- You Did the Heavy Lifting: Keep a PAR List to Capture Accomplishments
Your skills, accomplishments, and professional style—how you go about getting results—are hard to discern when reduced to a list of degrees, honors, and publications.
If you did the heavy lifting be sure to get the credit. Contributions that aren’t typically captured in your C...
- Small Wins for Sustained Success: The Progress Principle
Don’t let your lab’s fortunes sink like the Titanic, to borrow the opening simile from The Progress Principle. Read this book instead and find out how to facilitate daily progress among yourself, your coworkers, and your subordinates, leading to “virtuous loops” of small success...
- The Hierarchy of Learning
In medical school, there is a common saying: “see one, do one, teach one.” Generations of learners have taken pride in this statement and have passed it along, often smugly, as gospel. It has been considered wisdom, handed down from ancient Greece to modern times, as an essential...
- Can You (Really) Do Your Proposed Study?
…a deceptively simple question that can be interpreted in several ways.
For purposes of planning your proposed research study, answering the question (read: assessing feasibility) means looking at your idea from three perspectives—scope, cost, and time.
The scope of your pr...
- Fresh Ideas for Writing Innovation in Your NIH Grants
NIH information for grant authors prompts researchers to ask these questions as they describe innovation:
Does the application challenge and seek to shift current research or clinical practice paradigms by utilizing novel theoretical concepts, approaches or methodologies, in...
- Balancing on the Edge
As academics, most of us are in overdrive—racing from meetings to emails, writing to teaching, and maintaining some semblance of a balanced life.
Two fallacies about how we operate ourselves in overdrive:
I can multitask: Multitasking is a misnomer.1 When we multitask, we...
- Building Resiliency with Hypnosis and Mindfulness
“Stressed?” Of course. We are all stressed. We are carving out an identity in academia, developing our research focus, writing grants, papers, and talks, all while attempting to have some “balance” in our lives. In fact, it would probably be a little concerning if you were not st...
- Harness the Immense Power of Nosiness in NIH RePORTER
As a manager for our career development programs, many questions I get from trainees and faculty can actually be answered by using NIH RePORTER. You can find out all kinds of nosy things like:
Who else on campus has the kind of grant I’m writing (so I can ask if they’d shar...
- “Modifying the Current Flow from Negative to Positive (Data!)”
Scientists are experts at asking questions, analyzing, and critiquing. We are also taught that while there are rules and facts in biology, exceptions to rules exist - in fact, we expect them. I’m going to talk about critiquing to the point of publishing, about negative (but impor...
- Planning to Plan: Gathering Materials for Your Grant Pacing Plan
You’ve decided that maybe a plan for doing your grant submission is a good idea. Check! But how to start?
Here are four concepts (borrowed from the project management profession) to help you get started: 1) assessing feasibility, 2) timelines, 3) milestones, and 4) work breakd...
