in the research.**
Finally, in a great piece on research motivation that touches some of the same topics, Uri Alon also discusses "social connectedness" as a motivation tool. We all know how much better it is to be in a work environment where everyone is invested in your success. While I don't buy the "My lab is a family" argument, I think a manager should strive to obtain a harmonious work environment by keeping conflicts in check, setting clear rules, and make employees feel listened to and appreciated. The right "vibe" in the lab will make people want to come to work.
Notes:
* Daniel Pink's newest book is When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing and talks a lot about when you should perform certain tasks depending on your circadian rhythm. I'll review when I'm done.
** As a disclaimer, even as a small lab I give everyone their own project which makes me much slower than I should be in publishing. I always had complete autonomy in my work, and I cannot bear to force someone else to do otherwise, but this may not be the best solution for everyone and many trainees may like working together and benefit from it.
Sunday, April 1, 2018
5 years on the tenure track
Sometimes I wonder what made me think that April 1 was a good start date for my faculty job! But here it is, the April Fool's PI once again. I just completed year 5.
As customary in this occasion I go back to my past lab-birthday posts which reflect on the year that passed and on plans for the new year (Y1, Y2, Y3, Y4). The historical memory of this blog is one of the things I love the most (after my readers) because it give me prospective on my efforts and feelings. I am very glad that everything I put in place last year allowed me to survive this year. It was touch and go there for a minute, but the lab is good and back on its footing again. The new hires are great and after taking the time to get everyone up and going in 2017, things are moving along, papers are getting out and being published or in revision, we have cool new data, and we finally got our much needed R01 funding!
I have reflected a lot about what resilience means in academia during this process. The first month after getting the R01, when people were coming into my office to hug me or high-five me, I was stunned. I felt I had just come back from war. I was injured and psychologically devastated and there was no reason to cheer. A feeling I found so many of my friends who had been in the same boat shared. I don't know if it's true that the NIH throws you a bone at the very last second before drowning, but I have definitely heard of single-digit percentile R01s born out of extreme desperation.
Then a friend who is more senior mentioned that when you get your first R01 is when you realize you will survive, when you know that people trust you. And this is true. I still remember the joy of getting my very first grant as a postdoc, the sense of accomplishment and belonging "I can do this!" The disconnect in the past couple of years was that I knew I could do the job, but study sections didn't believe me, so I had to figure out how to convince them.
I feel like I am still recovering, but the outlook is a lot more optimistic. I made sure I had vacations planned to clear my head in case of both good or bad outcomes, and I'm ready to get back in the ring. This year I want to close this first chapter and really think about the future and what I can do with this lab now that there is some security for the next 5 years. There are still 2 more R01s in the pipeline...and I want to recapture the wonder and excitement I had on Day 1 of my faculty job.
I can also spend more time to focus on my other passion which is professional development for young scientists. After the Project Management series is done there will be more things in the pipeline.
As customary in this occasion I go back to my past lab-birthday posts which reflect on the year that passed and on plans for the new year (Y1, Y2, Y3, Y4). The historical memory of this blog is one of the things I love the most (after my readers) because it give me prospective on my efforts and feelings. I am very glad that everything I put in place last year allowed me to survive this year. It was touch and go there for a minute, but the lab is good and back on its footing again. The new hires are great and after taking the time to get everyone up and going in 2017, things are moving along, papers are getting out and being published or in revision, we have cool new data, and we finally got our much needed R01 funding!
I have reflected a lot about what resilience means in academia during this process. The first month after getting the R01, when people were coming into my office to hug me or high-five me, I was stunned. I felt I had just come back from war. I was injured and psychologically devastated and there was no reason to cheer. A feeling I found so many of my friends who had been in the same boat shared. I don't know if it's true that the NIH throws you a bone at the very last second before drowning, but I have definitely heard of single-digit percentile R01s born out of extreme desperation.
Then a friend who is more senior mentioned that when you get your first R01 is when you realize you will survive, when you know that people trust you. And this is true. I still remember the joy of getting my very first grant as a postdoc, the sense of accomplishment and belonging "I can do this!" The disconnect in the past couple of years was that I knew I could do the job, but study sections didn't believe me, so I had to figure out how to convince them.
I feel like I am still recovering, but the outlook is a lot more optimistic. I made sure I had vacations planned to clear my head in case of both good or bad outcomes, and I'm ready to get back in the ring. This year I want to close this first chapter and really think about the future and what I can do with this lab now that there is some security for the next 5 years. There are still 2 more R01s in the pipeline...and I want to recapture the wonder and excitement I had on Day 1 of my faculty job.
I can also spend more time to focus on my other passion which is professional development for young scientists. After the Project Management series is done there will be more things in the pipeline.
Friday, February 9, 2018
Is the resilience the name of the game in academia? Part 2. The Aftermath.
Is resilience the name of the game in academia? was the title of a very popular post from last year which opened a wide discussion on how much can one suffer through federal grant applications before they are deemed worthy, and whether the tenure track process is a pyramid scheme.
A couple of weeks ago I was working on my 7th consecutive NIH application and doing the obligatory chat with the NIH Program Officer who could take it in his portfolio. After the discussion he said "I looked up your application record. You are doing exactly what you are supposed to do. Keep going!" I was on the phone so I could roll my eyes. I thought "If someone tells me to keep going one more time, I'm going to to lose it." But what else can you do?
So, I kept going, through the emotional turmoil of working on application #7 while #6 was being reviewed (the NIH running wheel). As I was checking on eRA Commons that the new application was OK, the score for #6 came in...5.0 percentile...Wait. What?! I had to do a double take and make sure it was 5 and not 50. Single digit %. I broke down in tears. The score is well within the pay line and doesn't require any New Investigator bump or special treatment. My PO replied to my email with "Congratulations!"
I am happy, but the tension from running on the wheel for 3 years started dropping and I mostly feel so so tired. The enormity of what happened has still not entirely hit me. The possibilities, the change in focus for a lab that has been just pushing to get one more piece of preliminary/feasibility data, not being afraid that I could not keep the lab alive for more than 6 months...
I started thinking of what I learned from all this and what I could tell others in the same situation I was in. So here it goes.
1) Accept coaching. I remember reading this New Yorker piece by Atul Gawande about always needing a coach to truly become great. Coaching is more than mentoring. A coach identifies your weak spots and tells you how to improve, pushing you beyond what your comfort zone. Seek the people who will look at your grants and your writing and who will rip them open. Anyone who says "This is great" is not helping you. A coach is also someone who knows how to point you in the right direction. Reading my good grant some of my senior mentors said "You finally cracked the language you need to use for the NIH". Yet, they had not been able to tell me how to do it in previous applications and I had to look for professional grant coaching with Peg AtKisson @iGrrrl. So in a society where everyone needs to be praised, actively seek criticism and embrace it. Look for the people who really give you their honest feedback either gratis or for a fee.
2) Take all advice with a grain of salt. Ah, here I'm going to mess with you. You should take coaching and mentoring, but even the best coaches make mistakes. Your ideas are unique to you, as is your individual situation. You are the only one who can make the final decision on what goes into a project, a paper, and a grant proposal. While you should request a lot of feedback to see how different people react to your writing, this will mean a cacophony of different opinions. It is up to you to judge what is useful and what is not. And this is by far the most difficult aspect of being a leader: sticking to your guts, your choices, and your vision. The way I look at it is that if I have to drive my career into the ground, it will be on my own terms.
3) Be nimble. Rapidly adjust to situations and events as they happen. My first R01 application didn't work out and my PO recommended I write something else to target a different study section, so I did. If you are on a short 6-yr clock like me, time is of the essence. If you take 2-3 years to beat a dead horse...or rather to try and raise a cute little foal into a race-horse, you may end up with a project that is still not quite there. If you are in a place where you need two R01s for tenure, forget it! Some if the advice I got was to have multiple projects cooking and also figure out how to constantly repackage a proposal for different funding sources. That's what I call "application Tetris", where you can take one aim from here, one from there and voila', you have a new grant proposal! There is no single way to do things, mostly because you never know what is going to be a hit with reviewers.
4) Keep going! You know this was coming. Resilience is the name of the game. I have often wondered about how to keep going. This job has the ability to drag me back in on the exact moment I am ready to give up. You have probably heard many stories of people who were ready to quit and then everything turned out. I think there is an element in there of your colleagues throwing you a bone. Sometimes study sections appear to be like air-traffic control for young investigators: there are so many in the air, that they want to make sure you are running out of fuel before they let you land and refill. Maybe there is clarity that comes when you are truly desperate that makes you write your best proposals. I don't know.
The last think I can say is 5) Take care of yourself. Nothing is worth your health and well-being. I wish I practiced what I preach, but I'm working on it 😉
A couple of weeks ago I was working on my 7th consecutive NIH application and doing the obligatory chat with the NIH Program Officer who could take it in his portfolio. After the discussion he said "I looked up your application record. You are doing exactly what you are supposed to do. Keep going!" I was on the phone so I could roll my eyes. I thought "If someone tells me to keep going one more time, I'm going to to lose it." But what else can you do?
So, I kept going, through the emotional turmoil of working on application #7 while #6 was being reviewed (the NIH running wheel). As I was checking on eRA Commons that the new application was OK, the score for #6 came in...5.0 percentile...Wait. What?! I had to do a double take and make sure it was 5 and not 50. Single digit %. I broke down in tears. The score is well within the pay line and doesn't require any New Investigator bump or special treatment. My PO replied to my email with "Congratulations!"
I am happy, but the tension from running on the wheel for 3 years started dropping and I mostly feel so so tired. The enormity of what happened has still not entirely hit me. The possibilities, the change in focus for a lab that has been just pushing to get one more piece of preliminary/feasibility data, not being afraid that I could not keep the lab alive for more than 6 months...
I started thinking of what I learned from all this and what I could tell others in the same situation I was in. So here it goes.
1) Accept coaching. I remember reading this New Yorker piece by Atul Gawande about always needing a coach to truly become great. Coaching is more than mentoring. A coach identifies your weak spots and tells you how to improve, pushing you beyond what your comfort zone. Seek the people who will look at your grants and your writing and who will rip them open. Anyone who says "This is great" is not helping you. A coach is also someone who knows how to point you in the right direction. Reading my good grant some of my senior mentors said "You finally cracked the language you need to use for the NIH". Yet, they had not been able to tell me how to do it in previous applications and I had to look for professional grant coaching with Peg AtKisson @iGrrrl. So in a society where everyone needs to be praised, actively seek criticism and embrace it. Look for the people who really give you their honest feedback either gratis or for a fee.
2) Take all advice with a grain of salt. Ah, here I'm going to mess with you. You should take coaching and mentoring, but even the best coaches make mistakes. Your ideas are unique to you, as is your individual situation. You are the only one who can make the final decision on what goes into a project, a paper, and a grant proposal. While you should request a lot of feedback to see how different people react to your writing, this will mean a cacophony of different opinions. It is up to you to judge what is useful and what is not. And this is by far the most difficult aspect of being a leader: sticking to your guts, your choices, and your vision. The way I look at it is that if I have to drive my career into the ground, it will be on my own terms.
3) Be nimble. Rapidly adjust to situations and events as they happen. My first R01 application didn't work out and my PO recommended I write something else to target a different study section, so I did. If you are on a short 6-yr clock like me, time is of the essence. If you take 2-3 years to beat a dead horse...or rather to try and raise a cute little foal into a race-horse, you may end up with a project that is still not quite there. If you are in a place where you need two R01s for tenure, forget it! Some if the advice I got was to have multiple projects cooking and also figure out how to constantly repackage a proposal for different funding sources. That's what I call "application Tetris", where you can take one aim from here, one from there and voila', you have a new grant proposal! There is no single way to do things, mostly because you never know what is going to be a hit with reviewers.
4) Keep going! You know this was coming. Resilience is the name of the game. I have often wondered about how to keep going. This job has the ability to drag me back in on the exact moment I am ready to give up. You have probably heard many stories of people who were ready to quit and then everything turned out. I think there is an element in there of your colleagues throwing you a bone. Sometimes study sections appear to be like air-traffic control for young investigators: there are so many in the air, that they want to make sure you are running out of fuel before they let you land and refill. Maybe there is clarity that comes when you are truly desperate that makes you write your best proposals. I don't know.
The last think I can say is 5) Take care of yourself. Nothing is worth your health and well-being. I wish I practiced what I preach, but I'm working on it 😉
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
It is grad school/faculty job interview season. How do you pick where you will end up?
As you go on campus visit for grad school or faculty positions you not only have to decide if this is the university for you, but also whether this is a place where you want to spend a good chunk of your life. You may have done a wide search and be unfamiliar with some of the cities and schools, so what do you look for? How do you pick?
I was debating this issue with one of my senior mentors who suggested a clever approach, develop a ranking system. Define the things that are important to you for your work AND your life, and rank the different aspects of each option. One place may be #1 for work and #8 for life, so maybe you'd rather be somewhere that is only close to the top but has more attributes you like. It's an interesting exercise, especially because it really makes you think about what you want.
This is how I did it for faculty jobs. I came up with 7 criteria for work and 7 criteria for life, so that the scoring would be balanced. I chose things that are important to me personally and that I realized I would like for running a lab:
WORK: good colleagues, resources (cores, internal funding, etc), percent of salary support, students, good administrators, ability to attract good students/postdocs, recognition/ranking
LIFE: large city, proximity to friends and family, good art museum, good theater, good symphony orchestra, weather, distance from New York City
Then I made an Excel spreadsheet and assigned a value from 0-10 to each for a possible total of 140 points. Interestingly, the highest value I got was 106. Being in NYC immediately gives a score of 66, because let's admit it, the weather is not the best. It was clear that there is no perfect place and the final order was not necessarily what I expected. While this is not the only decision-making tool you should have, if you have been going back and forth in your head about some universities and cities, seeing how they rank on all aspects can be eye-opening. Defining your criteria can also remind you to ask specific questions during your interview to properly assess whether the place is a good fit. If you want a primer on which questions to ask and how to ask them there is an old post here. And another here on the all-important, but very loaded "Are you happy here?" and how to deploy it on a job search.
PS: Grad students: I was so confused when I had to pick a school that I literally let it up to fate, so don't feel bad if you don't know what you want. But trying this may help...
I was debating this issue with one of my senior mentors who suggested a clever approach, develop a ranking system. Define the things that are important to you for your work AND your life, and rank the different aspects of each option. One place may be #1 for work and #8 for life, so maybe you'd rather be somewhere that is only close to the top but has more attributes you like. It's an interesting exercise, especially because it really makes you think about what you want.
This is how I did it for faculty jobs. I came up with 7 criteria for work and 7 criteria for life, so that the scoring would be balanced. I chose things that are important to me personally and that I realized I would like for running a lab:
WORK: good colleagues, resources (cores, internal funding, etc), percent of salary support, students, good administrators, ability to attract good students/postdocs, recognition/ranking
LIFE: large city, proximity to friends and family, good art museum, good theater, good symphony orchestra, weather, distance from New York City
Then I made an Excel spreadsheet and assigned a value from 0-10 to each for a possible total of 140 points. Interestingly, the highest value I got was 106. Being in NYC immediately gives a score of 66, because let's admit it, the weather is not the best. It was clear that there is no perfect place and the final order was not necessarily what I expected. While this is not the only decision-making tool you should have, if you have been going back and forth in your head about some universities and cities, seeing how they rank on all aspects can be eye-opening. Defining your criteria can also remind you to ask specific questions during your interview to properly assess whether the place is a good fit. If you want a primer on which questions to ask and how to ask them there is an old post here. And another here on the all-important, but very loaded "Are you happy here?" and how to deploy it on a job search.
PS: Grad students: I was so confused when I had to pick a school that I literally let it up to fate, so don't feel bad if you don't know what you want. But trying this may help...
Friday, December 15, 2017
Is "go big or go home" the way to go in academic publishing?
For the past few years, I have been struggling to reconcile my tendency to build large complete stories for publication and the need to show productivity for grants and promotion. I have agonized about what would be a manuscript that would satisfy both requirements, while I had to contend with deadlines, reviewer requests, delays, and personnel leaving. I am still not sure of what is the right way...or if even a right way exists, so I thought I'd brainstorm this here and see what people think.
I was trained to build substantial mechanistic stories so that a phenomenon would be reported with a mechanism attached to explain it. But these take time. I was also trained, maybe naively, to follow the most interesting question and identify whatever approach was most suited to answer it, which has led me to use an array of approaches and not to be technically specialized. This takes even more time. When you are in a large lab with massive resources in an institution with all kinds of expertizes you can draw from, this is greatly intellectually stimulating and a lot of fun. When you are in a small place where you are the only person doing what you are doing, and sometimes the only person in your entire scientific discipline, suddenly this approach is not working so well.
I had to learn this the hard way applying for funding when reviewers couldn't quite place me and
questioned my qualifications to perform techniques I've been using for years. Despite having worked on a particular approach for a long time, I wasn't as prolific in publishing about it since I was building a larger story, and reviewers didn't believe I could do it. So I put a portion of the story together and published it, but they still said it wasn't enough. I looked at what I had, at my submission deadlines, and decided to break things apart a bit more. It broke my heart a little as I was cannibalizing another paper in progress to break it into smaller "single approach" pieces. Now, while I write yet another paper, which relies on some of the previously published data, I so wish I had kept everything together! It would have been so beautiful and cohesive, and now I have to do somersaults to make my point. There is another paper which has been in the works for 10 years now (yup, ten) because we have been learning new techniques which are taking years to perfect, and I wonder if it will be worth it.
I watch people who stuck it out and built one of these beautiful and cohesive mechanistic stories and I have to admit I am a little envious. Not necessarily because of the high-impact paper and the admiration of their peers, but because of the pride that comes with having a great piece of work to call your own. In giving a talk I can still place all the smaller pieces into a bigger picture. Yet, I cannot tell if it is as evident for others such as study section members, search committees, and university administrators, to see. In the end, my belief has always been that one has to strike the right balance between publishing a large story and not taking too long to do it and risk appearing unproductive. I still have not figured out how to walk this tightrope...
I was trained to build substantial mechanistic stories so that a phenomenon would be reported with a mechanism attached to explain it. But these take time. I was also trained, maybe naively, to follow the most interesting question and identify whatever approach was most suited to answer it, which has led me to use an array of approaches and not to be technically specialized. This takes even more time. When you are in a large lab with massive resources in an institution with all kinds of expertizes you can draw from, this is greatly intellectually stimulating and a lot of fun. When you are in a small place where you are the only person doing what you are doing, and sometimes the only person in your entire scientific discipline, suddenly this approach is not working so well.
 |
| Image: Adi Holzer, via Wikimedia Commons |
questioned my qualifications to perform techniques I've been using for years. Despite having worked on a particular approach for a long time, I wasn't as prolific in publishing about it since I was building a larger story, and reviewers didn't believe I could do it. So I put a portion of the story together and published it, but they still said it wasn't enough. I looked at what I had, at my submission deadlines, and decided to break things apart a bit more. It broke my heart a little as I was cannibalizing another paper in progress to break it into smaller "single approach" pieces. Now, while I write yet another paper, which relies on some of the previously published data, I so wish I had kept everything together! It would have been so beautiful and cohesive, and now I have to do somersaults to make my point. There is another paper which has been in the works for 10 years now (yup, ten) because we have been learning new techniques which are taking years to perfect, and I wonder if it will be worth it.
I watch people who stuck it out and built one of these beautiful and cohesive mechanistic stories and I have to admit I am a little envious. Not necessarily because of the high-impact paper and the admiration of their peers, but because of the pride that comes with having a great piece of work to call your own. In giving a talk I can still place all the smaller pieces into a bigger picture. Yet, I cannot tell if it is as evident for others such as study section members, search committees, and university administrators, to see. In the end, my belief has always been that one has to strike the right balance between publishing a large story and not taking too long to do it and risk appearing unproductive. I still have not figured out how to walk this tightrope...
Saturday, December 9, 2017
How do you keep going on the tenure-track?
The blog just turned 5 in November. I missed the actual birthday because it was a crazy month, but I've been thinking about this milestone. I realized that never in my wildest dreams I would have thought it would serve my readers and myself the way it has. It has followed me through twists and turns and going back through it gives me perspective on everything that happened. I went back to the beginning to read the post I wrote the day before I started my faculty position.
"Tomorrow I start the job I have been working towards for the past 15 years and I have been dreaming of since middle school. I always wanted to be a scientist and when I first joined a lab as an undergrad, I decided I wanted to run my own lab. I have had wonderful times and truly terrible times, when I have teetered on the edge of dropping out of college to man the cashier at a supermarket, dropping out of grad school to go write movies or just simply hide under a rock, leaving my postdoc to go work as a scientific consultant in finance or a policy advisor. For years, every day, I would wake up and think "Will I quit today?", and then I would choose my job as an aspiring academic scientist above anything else. Every day. And then, as I was interviewing for positions, something snapped into place..."
Little did I know that I would be back to the cycle in no time. This Fall as I went through the Nth federal grant proposal, dealing with the Nth admin disaster, and trying to keep my life together after months of antihistamines and steroids to calm my chronic hives, the thought of just quitting keeps coming up in my mind every day. Every day I wonder whether I want to go to work or not, whether I really want this job. I still consider working in policy, but have also developed a renewed interest in pharma.
What if I just resigned? A pragmatic friend asked if I have money ready for a transition to survive for 6-12 months, and I do. Heck, if I sold my place and moved to Bali or Costa Rica for a bit, I could probably rest easy on a beach for a couple of years...open a yoga studio...soak in some rays.
I saved a Tim Ferriss piece on TED talking about visualizing what would happen if you did what you are afraid of, and your fears came true. So, I indulged the fantasy and did the exercise of going through what I would do if I actually decided to quit. There is no scenario where the people in my lab are not taken care of, and I don't end up on my feet...and most likely on a beach, at least temporarily.
So, as usual, it all boils down to focusing on what I really want. What is this job worth to me? Is it the job itself or the workplace? Is it worth chronically affecting my health over this? In talking to my friends in and out of academia, I find these are the questions so many in my cohort are struggling with. Including "Am I making myself miserable by expecting too much?" "Should I just settle for what I've got and deal with the feeling of failure?"
2016 was truly terrible for me and I did a huge amount of personal development work in 2017 to keep going with a certain degree of sanity and level-headedness. And I was reasonably productive. But despite being more empowered and having figured out what I want and what I need, I'm still getting unexplained hives, which tells me that something is very wrong. In January 2016, in what I feel was a watershed post for the blog openly discussing some very personal feelings which resonated with my readership, I set a two-year moratorium on quitting. I didn't know then that the two years that would follow would be has hard as hell. I continue to feel the erosion and the sand slipping beneath my feet. Can I survive this job if it continues to be this hard? What is this worth to me? But also, should I stop pushing as much as I do to meet my huge expectations? Again, what is this worth to me?
Honestly, I have found some answers, but I do not know all of them yet. My plan is to put in one more R01 in February 2018, see what happens with the grants that are in review now and then take stock of what is going on. The only thing I know is that something's gotta give for this to be sustainable...
"Tomorrow I start the job I have been working towards for the past 15 years and I have been dreaming of since middle school. I always wanted to be a scientist and when I first joined a lab as an undergrad, I decided I wanted to run my own lab. I have had wonderful times and truly terrible times, when I have teetered on the edge of dropping out of college to man the cashier at a supermarket, dropping out of grad school to go write movies or just simply hide under a rock, leaving my postdoc to go work as a scientific consultant in finance or a policy advisor. For years, every day, I would wake up and think "Will I quit today?", and then I would choose my job as an aspiring academic scientist above anything else. Every day. And then, as I was interviewing for positions, something snapped into place..."
Little did I know that I would be back to the cycle in no time. This Fall as I went through the Nth federal grant proposal, dealing with the Nth admin disaster, and trying to keep my life together after months of antihistamines and steroids to calm my chronic hives, the thought of just quitting keeps coming up in my mind every day. Every day I wonder whether I want to go to work or not, whether I really want this job. I still consider working in policy, but have also developed a renewed interest in pharma.
What if I just resigned? A pragmatic friend asked if I have money ready for a transition to survive for 6-12 months, and I do. Heck, if I sold my place and moved to Bali or Costa Rica for a bit, I could probably rest easy on a beach for a couple of years...open a yoga studio...soak in some rays.I saved a Tim Ferriss piece on TED talking about visualizing what would happen if you did what you are afraid of, and your fears came true. So, I indulged the fantasy and did the exercise of going through what I would do if I actually decided to quit. There is no scenario where the people in my lab are not taken care of, and I don't end up on my feet...and most likely on a beach, at least temporarily.
So, as usual, it all boils down to focusing on what I really want. What is this job worth to me? Is it the job itself or the workplace? Is it worth chronically affecting my health over this? In talking to my friends in and out of academia, I find these are the questions so many in my cohort are struggling with. Including "Am I making myself miserable by expecting too much?" "Should I just settle for what I've got and deal with the feeling of failure?"
2016 was truly terrible for me and I did a huge amount of personal development work in 2017 to keep going with a certain degree of sanity and level-headedness. And I was reasonably productive. But despite being more empowered and having figured out what I want and what I need, I'm still getting unexplained hives, which tells me that something is very wrong. In January 2016, in what I feel was a watershed post for the blog openly discussing some very personal feelings which resonated with my readership, I set a two-year moratorium on quitting. I didn't know then that the two years that would follow would be has hard as hell. I continue to feel the erosion and the sand slipping beneath my feet. Can I survive this job if it continues to be this hard? What is this worth to me? But also, should I stop pushing as much as I do to meet my huge expectations? Again, what is this worth to me?
Honestly, I have found some answers, but I do not know all of them yet. My plan is to put in one more R01 in February 2018, see what happens with the grants that are in review now and then take stock of what is going on. The only thing I know is that something's gotta give for this to be sustainable...
Thursday, October 5, 2017
Are academic scientists cogs in the machine of education corporations?
My last post focused on how to motivate lab members during the last stretch of the tenure track and it spurred by far the most lively and interesting conversation we've had on this blog. The discussion touched many topics regarding motivation, results-only work environments, and how to run a lab in general. But there is one topic that often finds people deeply divided.
Are we as academic scientists running a small business renting space from a larger corporation (the university)? And if yes, is this attitude damaging how we train our students and postdocs?
Having grown up in a country where most universities are public, affordable and open to everyone, I have spent my entire career in the US grappling with this question and feeling uncomfortable when people extol the "tuition-driven" model, which for academic biomedical research becomes the "grant-driven" model. I'm not naive, I get how the cash flow will provide better services for students and more resources for researchers. But the cash flow also leads to the corporatization of education and research. The moment an institution starts to correlate space given to a lab with indirect recovery on grants on a bi-annual basis, research becomes a product...I will not digress on how this may push people to make bigger claims than necessary or to cut corners.
I think many of us, new principal investigators, who have finally seem how the sausage gets made feel uncomfortable, as we are pulled between an ideal and the reality. The ideal is that I would like to be like Plato in the Symposium, discussing big ideas with like-minded individuals, training young minds towards major discoveries which will have a lasting impact on mankind. The reality is that I have to be mindful of accounting, HR and facilities, which I constantly write grant proposals to keep everything going. Trainees have to be productive because without money, I cannot keep myself or them employed and even if I find money to pay for their salaries, I still have to pay for all the supplies and reagents they need to do science. So, am I running a small business? All that I know is that in work-related conversations I can relate much more easily with friends in management or with a friend who owns a coffee shop, than with friends teaching in the humanities.
Newly minted Nobel laureate Jeff Hall's comments upon leaving science ring true "Might an institution imagine that it should devote part of its ‘capital fundraising’ toward endowing the ongoing research of its employees — at least so that no such effort would abruptly sink to the null point? The answer is ‘nice try: we will raise funds, but we'll put them all into building buildings — in order to fill them with additional hires, who will be as haplessly on-their-own as is ill-fated you.’ " It is telling that lately Nobel laureates feel the need to say (and I paraphrase) "I would never have made it today" (Peter Higgs, Physics) or "The whole publishing system is messed up" (Randy Schenkman, Physiology and Medicine). I expressed before how I sometimes feel this whole career trajectory is a Ponzi scheme, and that we should call it like it is. If you work for a private university, especially a school of medicine or hospital, you are most likely a cog in a massive money-making operation and it is very clear that if you do not bring in the money, there will be no room for you.
How does this reflect on how we train students and postdocs? I feel like we just need to be honest of the challenges and benefits. As a grad student I was very aware of labs that were on the verge of being shut down down the hall and professor transitioning to pharma and medicine because tenure doesn't mean much when you have to pay 70% of your salary. It helped me shape future strategies for survival and also prepare me for what to expect. I wish I had been exposed to different types of institutions in addition to the "massive fancy school of medicine", so I really try to make a point to show my trainees that there are multiple different ways of being an academic and of doing research...and that as in every job you can look for the right "fit". I also make them aware of the budgetary considerations of running a lab, of the need to look for independent funding for their salaries and their projects, and of the need to get papers done to show productivity. The part of me that would like to be in the Symposium, hates having to chop stories up to get papers out to support a particular grant application. I want my stories to be whole, elegant and solid, but the university and funding agencies want to look at numbers...and so we balance being a cog and dreaming of being a wheel running free on the road.
I think good training can still be achieved independently of the current funding situation and that it is a disservice not showing the students and postdocs what the pressures and considerations of running a lab are. Eventually, talking about it may even get someone to do something to change the system...
Are we as academic scientists running a small business renting space from a larger corporation (the university)? And if yes, is this attitude damaging how we train our students and postdocs?
Having grown up in a country where most universities are public, affordable and open to everyone, I have spent my entire career in the US grappling with this question and feeling uncomfortable when people extol the "tuition-driven" model, which for academic biomedical research becomes the "grant-driven" model. I'm not naive, I get how the cash flow will provide better services for students and more resources for researchers. But the cash flow also leads to the corporatization of education and research. The moment an institution starts to correlate space given to a lab with indirect recovery on grants on a bi-annual basis, research becomes a product...I will not digress on how this may push people to make bigger claims than necessary or to cut corners.I think many of us, new principal investigators, who have finally seem how the sausage gets made feel uncomfortable, as we are pulled between an ideal and the reality. The ideal is that I would like to be like Plato in the Symposium, discussing big ideas with like-minded individuals, training young minds towards major discoveries which will have a lasting impact on mankind. The reality is that I have to be mindful of accounting, HR and facilities, which I constantly write grant proposals to keep everything going. Trainees have to be productive because without money, I cannot keep myself or them employed and even if I find money to pay for their salaries, I still have to pay for all the supplies and reagents they need to do science. So, am I running a small business? All that I know is that in work-related conversations I can relate much more easily with friends in management or with a friend who owns a coffee shop, than with friends teaching in the humanities.
Newly minted Nobel laureate Jeff Hall's comments upon leaving science ring true "Might an institution imagine that it should devote part of its ‘capital fundraising’ toward endowing the ongoing research of its employees — at least so that no such effort would abruptly sink to the null point? The answer is ‘nice try: we will raise funds, but we'll put them all into building buildings — in order to fill them with additional hires, who will be as haplessly on-their-own as is ill-fated you.’ " It is telling that lately Nobel laureates feel the need to say (and I paraphrase) "I would never have made it today" (Peter Higgs, Physics) or "The whole publishing system is messed up" (Randy Schenkman, Physiology and Medicine). I expressed before how I sometimes feel this whole career trajectory is a Ponzi scheme, and that we should call it like it is. If you work for a private university, especially a school of medicine or hospital, you are most likely a cog in a massive money-making operation and it is very clear that if you do not bring in the money, there will be no room for you.
How does this reflect on how we train students and postdocs? I feel like we just need to be honest of the challenges and benefits. As a grad student I was very aware of labs that were on the verge of being shut down down the hall and professor transitioning to pharma and medicine because tenure doesn't mean much when you have to pay 70% of your salary. It helped me shape future strategies for survival and also prepare me for what to expect. I wish I had been exposed to different types of institutions in addition to the "massive fancy school of medicine", so I really try to make a point to show my trainees that there are multiple different ways of being an academic and of doing research...and that as in every job you can look for the right "fit". I also make them aware of the budgetary considerations of running a lab, of the need to look for independent funding for their salaries and their projects, and of the need to get papers done to show productivity. The part of me that would like to be in the Symposium, hates having to chop stories up to get papers out to support a particular grant application. I want my stories to be whole, elegant and solid, but the university and funding agencies want to look at numbers...and so we balance being a cog and dreaming of being a wheel running free on the road.
I think good training can still be achieved independently of the current funding situation and that it is a disservice not showing the students and postdocs what the pressures and considerations of running a lab are. Eventually, talking about it may even get someone to do something to change the system...
Sunday, September 24, 2017
How do you get people complete projects during the tenure push?
My last post about getting back to the bench and figuring out how much time a new investigator should take from teaching and admin work spurred a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of having the PI active in the lab. It made me think about motivating and inspiring people. I have been interested in motivation for a long time. When I was a PhD student a new PI came into our lab at 8:30pm and just point blank asked me and the postdoc laboring at our computers "Why are you still here? My people are all gone. How do I get them to stay?" We kind of looked at each other and shrugged "I don't know..." Our boss had been gone for hours to go home to her family, and whether she was there at all didn't make any difference on our hours. We just needed to get work done. That started me thinking about why people commit to a project. Mind, the point here is not the number of hours you spend on it which can vary depending on family and other obligations, but the desire to get results and complete your work. How do you get lab members that are engaged, detail oriented and passionate about their science? You hire this type of person, you'll say. Sure, but you also have to keep them motivated...
When I started the blog 5 years ago (😱) some of my very first posts were about motivation, and I still need to remind myself of that advice from time to time. In one of my first posts I posted about a great book, Drive, by Daniel Pink who discusses behavioral research suggesting that once certain basic salary requirements are met people are motivated by Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. They need to work independently and develop their own ideas. They need to feel that they have mastered complex theories and techniques. They need to have a good reason for why they are doing what they are doing.
This all sounds great! This is exactly what motivates me. But everyone moving at their own speed or following their own ideas could work for a large well-funded lab but may not be the best way to get a small research lab to finish the papers and projects we need to survive the tenure-track. I have already assigned lab peeps to specific priorities, but some of my mentors want me to pull people off their own projects to help on finishing other people's things. I'm debating whether that would help or hurt our progress. Will I be disrupting lab dynamics and upsetting egos? And what about their own projects? This doesn't really promote autonomy or mastery...
.jpg)
It makes me think of the people who run a "tight ship". One of my past mentors forbade students to leave before 6pm and did random checks on Saturday to make sure everyone was at work. A lot got done, but I hated working that way, and this attitude is so distant from my personality, I would feel horrible imposing similar rules. But what is right? As I drive myself insane about the tenure push, I am torn about protecting my lab at all costs from my internal emotional turmoil... and again I am debating whether this is the best strategy. Will a false sense of security prevent my lab peeps from understanding that it's make or break time? That doom could be impending that we are all in this rowboat together. Everyone was warned very clearly of what joining a new investigator's laboratory entailed, of my timeline, and the pros and cons of coming in as tenure approached. But I feel that they really have no idea...and how could they?
I think I need to better express my sense of urgency, keep stricter deadlines, and shift priorities if necessary...and of course get back in the lab! Maybe the camaraderie of working through this together is that is really needed. In the meantime, this handy productivity guide from the Harvard Business Review may also help!
Photo credit: By PeterJBellis from England (White Water Rafting (on The Nile) - Wikimedia Commons
When I started the blog 5 years ago (😱) some of my very first posts were about motivation, and I still need to remind myself of that advice from time to time. In one of my first posts I posted about a great book, Drive, by Daniel Pink who discusses behavioral research suggesting that once certain basic salary requirements are met people are motivated by Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. They need to work independently and develop their own ideas. They need to feel that they have mastered complex theories and techniques. They need to have a good reason for why they are doing what they are doing.
This all sounds great! This is exactly what motivates me. But everyone moving at their own speed or following their own ideas could work for a large well-funded lab but may not be the best way to get a small research lab to finish the papers and projects we need to survive the tenure-track. I have already assigned lab peeps to specific priorities, but some of my mentors want me to pull people off their own projects to help on finishing other people's things. I'm debating whether that would help or hurt our progress. Will I be disrupting lab dynamics and upsetting egos? And what about their own projects? This doesn't really promote autonomy or mastery...
It makes me think of the people who run a "tight ship". One of my past mentors forbade students to leave before 6pm and did random checks on Saturday to make sure everyone was at work. A lot got done, but I hated working that way, and this attitude is so distant from my personality, I would feel horrible imposing similar rules. But what is right? As I drive myself insane about the tenure push, I am torn about protecting my lab at all costs from my internal emotional turmoil... and again I am debating whether this is the best strategy. Will a false sense of security prevent my lab peeps from understanding that it's make or break time? That doom could be impending that we are all in this rowboat together. Everyone was warned very clearly of what joining a new investigator's laboratory entailed, of my timeline, and the pros and cons of coming in as tenure approached. But I feel that they really have no idea...and how could they?I think I need to better express my sense of urgency, keep stricter deadlines, and shift priorities if necessary...and of course get back in the lab! Maybe the camaraderie of working through this together is that is really needed. In the meantime, this handy productivity guide from the Harvard Business Review may also help!
Photo credit: By PeterJBellis from England (White Water Rafting (on The Nile) - Wikimedia Commons
Monday, September 4, 2017
How much time should a new PI spend at the bench?
Some time ago I saw Huda Zoghbi give a talk describing her career path and mentoring philosophy.
Huda is a giant in neurogenetics and neuroscience in general and she is one of the people who shaped the study of neurodevelopmental disorders. She is also well known to be a great mentor, in particular to women. One piece of advice that Huda gave to young investigators was to be at the bench all day every day, work closely with your lab and fill the lab with grad students. As a young PI you are the best postdoc you can get and you are the one who can continue to make the big discoveries. Grad students will take a while to train, but the time taken will pay off.
In theory, I would love to do that. But my question is "How?" How could I have responsibly hired 3-4 students in a very small program where I had 3 rotation students in 3 years? The start-up also does not cover the time necessary to graduate multiple students. With the fluctuations in funding, I could initially guarantee 2-3 years in salary for people and now I'm down to 1 year, so I have stopped taking rotation students altogether. I have spoken to multiple friends in the same situation and some of them also have to teach one or two classes per semester giving them even less time for mentoring students.
For this reason, I have ended up running a postdoc and technician-heavy group, but as the tenure crunch is getting closer, I'm wondering if I should jump in to make things move faster. In talking to friends who just went through the process I realized I'm not an exception. I'm still the most advanced and technically skilled postdoc I can get. So my dilemma at this time is whether I need to get better organized with writing grants and papers, and carve out time for experiments. I was independent as a student and postdoc working on my own projects and ideas, so I tend to follow the same model of letting everyone work on their project and paper. Yet, I'm worried this is hurting more than helping and that I should get "all hands on deck" on a couple of papers and reroute resources to get things done.
What is your experience? How much time should a new PI spend at the bench? Does it make sense for me to step in to help with experiments or to start the riskiest projects and only give them off to trainees once the preliminary data is solid? Comments and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Huda is a giant in neurogenetics and neuroscience in general and she is one of the people who shaped the study of neurodevelopmental disorders. She is also well known to be a great mentor, in particular to women. One piece of advice that Huda gave to young investigators was to be at the bench all day every day, work closely with your lab and fill the lab with grad students. As a young PI you are the best postdoc you can get and you are the one who can continue to make the big discoveries. Grad students will take a while to train, but the time taken will pay off.
In theory, I would love to do that. But my question is "How?" How could I have responsibly hired 3-4 students in a very small program where I had 3 rotation students in 3 years? The start-up also does not cover the time necessary to graduate multiple students. With the fluctuations in funding, I could initially guarantee 2-3 years in salary for people and now I'm down to 1 year, so I have stopped taking rotation students altogether. I have spoken to multiple friends in the same situation and some of them also have to teach one or two classes per semester giving them even less time for mentoring students.For this reason, I have ended up running a postdoc and technician-heavy group, but as the tenure crunch is getting closer, I'm wondering if I should jump in to make things move faster. In talking to friends who just went through the process I realized I'm not an exception. I'm still the most advanced and technically skilled postdoc I can get. So my dilemma at this time is whether I need to get better organized with writing grants and papers, and carve out time for experiments. I was independent as a student and postdoc working on my own projects and ideas, so I tend to follow the same model of letting everyone work on their project and paper. Yet, I'm worried this is hurting more than helping and that I should get "all hands on deck" on a couple of papers and reroute resources to get things done.
What is your experience? How much time should a new PI spend at the bench? Does it make sense for me to step in to help with experiments or to start the riskiest projects and only give them off to trainees once the preliminary data is solid? Comments and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Fighting loneliness on the tenure track
My emergency contact is moving away. One of the friends who convinced me to move where I am was fired earlier this year for not having an R01 grant. She found a new (much better) job, was awarded a large foundation grant and will likely get her R01 in the next month or so. She's heading to be awesome somewhere else. The other good friend I had made after moving to "New PI town" moved away a few months ago also for a job opportunity closer to her family and boyfriend. So, who should be my emergency contact now? Likely someone in my family in Europe, since I don't have close friends nearby.
What I'm really asking is: how much loneliness is one supposed to put up with for the sake of their job? Many jobs may push you to move around for career advancement, but I do not know any other one where getting a new job takes 1-3 years and will most likely mean you have to move somewhere else. Being on the tenure track adds a level of restraint where you may not be able to be completely honest with senior or junior colleagues. In addition, being the boss is a lonely job, as you can be friendly and caring, but not the one to share your deepest fears and doubts. Not being in a relationship makes things more lonely, but relationships can complicate things. Some people move to less than ideal situations to follow their significant other. Other couples are stuck living in different cities because two academic positions in the same place are hard to find. Last but not least, studies have shown that it becomes harder and harder to form close friendships after a certain age,
This sounds dire. What is an academic to do? When deep ties built during graduate school and postdoc years are severed and friends are scattered all over, conferences and seminars become as much about science as about getting together and catching up. I never really appreciated how critical this is for my well-being until I started as an Assistant Professor. Other networks are also available to get support and develop a sense of belonging. Twitter provides a broad and supportive scientific community, though trolls and the constant barrage of news and opinions sometimes require taking a step back every now and then. Nonetheless, friendships can be forged on the site. The New PI Slack (no relations to me) is a supportive community for early stage investigators which is now hosting more than 1000 academics in constant discussions about running a lab, writing grants, training, teaching and many other topics. What matters is that there are A LOT of other people out there going through the same things and having the same problems I have. Science in academia doesn't have to be so lonely.
I will miss my friends terribly, but everyone has gotta do what they gotta do. Old friends are still an email, a phone-call or a flight away. And I am glad there are all these other groups available. I am still not convinced that you cannot develop new strong friendship after 30 or 40, in real life and online.
What I'm really asking is: how much loneliness is one supposed to put up with for the sake of their job? Many jobs may push you to move around for career advancement, but I do not know any other one where getting a new job takes 1-3 years and will most likely mean you have to move somewhere else. Being on the tenure track adds a level of restraint where you may not be able to be completely honest with senior or junior colleagues. In addition, being the boss is a lonely job, as you can be friendly and caring, but not the one to share your deepest fears and doubts. Not being in a relationship makes things more lonely, but relationships can complicate things. Some people move to less than ideal situations to follow their significant other. Other couples are stuck living in different cities because two academic positions in the same place are hard to find. Last but not least, studies have shown that it becomes harder and harder to form close friendships after a certain age,
 |
| Children's voyage (Wikimedia Commons) |
I will miss my friends terribly, but everyone has gotta do what they gotta do. Old friends are still an email, a phone-call or a flight away. And I am glad there are all these other groups available. I am still not convinced that you cannot develop new strong friendship after 30 or 40, in real life and online.
Thursday, June 15, 2017
Is resilience the name of the game in academia?
As I was going through one of the hardest days in my tenure-track experience, struggling getting grants and keeping projects staffed, a friend advised me: "Resilience is the name of the game in academia. Just keep going." And so I did, I doubled down on my efforts and ticked every possible box on the tenure check-list...apart from one...an NIH R01 grant. I applied at every funding cycle revamping old applications and drafting new ones, went from Not Discussed last year to two not-fundable, but decent scores in 2017. And so we keep going through the slog of applying to an NIH grant every four months until something hits. "Wishin' and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin'..."
Lately I've been faced with what happens if something does not hit. A very close friend was let go and will close her lab in the next couple of weeks. Then, this week Dr. Becca (@doc_becca) who has been a beacon for junior faculty everywhere got one more not-fundable score on an R01 application, and may not get tenure. In both cases, these women are recognized young leaders in their respective fields, speakers at national conferences and part of national society committees, in addition to being great mentors and good citizens at their universities. In Dr. Becca's words...
I didn't mean to start this as an hopeless post. I'm still wishin' and hopin'. Still hustlin' to come up
with some new ways to tell my stories so that journal referees, conference attendees, AND NIH reviewers are wowed. I'm just wondering if resilience is necessary but not sufficient, and if luck is the defining factor. The good fortune to have the right mentors at the right time to guide your applications, the right reviewers, the right star alignment for a favorable outcome. Then everything is a gamble, and all a young scientist can do is her/his best. If you are one of the lucky ones, how do you move forward from there? How do you motivate your trainees through such instability? But also how does this impact the status of scientific development and innovation at a national and global level? These are the days I would really want to move into policy-making to fix this, but then the most exciting science of my career is sitting there waiting to get done...and I need to find money to do it. So, I get back to my work and try not to think about any of this, while somewhere in the back of my mind still lurks the suspect that I'm being conned...
Lately I've been faced with what happens if something does not hit. A very close friend was let go and will close her lab in the next couple of weeks. Then, this week Dr. Becca (@doc_becca) who has been a beacon for junior faculty everywhere got one more not-fundable score on an R01 application, and may not get tenure. In both cases, these women are recognized young leaders in their respective fields, speakers at national conferences and part of national society committees, in addition to being great mentors and good citizens at their universities. In Dr. Becca's words...
What if you do everything you are supposed to do and the NIH still doesn't believe you? What if you are doing cool and innovative science which doesn't fit a certain mold and the reviewers don't get it? You can say: "Well, maybe you did not explain it well enough." "Maybe, though it was explained well enough to get nice papers and talk invites." It just feels like there is something fundamentally broken with the system and that wishin' and hopin' is not going to cut it. I have completely changed strategy with every grant I have sent in. When I have responded to reviewers comments by doing everything requested, things have gotten worse instead of better. Taking a look on the inside of NIH peer review earlier this year gave me some prospective. I don't necessarily think that peer review itself is broken. I enjoyed participating and found that everyone was fair, but I realized that the 10-15% pay lines introduce an element of pure luck which has nothing to do with your worth as a scientist. And this is particularly punishing to women as they receive lower scores than men. I have some hope in the new NIH initiative to increase new investigator pay lines to 25% across the board, but this still doesn't fix the overall lack of support that many junior and mid-career faculty receive from their institutions.I have done EVERYTHING I was supposed to. I published in good journals. I gave talks. I designed classes. I mentored students.— Dr Becca, PhD 🐘 (@doc_becca) June 12, 2017
with some new ways to tell my stories so that journal referees, conference attendees, AND NIH reviewers are wowed. I'm just wondering if resilience is necessary but not sufficient, and if luck is the defining factor. The good fortune to have the right mentors at the right time to guide your applications, the right reviewers, the right star alignment for a favorable outcome. Then everything is a gamble, and all a young scientist can do is her/his best. If you are one of the lucky ones, how do you move forward from there? How do you motivate your trainees through such instability? But also how does this impact the status of scientific development and innovation at a national and global level? These are the days I would really want to move into policy-making to fix this, but then the most exciting science of my career is sitting there waiting to get done...and I need to find money to do it. So, I get back to my work and try not to think about any of this, while somewhere in the back of my mind still lurks the suspect that I'm being conned...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)