Ever on & on

If you’re in the Boston area, check out these upcoming events.

Monday, April 15, is the dreaded tax day. But on the bright side, it’s also the date for the next SciO Beantown gathering. The first was a casual & fun affair. This one promises to be equally so, but with a dash of discussion about open access publishing.

A week & a half away is Experimental Biology 2013! Tons of great science, career development, and outreach talks are on the docket. If you can’t make it to the meeting, follow #EB2013 on Twitter. I’ll also be posting from EB2013 as one of this year’s ASBMB meeting bloggers. Expect lots of protein stuff from me. Have a poster I absolutely must see? Let me know 🙂

You know the odds. You see and hear the statistics – over and over and over again. You cannot help but know there’s a very good chance that your vision of the future will fall apart, that you will fail.

But you do it anyway. You cling to the hope that your experience will be different. Maybe you tell yourself you have something special or that you’ll work harder or smarter. You’ll do the “right” things, or maybe you’ll just get lucky. You’ll find obstacles in your path, but you’ll find a way around or over or through them. Somehow you will make it work. You have to believe that you will succeed. If you didn’t believe that, would you try? Would you stand a chance?

So you do it. You go all in. There are good days that buoy your confidence. There are bad days that test your resolve, but you find a way through them. Most of the days fall somewhere in between, just doing the day-to-day work to keep it all afloat, often without actively thinking about long game.

Then it happens. That fragile dream falls, hits the ground, and breaks into a thousand million pieces. And you feel like you shattered along with it.

While you’re picking up the shards, trying to figure out what to do with what remains and how to move forward, you inevitably find yourself thinking about how you got here. What did you do wrong? What should you have done differently? Should you have put in more or taken a step back? Were you blinded by pride – or naivete? If you’d been a touch more cynical, maybe you’d have been better prepared. Possibly the crash was inevitable, but if you’d held something back, maybe it wouldn’t have hurt so damn much.

That might be the hardest part about broken dreams: They can make you question everything – who and what you are, all you do and how you do it. It can be especially hard when you try to be self-sufficient, when you compartmentalize your life in an effort to keep one part from bleeding into the other, when you’re accustomed to putting forward an air of calm and control even when you’re a wreck inside. The people around you think you’re OK. You’re the strong one; you’re always OK. You say little, so they say little. When they do say something, it’s what they think you need or want to hear – more visions for the future, assurances that you’ll find something new/different/lasting, promises of the wonderful things that will come in time.

What you really need to hear is that you’ll simply make it through the here and now. That you’ll survive picking up the pieces, even though each one cuts deeply as you grab hold. That you’re not alone. That no matter how broken you feel, you’re still relevant, you’re still worth something to someone. Some days you know all of that, without question. Some days take a little more convincing, and you have to tell yourself that you really can do this, that the pain and doubt won’t last forever.

But some days you need a little help. You need to hear someone else say all those things that you know deep down. The thing is, people – even those who are very close – don’t necessarily think to tell you those things because they should be obvious. So you have to reach out and ask for help, which can be harder than it sounds. It means letting go of the pride or logic or whatever it is that’s holding you back. To keep from losing yourself entirely, you have to let some of the cracks show. You have to bare your weakness. The very thing you fear will crush you is exactly the thing you must do. Finding the strength to do that helps you realize you have the strength and support you need not just to survive but to keep playing against the odds.

Last night, I left you with a brief rambling about the point of Ph.D. training in science (tl;dr – to be a scientist; not a PI or a researcher, but simply a scientist) and a flurry of questions on expanding Ph.D. training to become more career-oriented. As promised, here is the continuation: my modest, quite possibly harebrained proposal to make Ph.D. training something more.

Element I – Exposure

As a grad student, I was perilously naive about the state of Ph.D. production and career tracks. As far as I knew, research was the primary way of life for one with a science Ph.D., and the other major option was teaching. I might hear about other career tracks about once a year, during a career development session at a conference. I seriously doubt that I was alone in my limited view of science careers. Early in my postdoc years, when I waded into the online science community, I discovered many scientists whose paths had taken them out of academia and/or research, and I realized that life off the tenure track was the norm, not the exception.

Students should be learning about career paths and job market trends early in training. It should be part of their introduction to grad school. Josh Drew is a faculty member in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia University and director of Columbia’s MA in Conservation Biology program. All first year students are required to take a thesis development seminar. Last semester, Dr. Drew covered a wide range of topics: committee selection, research resources, grant writing, and ethics (you can find some of his lecture slides on FigShare). He also thought it important to, per his syllabus for the course, “explore the realities of funding and the post-graduation job market”. He included a lecture on the job market and used social media to invite outside perspectives on science careers.

An intro seminar could easily be done in a single lecture of 60 to 90 minutes a week for one semester. From day one, be honest about the job market. Show the relevant statistics for your field. Use the data available! Professional societies (like American Chemical Society) and funding agencies (see NIH and NSF) have Ph.D. completion and employment data. If your own department has complete data for graduates, put it out there. The point is not to scare new students but to say, “Here is the lay of the land.” Now you get to tell them about the exciting opportunities outside the tenure track or industry research. Bring in 2 or 3 locals and alumni to talk about their careers for a few meetings. In a month, you can cover a lot of possibilities.

Element II – Planning

In terms of career advising in academia, it seems the default assumption is that trainees plan to pursue research careers, and that assumption is often not challenged until late in the game – like around the time you start discussing dissertation writing and defense dates. Although not often fully utilized, completing an individual development plan early during the Ph.D. (say in the second or third year) and revisiting it annually is one way to initiate the discussion of career plans with mentors.

For an IDP to be effective, though, departments and mentors must create an environment where trainees can be honest about their career goals. Too often students and postdocs feel that any path outside tenure track is mocked and disdained, and the truth is, many reactions and behaviors, both subtle and direct, that reinforce this impression. Mentors should be ready and willing to discuss the pros and cons of career tracks but need to remove themselves from the equation. Statements like “I don’t really think you’d be happy doing…” or “I’m not sure that’s what you really want to do…” can shut down discussion pretty quickly.

We also need to be open to talking about alternatives, by which I mean an alternative to whatever your primary career goal may be. Plan A is necessary but not sufficient. The training process in science is long – 4 to 8 years for a Ph.D. then maybe another 2 to 6+ years as a postdoc… We can easily hit a decade of training between completing our undergrad education and beginning a job search. Oh how things can change in a decade – the economy, the market, the funding climate, and the life we have outside the lab. The job we thought we wanted might not be there. Or it might be beyond our reach. Or it may simply not be the job we want anymore. Things change, that’s all. But when things change, we need another plan. We should start thinking about Plan B and Plan C and Plan Q now. We should be able to talk about those plans with colleagues, advisers, and mentors without having our commitment to Plan A questioned.

Of course, the careers for which we’re planning can very quickly expand beyond the experience of our mentors. Most people engaged in training scientists have held one or maybe two types of career positions, i.e. most academics have been academics most of their careers. There’s nothing wrong with that, but they’re not going to be the best source of advice for other careers. Guess what, mentors? It’s OK to admit that. It’s simply one reason why we need Element III.

Element III – Network

If you’ve been in science for a few years, you’ve probably been beaten over the head about the importance of networking. Networking can be a difficult thing, though, especially if you’re like me and find it difficult to walk up and talk to complete strangers or worry about whether you’re annoying someone with that email or wonder how you’re supposed to maintain connections when you don’t have a specific reason for contacting them at the moment. Another challenge is that networks can be very insular. As you’re training at an academic institution, it’s likely that most of your connections will be within the academic research community. How we can we enhance the breadth and career diversity of our networks?

In some ways, it’s easier now than it was a decade ago because of the vibrant online science community. Via blogging and Twitter, I’ve connected with new and established faculty members, editors for society publications, policy fellows, and science communicators. I would never have interacted with people in some of these positions if I’d had to rely on face-to-face introductions.

At the same time, it’s valuable to have more direct connections through institutions, departments, and mentors. You’re the coordinator for a graduate program. About 15% of your graduates have tenure track positions, and I’d wager you have a pretty good idea where they’re at. What about the 25% who are doing research outside of academia? What about the 25+% who have careers outside of research? Programs could potentially help trainees with career planning and development by building an alumni network to tap into. Plus there’s the benefit of data and potential speakers in Element I.

Element IV – Opportunity

As trainees, we need to remember that we have the largest stake and investment in our careers, and ultimately, our career is our responsibility. With the aid of mentors and advisers, we should identify courses and activities that will benefit our career goals. Activities could include writing courses, pedagogy workshops, guest lectures for an undergrad course, outreach activities for an elementary school class, mentoring high school students, grantsmanship workshops, writing for a department blog or a journal spotlight, or courses on law and science. For career development, there is no one-size-fits-all. We have to tailor a plan to our interests and plans. We have to figure out what matters for our career and how to strengthen weak points and improve our strengths.

Even though we must take responsibility for our careers, we still need support from our mentors and institutions. When engaged in activities outside of the lab, scientists – and especially those in training – are often confronted with the attitude of “Why are you wasting your time on __________ when you could be doing things that matter?”, and what’s implied by “things that matter” is research or writing papers or grants. Research and papers are imperative for Ph.D.s and postdoc training. They’re necessary to keep labs funded. Honestly most of us wouldn’t stick around if we weren’t engaged by the research. But papers are not the only things that matter for our careers, especially if we’re considering careers outside of research.

There are tons of career development, education, and outreach activities in our institutions, local communities, professional societies, and beyond. The opportunities are there, but sometimes we hesitate to take advantage of them because of implicit and/or explicit pushback from advisers and administrators. In other words, sometimes we feel like we need permission to participate in these activities, regardless of whether it takes an hour a week or 3 hours once a month or whatever the time commitment might be. Programs might help trainees carve out that time by recommending certain number of hours for “career development activities” per year. Maybe one day, the value of such activities will be widely accepted, but until then, I think it might take some extra encouragement.

Closing Notes

Regardless of what career we pursue, whether it be research or science policy or teaching, our successes will reflect back on the places where we trained. The point of the Ph.D. is to train us as scientists, a very broad goal, but I think programs and advisers should be invested in the career training of their students and postdocs. I don’t think that it will take a complete reinvention of training programs, but rather a few tweaks and additions to existing initiatives to change Ph.D. training into career training and to leave trainees feeling a little more prepared for that great, big, exciting world of science careers.