Designing Your Career

Faculty Life / Mentoring / Trainees

This post condenses a talk by Mark Denison, MD, at a Vanderbilt Translational Bridge meeting.

For many trainees, and occasionally even the senior faculty who mentor them, career development is a black box: You put in papers, grants, teaching, research, and other career-helping things, and out comes a postdoc, a faculty position, research independence, a deanship, or whatever you’re aiming for.  You’re not quite sure which conferences you should plan to attend, or when you want to have that paper submitted, but it’ll probably all work out somehow.  Right?

Wrong.  A bunch of random experiments do not a Nature paper make (unless you’re really lucky).  Similarly, a bunch of loosely related posters, papers, and grant proposals do not equal a career development plan.  Much as you start an experiment or grant proposal with what you want to test, you should start your career plan with where you want to end up.

Knowing your desired goal (a great fellowship? faculty position? R01?) lets you decide what you need to achieve that goal.  If most K awardees in your field have X publications when they submit their grant, you know how many papers you need to get out.  If you know you need to submit your first R01 no later than the third year of your K to avoid a gap in funding, you realize which application cycles you have to target.

Plotting all the steps on a career timeline, ideally about nine years out, makes them concrete and demonstrates exactly how much time each is going to take.  (Rather like another timeline process…)  Dr. Denison calls this “positive disillusionment,” as timelines often put into vivid relief exactly how long it takes to write a paper, dissertation, or grant.

Timelines benefit you also as a tool for mentor committee meetings.  Once mentors know your career goal and what you think will get you there, they can reel optimistic timelines back to reality or suggest specific conferences to attend or colleagues to meet to advance your career.

Finally, if you’re at that stage, timelines make a great addition to a career development award.

Example timelines:

A possible postdoctoral career timeline. Make full size.

Another potential career timeline for a postdoc. Make full size.

Download the template to make your own and share it with your mentors.

More Resources

Grant Funding Strategy: Which Grants to Apply For?

Tales of Career Development Awards

Tales of Developing a National Reputation

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Three essential steps to win a Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition

Trainees

  1. Have a very powerful opening that matches your single message (powerful) slide

You face one of three situations.

  • One – you are the first speaker and the audience is just settling in. They are unused to listening to very short talks, so they won’t pay adequate attention from the very beginning unless you have a strong ‘hook’.
  • Second – you are speaking after someone who has given a very powerful talk. In your first few seconds you must both distract them from the earlier talk and at the same time to get them to pay attention to you.
  • Third – you are speaking after someone who has not spoken well, and the audience is restless, distracted or asleep. Your opening needs to energize and excite them.

Fortunately, all three options have the same solution, and this is to make sure that your opening is both powerful and relevant to your subject. Ideally your words will link strongly to your slide, which will contain a powerful image that encapsulates your key message. An image without labels is best but if labels are necessary, do make sure that the image can be grasped in a single glance.

Here are suitable opening words suggested by a student who was studying the effects of the Mediterranean diet on health:

“Our average life expectancy is 80 years. But what about the average quality of our lives?”

  1. Energize your audience again in the middle of your talk and then leave them with a powerful take-home message

Just as in a novel or movie script, your short talk needs to have the equivalent of a ‘second act’. You might have used the first part of your talk to summarize the problem and outline the approach you are taking to solve it but in the middle of your talk, you need to show them what you have found and why your results are so exciting and/or important.

Try to use this transition to your results as a point where you re-energize the audience with your excitement (or other appropriate emotion) of what you found. Even if your results are not as you hoped, you should be able to create some drama around this.

Finally, always leave them with a strong take home message. Sometimes a quotation can help you here but so make sure that you say something that they well remember and that ideally will stimulate an emotional response.

  1. Breathe deeply, stand tall and speak out proudly

Good posture will help you feel strong and will also impress your audience. Practice deep breathing for the few minutes before your talk and then immediately before your first words. You will probably be speaking with a microphone so make sure you practice with one beforehand. Nevertheless, even if you don’t have to pitch your voice to the back of the room, do make sure that you don’t just look at the people in the front row. It’s generally a good rule to start by looking at the middle of the room and then moving your eyes a little so that you gradually include the whole audience.

For many more tips on giving a 3MT or short presentation, please download my pdf from my speaker training website.

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Think You’re an Imposter? Here’s How to Know for Sure

Faculty Life / Trainees

In my work as a consultant helping young scholars navigate the demands of academic life, one of the most common fears expressed by my clients is that they don’t belong. For them, every paper submitted or experiment conducted carries not only the stress of the task but also the threat of being revealed as a fraud. This is the burden of “The Imposter Syndrome,” a term first coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imes.

The fact that this phenomenon is so prevalent as to warrant its own label should be comforting. If feeling like an imposter makes you just like a bunch of other people in your field, then by definition, you belong. Yet like many scholars, you might remain unconvinced and develop a sort of meta-imposter syndrome, in which you think your colleagues all have the “Imposter Syndrome,” while you alone are actually an imposter.

So how can you know for sure if you really belong? Let’s look at some common concerns and see if they mean you’re an imposter. First, what if you’re pretty bad at some important aspect of your job? Does this glaring weakness mean that you’re not cut out for your field? In short, no. Everyone has weaknesses, and you’re not an imposter. In fact, experts in any field spend the majority of their practice time working on their weaknesses. That’s why they’re experts: because they recognize what they’re not good at and work to get better. So if you know what you need to improve, you’re in good company.

But what if you don’t have any weaknesses? If that describes you, I’d be surprised, because I wouldn’t have expected you to click on this post. But if you’re reading this and are now worried that you’re an imposter because you’re the only one without any shortcomings, you can rest assured. You have stuff to work on, like the rest of us, but you’re not an imposter. You’re simply blind to the weaknesses you have, and there are plenty of people around just like you. There’s even a name for your syndrome as well. It’s the “Dunning-Kruger Effect.” Look it up.

What, though, if your concern is that you’re all weaknesses and no strengths? Does that mean you’re an imposter? No again. Clearly, if you’ve reached some level of achievement, you have leveraged some strengths to do so, and if you believe otherwise, it’s because you’re blind to your strengths, or you’re extremely humble. Like many “Imposter Syndrome” sufferers, you probably ruminate on your weaknesses while taking your strengths for granted.

It’s true. There are things you can do, without even thinking about it, that others find quite challenging. Still, you may discount your strengths because you had to put in extra effort to get good at them. You may think you’re an imposter because nothing comes easy for you. Yet that doesn’t make you an imposter, either. For one, if you have a habit of working hard, that’s a valuable strength in itself. Also, another proven quality of experts is that they spend more time than others practicing on their own, so if you have to work hard to accomplish something, you’re not an imposter. More likely, you’re an emerging expert.

For many scholars, the fear of not belonging is tied to identity. If you’re a member of a group that has been traditionally under-represented in your field, you may feel the burden of disproving negative stereotypes about your gender, race, culture, or other intersecting identities, a phenomenon known as “Stereotype Threat.” Let me assure you, if you’ve overcome discrimination and biased perceptions, either explicit or implicit, to get to where you are, you darn well deserve to be there. You are definitely not an imposter.

Source: https://goo.gl/xiJpfw

When it comes down to it, there is only one true test to know if you’re an imposter. To take it, find your ID card, for whichever organization within which you reside. Is that your real name on the card? Is that your photograph? If not, and you’ve falsified your credentials, then you are an imposter, and I hope you get caught. If, however, that is your actual name on your ID, then you’re not an imposter. Rather, you’re a card-carrying member, with all the honors, rights, and privileges thereunto appertaining. So go ahead and ask that question you’ve been wondering about at the conference seminar. And send that message to that prestigious potential collaborator. You deserve to be here, so use your voice. I, for one, look forward to hearing from you.

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