How do you know when to change and not quit?

I have been thinking a lot about quitting recently. As I wrote in a very hopeful post the day before I started my faculty position, thinking about quitting is part of my process. I have considered alternative careers since I was in college and I have become accustomed to chose my job every day. I am going to work because I want to, because there is nothing else that I would rather do. Sometimes things get so hard, that you question your choices and wonder whether whatever you are doing is really what you should be doing with your life.

I was looking for articles or blog posts about transitions in academia and I found a whole lot about quitting. There is a great article on Vitae that summarizes some of the views of the so called academic Quit Lit which they collected in a handy Google doc. (Warning: you should read these posts only when you are in a good mood or in the company of a good bottle of Scotch)

However, what if you should not change careers altogether, but are just unhappy where you are?
Sometimes we mistake profound dissatisfaction with our current situation with having chosen the wrong profession, but this is not necessarily true. Throughout my training, I have met people who just needed to be somewhere else and did not necessarily fit where they were. Someone who started a PhD in Neuroscience and switched to Computer Science to another university. Multiple people who were in the wrong thesis lab or the wrong postdoc lab. When you think everything is hopeless and you are stuck, this is hardly ever the reality. You are never ever stuck unless you're in jail without the possibility of parole, but then you have other problems than deciding what to do with your PhD.
You can be unhappy for a multitude of reasons:
- your job is toxic and your boss is a monster who makes everyone cry;
- your job is great/okay, but the rest of your life sucks;
- your job is okay, but you do not have the right resources for advancement.

It boils down to this. You institution/lab can 1) destroy your career, 2) allow your career or 3) support your career. If you're in position #3, great for you! Stop reading and go do something fun. If you're in position #1, you need to come up with an exit strategy stat! In the best case scenario you are a year 1-2 grad student or postdoc and you can exit gracefully to find another lab. In the economy of your life, 1-2 years mean nothing. Trust me. If you are more advanced, you need to discuss with trusted colleagues and mentors how to best position yourself to get out. A good number of people will be in position #2, some things are okay, some things are not, so you're not sure what to do. Science has a lot of ups and downs. You may just need to sit down and figure out the pros and cons of your situation. A senior mentor recommended a very good strategy. Make a list of every single thing that is important to you in your life and your work, for example, good colleagues or good museums. Then as you consider moving, rank the new cities and universities for each of the criteria (this may require research). The perfect university/perfect city match may not exist, so you must decide what you can live with and what you really want. It may turn out that where you are is the best compromise or that you can ask for something to change to make things better. If not, you use your network to start figuring out how to move somewhere higher on your list. Academia can be for life, but does not have to be a life sentence.

Where the New PI tries a time management exercise

I have multiple posts at various stages, but lately the time is lacking. I feel exhausted and unproductive, being pulled in a hundred different directions while I need time to focus and write an R21 and an R01 in the next 6 weeks. While barely keeping my head above water, I've been on Twitter sporadically, but yesterday I caught a couple of posts about time management. In one, which I can't find anymore because I forgot to bookmark it, the author was describing a time-management exercise. You make a spreadsheet of your day in 30min intervals and log what you do for some time. I have tried in the past to use different online time management tools to figure out where my days go, but I always forget to turn on or off the timer. I thought this more gross approximation of where time goes would be easier, so I will try for a week or maybe a month.

I have decided on simple categories: research, service, teaching and administration for work, exercise, TV, social, culture and sleep for myself. I have multiple questions in mind.
1) Simply put, how many hours a day and a week do I really work?
2) I feel like I have an inordinate amount of administrative work to do or followup on and I've been spewing random numbers when complaining about it. How much of my day is actually spent doing someone else's job?
3) Am I doing too much or too little service?
4) Can I make sure I exercise at least half an hour each day?
5) Am I happy with my activity distribution or do I want to make changes?

The first day was very informative. I worked 9.5 hours with a 1 hour break in the afternoon, because lunch was eaten during a seminar. 60% was actual research work, either writing or discussing experiments, 31% was some kind of service dealing with someone else's faculty candidate and reviewing grants. Only 9% was admin. I put in my half hour walking to work this morning, so now I feel justified going home and crashing on the couch...

I am curious now and I will report how it goes...

Maintaining your ESI status...

With one R01 application waiting for additional experiments before resubmission and one R01 submitted, I received the dreaded email from the NIH saying that my ESI (early stage investigator) status had ended. I was sad and wondered what would happen to my lab that the extra bump in percentile for funding is gone. Since I have never had an R01 the New Investigator status still holds, but it's institute dependent and not as codified as the ESI.

The fact that ESI status depends on the date your PhD was conferred is a real issue as people stay longer and longer in their postdoc position. All candidates we interviewed in our latest faculty search had started their postdocs 2007-2009, so their ESI bump could end as early as next year. I was talking to a friend about this and actually found out that things are not as black and white. With some planning you can maintain your ESI past the dreaded deadline.

It turns out your application is listed as ESI as long as you SUBMIT before the ESI ends, so, phew, my currently submitted R01 will be regarded as ESI-eligible. Not only...

For individuals who are still New Investigators at the time of resubmission of the A1 application, there is a 13 month period during which the New Investigator can submit the A1 resubmission application to retain ESI status. 

This means that you have 1 year to resubmit your application and will still maintain ESI status. So, my first R01 application will still be considered ESI if resubmitted in July 2016 AND my second R01 application will remain ESI until March 2017...a full year after my ESI status ended.  Of course the ESI advantage will disappear if R01 #1 is funded, but it's nice to know that I have multiple chances. I had no idea that any of this was in place before I started my lab and most of your senior advisors do not know either. But this could be make all the difference in your funding!

How much of your own money do you spend for a (new) lab?

Lately I started keeping track of how much of my personal money has been used for the lab and started thinking of all the reimbursements I never requested. Through some administrative breakdowns I was owed several thousand dollars in reimbursements for almost 6 months, which annoyed me to no end and made me more weary of "donating" money to the university. Then I took a business trip someone else paid for, and we stayed and ate at places I wouldn't even consider on my own dime.

I believe that you have to be very conscientious when spending grant money. As a postdoc, I have always been careful is finding the cheapest hotel and being thrifty, but I still used to turn in every single receipt for meals and transport, etc. When I started my own lab things changed. My PI salary was substantially higher, my quality of like improved and I started paying for things myself. Sometimes I bought he odd item our ordering department was giving me trouble for, but mostly I started paying for all my meals and transport during business trips, plus lunch for the lab and various celebrations. I justified it with the fact that it would be coming from my start-up funding, that I would be eating anyways independently of where I was, and I'd rather keep that money as long as possible for reagents and other things. However in the long run it adds up, especially when you go to a lot of meetings like I do. I didn't even realize until this year that I can actually detract all those expenses from my taxes, so I gave up more money than I thought. I started tracking all my business expenses for 2016 and in 3 months I'm already at $1,000 I do not plan to submit for reimbursement.

Now I'm starting to wonder whether this behavior is naive and hurtful. Why should I spend my own money? Why am I not saving that money for my mortgage or retirement? Is there really going to be a return for investing this money in the lab and my career?

I think this again goes back to the idea of considering the lab like a small business. As the owner I make all the sacrifices. At the moment I am not hurting for money and I could pay for all the things I don't get reimbursed. But a part of me thinks that every meal I save is a piece of a conference a year for now or part of someone's future salary. Yet, multiple people I know spend liberally for things like these. What is right? I would really appreciate if other investigators commented about this and how they go about it.

Third year review. The lab turns 3!

I'm official mid-tenure track and probably need to officially update my Twitter handle to The Newish PI. @Scitrigrrl hit the nail on the head in her post last year about being a third year faculty (here). You just learn to do more. More and more teaching piles up because people are no more afraid to ask and get nixed by your chair. More and more people join the lab and projects and side-projects crop up. More grants and papers must be written or reviewed. Colleagues start asking you to help on their projects and join their grants.  You get asked to do things you didn't know you were supposed to do and you pick up some other chores because it looked like a good idea at the time.

So I'm officially stretched to the limit. Three years have passed, my R00 ended yesterday and I need to start making very definitive plans for assembling a tenure portfolio. I have been relatively successful at getting foundation grants, growing the lab and getting a few decent papers out, but the bottom line is that I NEED AN R01. I will be able to stay alive until the end of 2017 with current grants and startup, but R01 funding is necessary for further survival, tenure and new opportunities. I have two applications at various steps of review/resubmission, so the path to follow is to keep going in at every cycle, do everything the reviewers ask and try my luck again and again.

The problem is that R01 applications are incredibly draining. You know, I do really love writing. And I love writing grants, but the emotional burden which comes with an R01 application has been something new to me. That sense that your entire future depends on it, that a group of random people you cannot control will read it and maybe not understand it, that you are working like a dog and it is probably all for naught, that your grants office will come up with some random way to mess it up. It is exhausting. I am still recovering from the February submission and I have to start thinking about June.

In parallel, all the dozens of tasks listed above are due, and taking time off to write leads to the fear that if you are not on top of things, there will be a lull in productivity. Last year, one of my resolutions for year 3 was to push trainees to be more independent and I have at least partially succeeded. Until you realize the amount of turnover a young lab can go through. On one project I have a fully functional team which can train its own new people, the other is a bit of a mess and I have had to start over pretty much every semester. I manage to get scraps of work done in very small increments where every temporary person does one little piece, which will eventually constitute a tassel in the finished mosaic, but my bandwidth is limited. I am always worried that that part of the lab will die. Productivity on the grants supporting it has been scarce. Yet, the grants are getting close enough to the end that hiring new people feels like a gamble. I am dragging a couple of papers to completion and they are kicking and screaming that they do not want to go on...Is my three year old project turning into a threenager? And if so, should I stand aside and ignore the tantrum, pick it up and drag it along, or just abandon the silly monster by the side of the road?

I guess these are the issues you deal with in Year 4 and 5, when you are forging a career and have to pick and choose directions. When is it time to drop something and move eggs in a different basket? Which project will end up being written up for a grant? And most importantly is the lab a living independent entity which can go on on its own when I'm traveling doing the PR job I need to do?

We will see. The only thing I know right now is that I really really need a vacation...

Defining expectations in academia: pushing a square peg in a round hole

Lately I have spent a lot of time thinking about expectations and "fit" in academia. We are interviewing faculty candidates and a huge amount of scrutiny is put in figuring out how their research and their personalities will fit with ours. I assume the same goes on on the other side: "How do I like this department?" "What would it be like to work in this department/university?""Will I be successful here?" "Will I be happy?"

When you start a faculty job at an R1 institution you have some basic expectations: 1) that you will be given sufficient money and space to start you lab and do your job; 2) that you will have administrative support to hire people; 3) that you will get help submitting and managing grants; 4) that you may be protected from teaching at the beginning or that you may be able to buy out some classes; 5) that if things break down someone will fix them relatively quickly or at least that you will have water and electricity (especially emergency power); 6) that your department chair has your best interest at heart. Then, not necessary, but relatively important, you may hope 7) that your department chair will be doing their very best to support you financially and politically when needed; 8) that your colleagues will be collegial and collaborative; 9) that the students at your new school will be smart and engaged; 10) that the dean will not abruptly change and deny you tenure because "psych, new rules!".

Then you start you job, maybe at your dream school. As you start renovating, hiring, applying for grants, managing money, mentoring and teaching you find out that some of your expectations are not met. Maybe a lot of your expectations are not met. And you wonder, how is this possible? How can this school actually function? You are ashamed you have been duped, and then you talk to friends and pretty much EVERYONE is going through the same thing or worse. Because the Russians always know how to best describe gloom, I'll misquote Tolstoy "All happy universities are alike; each unhappy university is unhappy in its own way". Every university has a unique set of problems and you have to decide what you are willing to put up with. Is complete administrative breakdown acceptable? Partial administrative breakdown? Is a confrontational chair who laughs at you when you get an R01 and ask for space acceptable? Is no respite from teaching when you're supposed to get grants acceptable? And if your situation is not acceptable, do you put your head down and keep going? Or should you just pack your bags and leave? The answer is not that simple. What you consider a horrible situation may be a perfectly good fit for someone else. You talk to your friends and their tales of woe are so terrible that you rethink your puny problems.

The existential conundrum is the same in any type of job. How much are you willing to settle? In general, as a group, scientists are not people who settle... But at some point you have to figure out what is negotiable and what is not. What you can live with and what chews up your soul from the inside. If you could jump around different companies every 1-3 years like people in other industries do, you'd have a chance to identify specific things you need. However, since our hiring process itself is 1 year long and only happens when you are "ready", you may end up feeling trapped and getting even more frustrated. It is such a tricky process. Does the dream job exist? Or does the grass just appear greener somewhere else and you should be happy with the grass you have?

I personally think that if you are not in a supportive environment, you should rethink where you are, but "support" can mean many things to many people. It can mean a good boss, it can mean no teaching ever, it can mean good admin help, it can mean water and power, it can mean access to students, it can mean someone actually paying a good portion of your salary. And until you start doing this job, you don't necessarily know what you need...

I'm interested in finding out what people think about this.

This is how I will use preprints. How would you use them?

As usual there is some fierce debate going on on Twitter and this time it's about about preprints (non-peer-reviewed manuscripts made publicly available) and how they will save or completely doom biomedical research. Lately I have been thinking a lot about how I would use preprints, as I am writing a couple of papers. Here are my 2 cents.

Pre-prints are NOT peer-reviewed publications and should not be treated as such, but I consider them full fledged scientific output, i.e. items which could legally reside in an NIH biosketch. If you are at the point in a project where you have a fully formed manuscript with figures and stuff, kudos to you! Getting to that stage in a project is an achievement and a preprint in my book is a 1,000 times better than a manuscript listed "in preparation" in your CV. If I am on a faculty search committee or on a grant review panel and you list papers "in prep", that means nothing to me since I have no idea of when those projects will be done, nor what their scope is. I had papers in prep on my CV that never saw the light of day...now I know better. So as a reviewer or committee member I would be delighted to read your preprints. It would allow me to actually take a look at your work.

This brings me to a point that baffles me, that preprints will doom biomedical research because without peer review, how will we judge? If preprints count for grants and job applications, will we not get flooded with crap? Wait, are we suddenly unable to read a paper? Despite all the people screaming to the top of their lungs that peer review is broken, I have always had a great experience as a peer reviewer and a peer reviewee (apart from Nature, reviewers for Nature are crazy, but this is a story from another post). Reviewers of my papers AND my grants have (almost) always had constructive and interesting comments which have led to a greatly improved product. As a relatively new reviewer, I always go read all the other reviewers' comments. In general I find that we agree, and that sometimes they bring up some really smart points is hadn't thought about or I didn't want to raise (I'm usually glad they did). All this to say that as someone who can write and review a paper, I can read a preprint and decide whether it's good or not....and so can most scientists. As long as we agree that a preprint is a manuscript that must be taken with a grain of salt, I think we'll do just fine.

How do I plan to use preprints in my own lab? Judiciously and with caution. Posting a preprint is still a very scary thing for a new investigator. I know there are other groups working on my genes of interest and I know they have some of the reagents/animals I have. They may not quite have the same expertise/ideas we have, but I've been surprised before by papers coming out of left field. Will the preprint of a particularly interesting finding generate wide interest and get multiple groups to actually publish before we do? Am I putting my career in jeopardy?

Some academics think of this attitude as blasphemy, but I look at my lab as it was a business. My products are papers, my earnings are grants. I peddle my goods at conferences and talks, find supporters and collaborators. I was trained to always share openly. If you don't put your product out there, who's going to buy it? It has served me well in the past: I have found my best collaborators by talking openly at conferences and sharing has saved me from getting scooped a couple of times. So I tend to lean towards preprints as just another product. I guess posting one is like beta testing. When I do I will be terrified and anxious, like when I occasionally share my inner fears and insecurities on my blog. But I'll start with baby steps after thorough discussion with my trainees and how this could help/hurt them. Let's just hope my papers don't stay in beta as long as Gmail!

Best advice I ever received was to never scrub a toilet again

Note. Since I've been accused on not being fair and thinking of other people as less worthy by asking them to do chores for me, which is definitely NOT my intention, I have made a few edits to clarify things. I just hire people to do jobs that they are already doing and I pay them fairly with the money I have available.

When I was a grad student, I attended a luncheon with a very successful female scientist. When asked if she had any particular advice for us young women starting out, she said to learn to maximize our time and to never ever waste it with tasks that don't push your career forward, like cleaning the bathroom. She told us to just hire people to do these types of things because our careers would become more and more busy, family obligations would fill every free moment and scrubbing a toilet was not worth our time. Over and over again this type of advice was repeated by successful scientists at "women in science meeting": "Find the right housekeeper and pay them their weight in gold" "Find the right people to help you manage your life".
In grad school I had friends who paid for a monthly cleaning service, but I felt I should still do all my housework myself. I didn't hire a cleaning person until my postdoc and I could only pay for her to come once every two months, but I was hooked. That was around the time the "outsourcing your life" craziness exploded on magazines. If you missed it, these are some articles from The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post. The idea is that time is money and you want to spend your time on things you want to do, on things that enrich you personally, emotionally or financially, and everything else should be taken care of by someone else. Apart from hiring a personal assistant in India, which I've been dying to do for years, but which would require giving someone access to may banking and financial information, I pretty much tried everything.

I have repeated multiple times that as you rise in the academic ladder, the amount of things you have to do continues to increase and you just become a better juggler or weightlifter, so things begin to take a toll. I am that person whose unread email count always had to be 0 and I used to be as obsessive at getting my mail. Nowadays, if I pull my mail out once a week or twice a month, it's good. My cable box broke maybe 10, maybe 14 weeks ago, I have no idea, but the people I need to talk to leave at 9pm and if I do get home before 9pm, I'm usually too exhausted to pick up the phone and deal with stupid Comcast (I should probably call them right now instead of writing this, but I hate Comcast). Most of the time, I feel my life outside the lab is kept together by a thread, but that thread consists of multiple lovely people who do all the things that do not require my Social Security Number.

1) I don't clean. That is a bit of a lie, as everyone who has a cleaning crew knows, all surfaces must be free and clothes must be put away when they come, as a courtesy so that they only have to do the deep cleaning and don't spend one hour puttin away you stuff. But apart from one hour on the morning before they come when I madly put things away, I don't clean. They clean, they wash my sheets and change my bed, they throw my moldy food out of the fridge. Like my mother, if I leave stuff out, they put it away in random places...but that was my fault for leaving stuff out. When I come home on cleaning day, my place smells awesome, everything is shiny and it takes around 10 days before it reverts to chaos, so they come twice a month (I know, no kids, very un-messy cat, always traveling...and I cannot afford them to come weekly).

2) I don't own a car so I don't do big grocery trips. I pick up my produce at the farmers' market next to work or at Whole Foods on the way home, but if I can't carry it in a couple of bags, I don't carry it. The cat litter, the gallons of water for the fish, the biweekly supply of Coke Zero, all the rest comes with Google Express or Instacart. You pick the store, pick what you want and...boom, you have it. Burnt our lightbulb, aquarium filters, Costco run. All those errands that would have taken half a day are done over 5 minutes at lunch, and the stuff is waiting for you when you get home (FOR $5!!!!). You don't have these services nearby...Amazon Pantry.

3) I don't go to the dry cleaner's. I like doing laundry, so I do my own, but I had friends who dropped everything off and had it done. There is a dry cleaning service that picks up a bag from my building and returns the clothes 2 days later. You can put torn clothes or broken shoes in the bag with a note and they will repair...they even have an option you can check where they will automatically repair any tear they find without asking you. Most cities have services like these and they don't cost much more than the regular dry cleaner.

4) I don't really wait for more than 10 minutes for the bus. Ok, this is princessy, but if the bus/subway is more than 10 minutes away, if I'm cold or tired, Uber comes to pick me up. Yes, yes, they're awful and exploitative and maybe Lyft is better. I constantly try to have serious conversation with them on whether they feel the company is using them, and they all seem pretty happy to me. In any case, a car is never more than 2 minutes away. When I'm in lab past 9pm in the winter, I just call it from my office and it's waiting for me at the door. I don't own a car and the monthly cost is way less than car payments and insurance.

And then, TaskRabbit can take care of anything else. TaskRabbit is a service in multiple cities or online where you give people tasks and they do it. I used it the last time I moved. I gave my tasker my move inventory and a list of companies and she returned a spreadsheet with quotes and contacts after making all the calls in my place. They will organize your closet, pick up your stuff, drive you to the airport, wake you up on time, do market research for you, etc, etc.

The convenience of having all these people do stuff for you is amazing and done judiciously, not terribly expensive. At the end it's determining what your time is worth to you. I like doing laundry, I like washing dishes. Some people stress clean and like going on errands. Some people like driving to work with NPR on. It may just be nice to know of all the options out there and figure out a plan for making things easier on yourself.

PS: I read this interesting article on the pros and cons of outsourcing (here) where they list "loss of community" as one of the cons. Interestingly for me it's the opposite. I'm doing a stressful job, alone in a big city where I know very few people and where I have to take care of everything. The cleaning lady, the petsitter, the concierge, the Uber drivers end up being a big part of my community and are there for me...I am very grateful to them for all their help and do my best to show it whenever I can.

Not all R01s are created equal. When should you let a project go?

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

The first one was very hard to write, in the sense that the choice of what was going to be in it, what the flow of the experiments was going to be, and how to properly balance the aims was difficult. I took into account opinions from many readers, mostly on the Specific Aims, and worked it and reworked it for almost four months. Some thoughts here. It was discussed, scored poorly. Comments from everyone were very positive about the structure of the grant, but not the writing and the feasibility. My lab is working on all feasibility issues and the proposal will go in again as soon as we are ready.

The second one was not too hard to write, the flow is simple and logical, because the flow of that project has always been simple. However, putting it all together was a nightmare that took months and months of coaxing collaborators to provide preliminary data and information, getting permissions and accesses to patients, and just coordinating multiple moving pieces. It was the first time I had to delegate a part of the writing to other people. The structure was laid out as early as February of last year, but by October we were still not there. Since most of the writing was done over the holiday break and at the beginning of the semester nobody apart from my lab and my collaborators read it, so I had no external feedback. I based my tone and amount of detail in the approach based on the comments I had for R01 #1, but this will go to a different institute and a different study section. To a study section I don't know and with whom nobody I know has anything to do. It's like aiming a dart in the dark. An enormous amount of work had been done to polish and aim the first grant to a specific study section, but then the Center for Scientific Review decided to change things up completely and put it elsewhere. I thought, why bother? Make it as clear as possible for a variety of scientists, put as much detail as possible, as much big picture as possible, and hope this little Frankenstein finds someone to love him....if it doesn't, I'm not sure I can do this again. Which brings me to the question in the title. When should you let a project go?

I started the project for R01 #1 almost 10 years ago. It took us 2 years to just figure out where the darn protein was. My postdoctoral advisor told me to drop it at 6 month intervals, I replied I had a hunch. Halfway through, I decided to drop it because I hated the darn protein with all my heart, my K99 was awarded and I was bound to it for 5 more years. The first paper was published after 8 years! The second paper after 9.5. We have 3 papers in the pipeline for year 10 and my current data is the most beautiful data I have ever seen in my entire life. It was like this nasty poisonous caterpillar finally turned into a stunning ethereal butterfly. AFTER 10 YEARS!

Project for R01 #2 started around the same time and yielded a paper/year very consistently and several grants, but recently it has come to a screeching halt. I cannot find the right people to staff it, I cannot control it, and I am keeping it going out of sheer willpower, as I generate 90% of the data myself and coordinate all the parts. Putting together this grant was utterly exhausting and as my career advances I cannot just will it into existence like a golem! So, part of me wonders whether I should let it go....forget the years of networking, the emotional and financial expense.

Maybe, it's just the let down following R01 submission, but it is a tricky question to answer and I believe that it's a question many new investigators (probably, investigators period) face all the time. Will this pay off or am I banging my head against a rock wall? How do I know I am not driving my lab into a ditch? Ah, fun times! Maybe one day I'll write a book like this one...

Will I have jumped the glass cliff in 5 years?

Unstable cliffs

This blog post has been brewing in my head for several months. I've been reticent because as a rule I try to be very careful about what I put out there for the world and posterity to see. Some people know who I am in real life. I don't think my trainees and my superiors know of this blog, but someday I'm planning to un-pseud so that all this can be traced back to the real me. At the same time I think of the bravery of Ian Street, PsycGrrrl and Dr24hours in openly discussing their struggles, and how that helps me and other people, so here it is.

Work has been going really well. The lab has found some kind of groove with only minor hiccups. We have what I can genuinely call the best data of my life, the kind of data that if managed correctly can be career-defining. I'm making all the right steps, hitting milestones. Yet, for the past year a certain malaise has been pervasive in my personal life often making me think about quitting. A few weeks ago I was reading this article about women becoming more and more weary about fighting barriers for their careers, until the reach the so called "glass cliff" (here). I thought I'd discuss what is going on in my head.

Last spring around my birthday I was staring down incipient depression. Depression is not a stranger to me, but this felt different, it felt existential. I had to work through the realization that I will probably never have biological children. I had always wanted them. But birthdays are coming and going, a stable relationship is not materializing, so even if I meet someone, I'll probably adopt (or they'll have kids premade). Acknowledging the possible loss of the biological option was devastating. I'm a geneticist, for Christ's sake. I seriously considered going to a clinic and having a baby on my own, but then I realized that I have no support network where I currently live. Most of my friends have kids and I know it is no picnic. The idea of managing a lab towards tenure and a baby completely alone terrifies me, especially considering that hormonal changes can wreak havoc on me on the psychiatric front. There are millions of single mothers and the more I think about this, the more I know they are incredibly strong people.

The thought of not having kids brought up the idea of legacy. What will be my legacy? (Yes, people, full fledged mid-life crisis here) So far my scientific contribution has not felt significant. If it was, would I feel better? Or is there another purely human element that is missing? At a Women in Neuroscience lunch a few years ago, Carla Shatz gave a very heartfelt talk about waiting too long and the sadness from never having been able to have children (some of her thoughts in an interview, here). Everyone was shocked because she is such a well-respected pivotal figure in Neuroscience. The expectation was that if you are that successful you're happy and fulfilled, but the human experience is much more complex.

So you think about family and think about legacy and think about what you want as a human being. I have given everything to this job without even thinking about it for years. But, what is too much to give up for your job? I changed countries. I moved every 6-7 years to a different city, which goes against my preference to being rooted in an extended group of friends. I don't think for a second that the lonely childless state is due exclusively to the job. There are a lot of other factors at play. But the moves and the times when work had to take precedence to get to the next step have definitely contributed, as they contribute for any woman with a demanding career. You lean in, but as you lean in, you may neglect other things. Then one day you looks around you and a "normal life" has passed you by. A fun uplifting read from the NYT this week, here.

So while part of me is very happy as I love my job and my data, part of me is very unhappy and just wants to quit and move back home to get a "normal job" and be with my friends.  When one of my female postdocs, discussing career options, tells me that she looks at me and doesn't think she can do my job and have a family, it breaks my heart for many different reasons. It makes me feel I'm failing as a role model, but it also makes me wonder where my life is going and what I want from it. According to the lore, I am a good candidate to "make it" in academia. I can leave work late at night, I can travel as much as I want without obligations, I can move whenever I want and wherever I want. Yet, I still think about quitting. Why? All things considered social interactions are it for me and I wonder whether they may constitute an issue for other women as well. There is a point when you are the only woman in a group of hires that you start noticing the behavioral differences. In principle the guys want to interact and love it when you organize all the socials and scientific round tables, but interaction doesn't seem a necessity for them as it is for me. The solitude at home and the solitude at work start getting really tiresome, a constant invisible drain on my morale. I run and do yoga. I try to be very gentle and accepting of myself, just to mindfully keep the ghost of depression at bay.

The ambition is still there, the drive is still there, but I feel the slow erosion the article about the glass cliff describes. I used to be against quotas. But now that I am more informed about implicit bias, I think of countries like Germany or Norway which support 30-40% female quotas in boardrooms and government (here). The idea is that increasing diversity in the board changes the work environment and actually promotes innovation and better leadership practices. I'm also wondering if it generates an internal network of peers which makes it easier to be a woman in a position of power and to make your voice heard.  Just yesterday there was piece on how female full professors are greatly lagging in numbers behind men in US Medical Schools (here). I'm starting to really understand why, and while I am still holding on and I gave myself a 2-year moratorium on quitting, I wonder whether I will still be here in 5 years, even if I got my coveted R01.

2015 "year in review" as a Y3 PI

The rules for the "year in review" post are simple:
-Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year.

I find truly amazing how well this reflects what my blog was all about this year 1) R01 writing, 2) mentoring and 3) promoting the lab. This is what I have been doing in 2015.

January: So, you are sitting at the bench in your graduate program/post-doc and you say to yourself; “this is not where I want to be.”

February: We are 18 weeks out from submission day and I have started putting all my ducks in a row to see if this crazy idea of submitting two R01s at once is really going to work.

March: As a new principal investigator, I'm always in a frenzy to promote my work, so that I'm going to establish myself in my field(s) presenting cool new data.

April: It's 730 days of being an Assistant Professor. After the absolute exhaustion and chaos of the first six months and the light at the end of the tunnel of finishing year one (Y1), year two (Y2) was a very different beast.

May: Despite the absolute madness of the past two months, I was still holding on to the hope I would be able to submit two R01s for the June deadline as detailed in a post earlier this year.
This was April 30th, but nothing was written in May because....R01 deadline on June 5th...

June: "Mirror mirror on the wall, what are aims to win it all?"

July: I thought I'd weigh in on the kerfuffle going on on Twitter about the mostly irrational fears that Obama will force us to pay postdocs $50K.

August: This week I was honored and excited to be cited, together with none other than DrugMonkey, as someone who provides good advice for new investigators, but what really caught my eye in the tweet was "NHLBI K-to-R01 Meeting". What was that, pray tell?

September: As a trainee I always wondered what my PI was doing cooped up on her/his office and when I became a PI myself I was shocked by the endless list of things I was now responsible for.

October: I launched the "day in the life of a new PI" challenge a few weeks ago to see what the days of principal investigators are like at different places and at different stages of their careers.

November: PharmaFriend here to give you a glimpse of my day while I’m at a scientific conference. I’m a few days late; so, please accept my apologies. There are a few differences between attending a congress as a participant/scientist, vendor for pharma client, and actual pharma client.

December: Sometimes insecurity and impostor syndrome work to your detriment.

2015 greatest hits:

The R01 twin strategy: Parents of twins will probably laugh at my naivete, but as someone who always wanted two kids, I always thought that twins were the most efficient way to achieve that goal: you have two of them at once and you're done. So I didn't bat an eye when one if my senior faculty mentors outlined what I will call the "R01 twin strategy" to me.

Questions you should as on postdoc interviews: Following the "Questions you should ask" for the faculty job search, I was asked for a similar post for the postdoctoral search.

Looking forward to 2016!!

On finding "your people": who do you want your field to be?

I have written a lot about my confusion in defining my identity as a new PI. I work on a couple of different things and in both cases these projects require very interdisciplinary approaches requiring me to wear a lot of different hats. As I was finishing my postdoc I have written about branching out into new fields (here), and then as a new PI on trying to make your mark and be noticed (here) and struggling with a changing identity (here). A few things have happened lately that have made me think some more about this topic.

Many people told me that the first few years as a new investigator are the loneliest and most difficult, and I can confirm this has been true for me. I am starved for colleagues and scientific discussion and I feel very isolated, so I've been going to a lot of meetings (6-7) every year. In some cases I just go to see friends and catch up on the field, in others to try and learn new things, and in all of them I do my best to showcase what we are doing in the lab and make new connections to be become "established". Everyone says you feel better when you become "established", but what the heck does that mean?
Well, my interpretation at this moment is that you start becoming "established" when people recognize you for something you do as the expert in that topic and reach out to you for presentations and collaborations.

The path to this can be completely random. In the past two months I went to two meetings, one for each area in the lab, with very different expectations and opposite outcomes from what I was anticipating. Meeting one was supposed to be my big break. We have some very very exciting data on that project (probably the most exciting data I've had in my entire life), which I was going to present for the first time. All the movers and shakers were going to be there and I worked on my talk for almost a month. I reorganized, I practiced the talk multiple times. Everything had to be perfect. While I have met many of these people at one time or another, they don't "know" me, in the sense that they may vaguely remember me from some other meeting or seminar, and this was going to put me ON THE MAP. The outcome was not as expected. Most of the speakers only showed up for their session (some only for their talk) and left immediately. The whole set-up was very awkward so that there was no common space to mingle or eat. My talk was toward the end of the meeting, so only a handful of trainees and the attendees for the next session were there. It all kind of fizzled and I still feel like an outsider in that field. I was a bit dejected.
Meeting two was an afterthought. I had been invited to speak at a pre-meeting symposium by someone I had met at a conference a few years back, and since I've been trying to do some work in this field with one of my collaborators, I decided to stay for the actual meeting. I thought I would learn something and I brought my postdoc so that she could be exposed to the techniques. First of all the symposium was truly kick-ass, fun multi-disciplinary kick-ass science. But the most amazing thing is that I came away with multiple new collaborators, a spot in a multi-PI consortium, a new NIH program officer who wants my grants and a bunch of new contacts. It turns out I am the one person generating specific models that they need... It was the most science fun I've had at a meeting in a very long time. So, hum, who do I want my field to be? These guys (and gals, lots of awesome gals there). They share the same interest for questions I think are extremely important and understudied and want to help figuring things out.

I haven't truly turned my back on the group from the other meeting, but this whole story is just to say that vibes in different fields can be very different and it takes time to figure out who will end up being "your people". I did come back from this second meeting with a sense that now I'm "in" and that this is a really cool crowd I'd love to hang out with. Maybe I don't have to forge my career out of sheer willpower, but just find my tribe...

How I figured out too late what the new biosketch is for

Sometimes insecurity and impostor syndrome work to your detriment. When I started approaching the new NIH biosketch Contribution to Science section I had a meltdown (here). I felt I had more proper contributions, i.e. publications, in one aspect of my research and not as many in the other, so I framed the biosketch on the former to make myself look more impressive. When I got the comments back from my R01 review, I realized how dense I had been in not understanding what the new biosketch is actually for...framing your expertise to show how you are the best person to perform the research. Because I was insecure, the reviewers did not understand who I was and where my strengths really lie, they questioned that I was actually able to do the experiments I was proposing to do.

Just to make it clear, I do genetics and cell biology. I started as a geneticist and then really dove into the functional analysis to understand the mechanisms of disease following genetic mutation, so I am now primarily an animal model person. If you have the patients, you can happily publish a nice human genetics paper a year, while a substantial mechanistic work can take 3-5 years, hence the discrepancy in my publication balance. In the initial version of my biosketch, I highlighted all the wonderful genetic discoveries I made and all the contributions to medical genetics, to support a very hard core cell biology grant. One of the reviewers wondered if I knew how to make complex mouse crosses...I've been crossing mice for almost 20 years...

The thing is, despite this I got really good investigator marks. They thought I was very productive and well trained, they just wondered why the heck I was doing cell biology and mouse genetics and whether I knew what I was doing. My biosketch was an epic fail, as it was framed and organized in the wrong way. And while some scientists were harping about it when the new biosketch guidelines came out, this whole ordeal made me realized what an incredible advocate this new biosketch can be. In the K99 application you have a 3 page Candidate section where you frame your training, your goals for your science and your vision. The same can be done in the new biosketch. As I went back and redid my biosketch with my goals in mind, explaining how all the pieces in my training fit to lead to the singular expertise which is perfect for this proposal, I realized I had been a complete idiot. And now you can learn from my mistakes. Work that biosketch!

Things I've learned from my first R01 submission: grantsmanship is a moving target

My first R01 submission is now complete (review, summary statements and PO discussion) and I am entering resubmission mode. As I start thinking about the resubmission I would like to take stock of what happened, since I have learned quite a lot and there have been a few surprises. I thought it may be helpful for the other novices out there, and maybe for some of their mentors.

Just to put things into prospective this is what happened. I wrote a very ambitious proposal on a little studied gene with direct human disease relevance. The proposal spanned basic cell biology, biochemistry and behavior in animal models. Because the review process is so study section specific, a lot of effort was taken in learning everything I could about the intended study section and writing the proposal being mindful of the roster. There were a lot of discussions with senior advisors about making sure the big picture was always present and eschewing too much experimental detail (some if it summarized here in a post I wrote about the multiple versions of my Specific Aims page). I made choices based on the advice I was receiving, wrote a very detailed cover letter requesting two institutes with two program officials (POs) I had been talking to and who had expressed interest in my work, plus the intended study section, and sent the grant off in June. First glitch a couple of weeks later: the assignment went to a third institute, but the study section was fine. Second glitch a couple of months later: the Center for Scientific Review decided my proposal was more suited for a different study section, which I've heard compared in the past to one of the rounds of Hell. I panic, my chair panics, frantic calls to the SRO with no avail. Everything is now wrong! The focus of the study section is different, my proposal has the wrong tone and scope.

So we wait...

Study section comes and goes. After 12 hours I get my score (yes, new investigators have priority and get their scores right away). It was discussed! I'll get detailed comments. OMG, my impact score and percentile are so low, I didn't even think they could ever get that low if a grant was discussed. They hated it!! They thought it was overambitious. They didn't understand what I was trying to do. They thought my gene is useless. They thought I'm a loser!

I get the summary statements late at night a week later and I consider going to bed without reading it, because I wouldn't be able to sleep. But imagining the horrible horrible things that could be in it would also not allow me to go to bed. So I open it very cautiously...

Reviewer 1 loved it! WHAT?! HOW!? Overall they all thought it was a great project, very clear disease relevance, very cool experimental design, very promising your investigator...very poorly written approach. Ha...The choice to keep the tone big picture as advised by senior colleagues, backfired BIG TIME!! And in fact senior colleagues were shocked by my summary statement. But it all made perfect sense. The study section members don't know me, and my publication record, while very productive in other realms, has been slower on this project as all the papers are in the pipeline right now. The burden of proof is entirely on me. There was no trust that I could do any of the things I said I would do. There was no trust that I could even design appropriate controls for the experiments.

Good news: They liked the study! They liked me! According to my PO is a very viable proposal. It just needs more preliminary data and a thorough rewrite.

What have I learned from this?

1) The study section will dictate what you need to do. You can try and game the system predicting what they will say, but your grant may be sent somewhere else and you'll get a different batch of people. So just listen to the batch of people you get. Unless the assignment is so wrong that you need to go somewhere else.

2) Take all advice you get while writing with a grain of salt. As I have said in other posts about grant writing, each single one of your advisors will tell you to do what worked for them and they will all be different. So try to figure out what will make sense and then go back to point (1): do what the study section wants.

3) The expectations for new PIs are very different from those for senior PIs. The burden of proof on a new PI is much bigger especially if you have limited publication in the proposed field. I was shocked that they thought I could not even set up a control, so I'll have to show them that I can. Be wary that your senior advisors may not know this, and this could also be very study section dependent.

4) A score doesn't mean much unless it's <10%. Unless it's a fundable score, it seems that a score can be a suggestion, or a message, or a warning. I knew from a friend that this particular study section gives ridiculously low scores, so I knew not to be completely dejected about mine. My impact score also had very little to do with the scores I got from my reviewers. The panel must have decided it was not fundable and needed a lot of rewrite, and they made it clear by giving me a Poor rating. Nobody seems to think that's a problem, so I'll behave like it's not...

5) Make good use of your chat with your PO. I knew from my K99 application, that discussing your summary statement with your PO really allows you to develop a very clear action plan to turn a proposal around. This time it wasn't different. Prepare your questions and voice your doubts, and make sure you listen to the comments on how the panel viewed the grant. If there's hope, try again!

And so we try again. Wiser and still little bit confused...

A day in the life of a scientist in pharma medical communication

A guest post from PharmaFriend about a day in her life in big pharma medical communication, aka marketing (Sunday 11/8).  BTW, this was her great post on applying for jobs outside academia.

Hello Dear Readers,

PharmaFriend here to give you a glimpse of my day while I’m at a scientific conference. I’m a few days late; so, please accept my apologies. There are a few differences between attending a congress as a participant/scientist, vendor for pharma client, and actual pharma client. The biggest difference is how much time I spend working before the actual meeting starts. So let’s take it from the top:

4:30-6:00am. AWAKE. Jet lag is killing me, but I try to be somewhat productive and do some emails.

6:00-7:15am Jog to Pier 39. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that I have a lot more stamina when I work out during the meetings. Fortunately, the jet lag has worked in my favor and I have been able to get some good calorie burning in before this long day begins.

7:15-8:15am Cleaning up my inbox. I did not put on my out of office notification (big mistake). This means that I should respond to some of the mails that keep pouring even when I’m away.

8:15-9:30am Breakfast. It’s an important meal and I’m starving after my run. While at breakfast, I confirm that the external clinicians have everything they need for today’s activities. I also catch up with colleagues that have other pre-meeting activities going on at the congress.

9:30-10:30am Film crew prep. We are doing an activity that requires interviews with several medical experts. So, I need to brief the film crew and go over the discussion guides. The facilitators are not really subject matter experts; so, I’m a little nervous about it. I’m not doing the interviews myself, which tweaks the control-freak within, but I move on.

10:30-12:30am The shoot. All goes really well. Everyone was engaged and we got some really good footage. The crew and doctors got along fine and I can calm down about part 1 being all done. This is going to be a great piece when it finally hits the internet.

12:30am-1:45pm Dim sum. We are in San Francisco after all and it’s delicious.

1:45-2:30pm Walk the congress center exhibition floor. There are 2 reasons for doing this. 1) Competitive intelligence and 2) Figure out who has the best coffee. Hey, the learned behavior of seeking free food has not diminished since grad school days. It’s just a bit more refined. I ran into an old colleague from my vendor days. It turns out that 4 of us are here and I so psyched to see them all.

2:30-4:00pm Attend some sessions. Finally, I get to hear some data, after spending the day in congress-adjacent activities. Of course I have 2 different sessions on opposite side of the congress hall. My pedometer is getting its fill as it always does onsite. Back when I worked in the ad agency world, I could easily log 30K steps in McCormick Place, alone. My speaker has just told me that she is not coming for her interview tomorrow. She is overbooked and I am panicking a little bit, as this is critical education content for physicians.

4:00-5:00pm Back on the congress exhibition floor. I’m trying to maintain calm and put out this little fire. There is not much, I can do, but I didn’t have transparency into the scheduling issue until now. I actually found the good coffee and I need it since I’ve been up since 4:30. I take a peak of the amount of gaming being incorporated into the medical education. These ideas could be something to incorporate into next year’s designs.

5:00-6:30pm. Downtime before dinner. I do more email cleaning. Thank goodness for Sundays and the lack of new emails. I get my inbox down to something more manageable and send a note to the speaker for tomorrow’s video interview. It’s all a bust; so, I head to Macy’s with a colleague.

6:30-9:00pm. Ladies’ dinner. Nice ladies’ dinner with work colleagues. The food was unremarkable, but the company was nice. I’m still pissed about interview tomorrow, but I need to get over it.

9:00-10:30pm. Nightcap. After a long day, I spend a little time sipping something with bubbles.

10:30-midnight. It’s morning time CET, so, I check in the other half back home and I look at my iPhone. I’ve got to review some documents and take care of some budget issues to prep for the end of year. I really should write up these meeting minutes, but I am super sleepy. Those may have to wait until after the congress is all finished. Tomorrow, I get to do it all again.