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Vanderbilt’s Edge for Scholars hosts weekly Zoom office hours, called Ground Level, with senior mentors and leadership. Discussions range from advice for grant writing and publishing, study design, tenure/promotion, managing a lab, and more. We collected pearls from these discussions.

Hosts for Ground Level cross the basic-translational-clinical-population spectrum and, and while their science is unique, most of their insights are applicable to everyone.

Leadership

• Be open to a leadership position – an administrative role does not have to be all paperwork and people managing drudgery – it could be an opportunity to affect huge systemic changes.
• And, when it’s time, consider moving up and out so your spot can be available for new voices and new people – this is called crop rotation.
• Trust your gut – in order to guard yourself against the very human tendency to get overwhelmed by anxiety, trust your hard-won strength, knowledge, and instincts.  Your inner voice is saying, “you got this.”  Listen.

Hiring and Management

• A kanban board (sometimes known as a kaizen board) can work wonders for managing a lab. One PI uses the board to show every team members’ priorities for the week, metrics related to those priorities, and which other team members folks need help from. (This particularly helps the PI to see who they need to meet with in a given week.) The board gives the team clarity on how they fit together.
• When interviewing a potential hire, don’t just ask what’s on their CV. Ask them to describe a problem they had to solve on a team, or ask about their role at a previous position: What did they create or contribute that they liked the most?

Publishing

• Just because you do a pilot study, you don’t have to publish it.
• When doing a randomized controlled trial, especially one where data will be years in the making, publish a study design paper before your outcomes paper. This also avoids the problem of a single paper on design and outcomes being too long for most journals.
• When receiving reviews of a paper or grant, read them, put them away for 2-3 days to let your emotions settle, then go back and re-read.
• By the time you’re on faculty, you should be the corresponding author, not your mentor.
• When responding to reviewers, highlight discrepancies between their reviews without picking a side.
• You’re ready to publish on a topic/problem/experiment(s) when you have 4-5 figures.

Grants

• Take advantage of the Early Career Reviewer program and other opportunities to get on study sections before you land big grants. See how the sausage is made.
• When collaborating with someone at another institution (or even your own, if in another lab), use the collaboration as both a training opportunity for mentees and a way to get Rigor, Reproducibility, and Transparency points in your next grant. Send folks from your lab to the other (or vice versa) to learn how to do a technique or experiment. Have the visitor repeat one of the experiments your collaboration has been responsible for, displaying that yes, the methods you wrote can be followed and results can be reproduced. Write this into your grant.
• In grant applications, use only one figure per page.
• In an aim, don’t just test, but measure. Your first sentence is that you will determine or measure how A influences B; you’ll quantify or assess. In the second sentence, state that you will test the working hypothesis that [insert specifics here]. This way, even if you’re wrong, you still have data from this aim.
• Always try to pull language from NIH websites to prop up your impact (how does what you’re doing work toward their goals?).

Time Management/Efficiency

• Keep a best practices list with your team so you don’t reinvent the wheel. For a new problem or project, you can enter your “pantry of possibilities” and gather ingredients to cook the recipe for the solution.
• You can do everything! Just not at the same time.
• For physician-scientists, especially those on Ks: Rather than doing clinic a half day per week, be in clinic all day twice a month. A half day of clinic often consumes the whole day anyway, so this reduces that day to twice a month rather than every week.
• Develop a strategy to say no – it’s too easy to get wrapped up in collaborations, committees, and requests for service.  If the return on investment is slim, graciously decline.  Consider weaponizing your mentor (with their permission) by saying, “I’m sorry but I don’t have the bandwidth right now because my PI is keeping me busy!” Also, consider passing this opportunity along to another colleague who might benefit more or be a better fit.
• Have strict control over your calendar – carve out and build strong barriers around blocks of time for mentoring, reading, writing, researching, family, etc.  Create a set list for the week.  Create a rhythm for the week and stick to it.

Networking

• If someone senior or important asks you, in passing, how you are, saying “busy” or “tired” can be a missed opportunity to tell your story.
• You have 7-14 seconds to tell your story.
• Finding your passion = what do you do on your best days.
• Introduce yourself to NIH officials at national meetings. Before the meeting, contact your PO, see if he or she will be there, and ask for fifteen minutes face to face. Or have your PO recommend other POs or PIs working in similar areas you could meet with.

Financial

• Ask your administrative officer who is the best budgeter in your department and meet with that person to learn their wisdom.
• Capital equipment: Purchase what your lab needs on a daily or very regular basis, but otherwise look to share equipment or use cores.
• To gain access to expensive equipment owned by other PIs, offer to contribute to the annual service fee.
• At the early career stage, your capital is not money. It’s the ability to give co-authorships to others with resources or skills who help you.

Negotiation

• When negotiating your own job offer, ask for the goal you want to reach rather than specific items or salary. For example, “I want to be the go-to person for X. To do that, I think I’ll need access to devices a, b, and c. How can we make this happen? I can envision either owning these devices, sharing ownership with someone else, or being able to have time on them via a core.”

Doing Research

• Explaining biomarkers by analogy:
  • The fuel gauge on your dashboard is a biomarker.
  • The fuel gauge + how many miles to the gallon your car gets + how many gallons of gas you have left is a prognostic biomarker.
  • The fuel gauge measurement + how many miles to the gallon your car gets + how many gallons of gas you have left + the current headwind + current traffic + other relevant variables is a predictive biomarker.

More Resources

Avoiding Barriers Between Your Work and Your Reviewer
Negotiating for Your First Academic Position
Paper-Writing Checklists To Prevent Headaches Down the Road

Just yesterday one of my Ph.D. students whose dissertation is due to the committee next week asked me “Please tell me the truth. Am I okay?” I assured the student that they were indeed okay, and not just okay but that they had completed an impressive body of work, that they had amassed so many new skills, and that they were now a leading expert in the subject of their research. All of that is completely true, but honestly, I don’t think they believed me.

They were consumed by self-doubt. But the final chapter is not yet framed as powerfully as the resulting manuscript will be. But there is yet another analysis that probably should be added. But the text of the two chapters that are not yet published could certainly be further refined. They were also clearly reckoning with the realization that the large experiment we designed at the outset of their dissertation would be designed much differently and better today given what we now know.

And that’s the problem with the end of a dissertation. You will produce no other work in your career in which your understanding of what you are doing changes so profoundly while you are in the process of producing it. It is not a flaw; it is an essential outcome of the PhD that by the end of your dissertation you will fully understand how much more impressive your dissertation would be if you could start the work again knowing all that you have learned. No person in the world is better poised to see the flaws and imperfections in a dissertation than the person who became an expert while they were creating it. There is real grief in coming to the end of this enormous undertaking. You grieve for the ideal dissertation you dreamed up years ago while everyone is pushing you to just finish the less than perfect dissertation you actually produced.

I was never more unhappy than in the last few months of my dissertation. I felt like a failure as I forced myself to write up the work I now saw as immature and uninteresting. I had already learned so much from doing that work, and I did not see much value in sharing that knowledge gained with others through my publications. I did not value that knowledge gained. Instead, I regretted the knowledge I did not have earlier.

We do not do enough as mentors to prepare students for this fundamental disappointment at the end of their degree. Yet we should expect it because it is an inevitable outcome of a challenging graduate program. We do not do enough to recognize and value the expansion of the scholar’s understanding, skills, and experience that is the true measure of a successful PhD. It is okay–indeed, it is necessary–that you are dissatisfied with your dissertation. It is this dissatisfaction that is the catalyst for the next exciting question, technique, or experiment.

And it is critical to find opportunities to remind students how far they have come. Senior grad students should try to see themselves through the eyes of their junior labmates. How often are they asked for advice and assistance? They should consider how many times they have had to explain something complicated to their PI. They should give a guest lecture or talk in which they tell the story about something they did that they now realize was naive and how their understanding grew. They should go back and read their early drafts and proposals.

As mentors, we should help our students focus on their intellectual growth, and help them find pleasure in moving from a position of no knowledge towards expertise. I am trying to consistently point out the growth I see in each of my students as a counterweight to the work I also must do in critiquing and refining their research products.

More Resources

What To Know While You Do Your PhD

How to PhD: 10 Tips from Hindsight

“We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.”

I thought of this quote, and my own primary mentor, when I heard that January is National Mentoring Month. Initially begun to promote youth mentoring in 2002, the month-long focus on mentoring applies to individuals at all levels and career types. For early career researchers, one of the most important things a mentor can do is help his or her trainees create a career roadmap.

Chief among the initial steps of that path is to correctly initiate a mentee-mentor relationship with an agreement upon the “rules of engagement,” often called a Mentee-Mentor Agreement or Mentee-Mentor Action Plan. These agreements are designed to help a mentee and mentor agree upon, and directly articulate, the foundations of their relationship, and lay out key components and responsibilities for each party.

We are finalizing both a Flight Tracker based and public use version of this agreement, which will exist on a REDCap-supported platform. If you would like information on utilizing this tool, please let us know by reaching out to Melissa.krasnove@vanderbilt.edu.

Recently, the Early Career Committee of the Cardiopulmonary, Critical Care, and Resuscitation Council of the American Heart Association (AHA) outlined several key features, including but not limited to mentorship, of a successful career roadmap.¹ Let’s take a closer look at several key components.

The Mentee-Mentor Relationship

• Robust mentorship is universally accepted as crucial.
• Multiple mentors, or mentor-like individuals, are often necessary over the course of a career. At times, teams of mentors serve multifaceted roles for mentees.
• A Mentee-Mentor “agreement” or “plan of action” supports a healthy relationship from the start by clearly outlining expectations. It describes a path to conflict resolution if needed.
• Mentees should actively participate in the relationship, including but not limited to crafting meeting agendas, pursuing new scientific ideas, and seeking guidance across an array of domains as needed related to their career development timelines.

Characteristics for the Mentor to Foster in the Investigator

• Resiliency and persistence.
• Receptiveness to feedback on one’s writing and career plans.
• A carefully crafted plan for grants and manuscripts with one’s mentor(s), and follow-through on the plan.
• Knowledge and access to all of one’s resources (intellectual, funding, departmental, etc.).
• Careful focus on and time reserved for writing.

Pursuit of Diverse Funding and Writing Opportunities

• Map of 1, 3, and 5 year submission plans with Mentor(s).
• Engagement in grant writing and manuscript resources (e.g., manuscript sprints).
• Communication with to Program Officers when appropriate.
• The ability to start early, seek feedback, revise often, and avoid last-minute stress.

Work-Life Balance and Related Issues

• Division Chief and/or Center Leader(s) can be excellent advocates for you when needed, in concert with your Mentor.
• Develop a mechanism to manage your time effectively.
• Learn to say no, but sometimes say yes.
• Support family and personal wellness.

This is one take on a roadmap to success. Notable to me is that while the initial component specifically addresses mentoring, most, if not all, of these components rely on strong mentorship—at least they did, and still do, for me.  For example, early in my junior faculty time, I had the opportunity to assume leadership of a clinical program directly related to a line of my translational research; however, my mentor wisely steered me to work closely with my division chief (with input as well from my department chair) to carefully determine the right timeline for this transition, which helped protect me from my own exuberance. The resulting delay in transition ultimately resulted in more success for our clinical program as well as my research and career development.

So as January begins, take a moment to think about your mentorship milieu and overall plan for career development. And if able, give a shout out to your mentor(s) this week—they are easy to see if you just look down as you stand on their shoulders.

1 Agarwal S, Spiekerkoetter E, Austin ED, de Jesus Perez V, Dezfulian C, Maron BA, Ryan JJ, Starks MA, Yu PB, Bonnet S and Perman SM. Career Development of Young Physician-Scientists in the Cardiovascular Sciences: Perspective and Advice from the Early Career Committee of the Cardiopulmonary, Critical Care, and Resuscitation Council of the American Heart Association. Circ Res. 2018;122:1330-1333.

One sign of a caring community is that individuals regularly reach out to each other for help. In many circumstances, we can best help by sharing our knowledge or suggesting solutions. Questions ranging from “What is the proper statistical analysis?” to “How can I improve my chances for an interview with this department?” allow us to give advice when a colleague needs help to solve a problem.

But how can we help when someone comes to us with a problem that cannot be solved – at least not with simple advice? Such situations occur when a friend or colleague is experiencing powerful emotions such as frustration, fear or sadness, or when coping with a difficult loss. When someone opens up to you in this way, you may not know what to say. You want to help, but this is a dilemma that can’t be readily fixed.

It can be a helpless feeling – not knowing what to say or how to fix it – and you may be tempted to search for some bit of advice to cheer the person up, such as reminding her of all that is going well or otherwise finding a silver lining. Most often, however, your efforts fall short, as it is quite difficult to talk someone into feeling better. Moreover, when we try to “fix” our friends’ emotional state, we can inadvertently place an extra burden on them to try to feel better for our sake, or to fake it, because we are uncomfortable sitting with the feelings that are troubling them.

So how can we help when we have no solutions? The answer lies in empathy.

To provide empathy is to accompany another individual in whatever he or she is feeling: to switch from a mindset of problem-solving to one of seeking to understand another person’s experience. So when someone shares, for example, that he is sad and frustrated that his grant didn’t get funded, or that he is feeling distraught after having yet another experiment fail, rather than search for answers, you may say something like, “That sounds like a difficult place to be. I’m here for you.” If we feel somewhat helpless in being unable to make things better for our friends, then we are likely experiencing a small dose of what they are carrying. And if we are willing to sit with them in that experience, then they are not alone.

It might sound easy: simply sitting with someone rather than trying to fix their problem, but truly experiencing another person’s distress is pretty hard. It requires us to withhold judgment about whether our colleague’s emotional state makes sense. If they are experiencing the feeling, then it is real. A scientist doesn’t reject data that is unwanted or unexpected. Rather, she explores why the data look that way. Similarly, an empathetic friend doesn’t disallow someone else’s emotions just because they’re unpleasant. She instead seeks to learn what it’s like to feel them. In this regard, empathy emerges when we let our natural curiosity about the world extend to another person’s subjective experience. We are most empathetic when we genuinely want to know how it feels to be the person sitting beside us. And that can be the best help anyone can offer.

More Resources

Emotional Connecting While Social Distancing

The Thrills and Perils of Living on the Edge – Anxiety Edition

Staying Mentally Well in Academia is a Balancing Act