In a nutshell, prepare yourself–take time off from your day to day lab work and really, really prepare. You can run all the northern blots you want prior to your job talk to get some data moving, but if you don’t ultimately land a job in academic science, your mad skilz in northern blotting are going to go by the wayside. Focus and prepare.

First, you need to perform well. And by performing well I mean write and deliver a kick-ass talk. Put a lot of effort into your 50 minute seminar, and your chalk talk as well. Open with at least 10 minutes of a broad overview of your type of science — if your audience is full of people that do widely disparate things, then make sure you orient the audience BROADLY as to where your science fits. This is where you include pretty pictures, nice graphs, or conceptual figures. Think about each transition, and at each point you want to be holding the audience’s rapt attention–so don’t let their minds wander. CPP has written a nice blog post giving more specifics on the job talk, and I’m not going to re-hash this stuff. But I do want to emphasize the importance of getting this aspect of your interview right–many of the faculty won’t look at your CV to know how kickass you are and so you need to convince them of your scientific worth in 50 minutes. And end with where you will be going–highlight that your ideas are fundable, not by saying as much, but maybe gearing your potential future work toward particular grant panels. Show that you’ve assessed the funding landscape and can gear your work toward the fundable.

Beyond your talk, you will be chatting with many of the faculty in 30/45 min increments in their offices (see here for CPP’s breakdown), and you will have longer one-on-one exposure to members of the hiring committee at lunches and dinners. Realize that every minute counts. If you are socially inept, read up on how to be more personable. Learn how to make some of the chit-chat. Don’t talk about yourself much at all–there is no need to mention your many stellar awards. You’re being evaluated not only on your science, but also, at some level, how personable you are and how willing you may be to contribute to various service aspects within the department. Are you going to be a team player?

Other people probably have divergent views on the personable stuff, but I prefer to not be around trollish people. I want to bring in a colleague who I want to interact with–who is fun to talk science with, who would be willing to potentially collaborate, and who would not balk at picking up some of the departmental service or teaching slack if something comes up for another faculty member, like an illness, birth, or death. They have to be excellent scientists, too, and fundable, let me reiterate that point. I do not know how much weight other departments might place on excellence and fundability versus personality. I would prefer to have someone consistently funded but also agreeable rather than a colleague who has 3 grants, a small army of people, and a seriously bad temperament.

But back to being prepared. Part of being prepared means that you know, at some level, the faculty profiles within the departments you are interviewing. I knew everyone’s name and a broad idea of what they worked on and major topic of interest. It is smart to show that you have looked into this aspect of your potential department, because, just as you are being felt out as a potential colleague, you should also be evaluating the quality of the department. It’s a good idea to identify where in the department you would fit in and how your particular science would add a new tool set. You know how I mentioned that each person will have an agenda? Here is where you can help mold their thoughts–you can identify to the faculty how you will be a unique addition to the department.

Another aspect of being prepared is that you assess the potential start-up $$ amount in a subversive manner. Find out the general expectations based on what other people in your field, not in your potential department, pulled in for start-up. I think it’s a bad idea to discuss specifics of what you need before you have been given the offer–and I personally think it’s a seriously stupid move to ask other faculty what their start-up amounts were. This may, again, depend on the type of department you are interviewing in, but in my experience this number is not something I want to give out freely. Realize that others might feel the same way and tread lightly here. If you’re asked what sort of infrastructure you need to get your work done, answer truthfully, because, at some level, the person asking might already know the answer. So be realistic. But do so realizing that a large, well-known department at an R1 university might have more resources than another department in an R1 university. There’s a striking amount of variation out there.

I might add to this post in the future as more things occur to me–and if you are freaking out now, I would advise you to try and chill and prepare. The more prepared and confident you are, the better for your individual personality to shine through and excite the faculty. Because that is ultimately what you want–to have left behind an excited group of faculty that will do what they can to get you hired. Below are some links to other job-interview advice from various bloggers–READ IT! PREPARE! And have fun.

Chalk talk Cha-Cha-Cha

Interview questions from Dr. Becca

DrDrA’s awesome set of job related posts

Gerty-Z, always for the win

Dr Isis tells us what to wear to dinner

…and the interview in general. This one’s a gem

And just in case you wanted more…Dr. Becca has an awesome TT job search advice aggregator that I can’t believe I missed.

I’m still within the early years of setting up the lab as a tenure-track assistant prof in a large research university. I am starting to breathe a little now that the lab is running, I have funding, and I have some teaching behind me. However, I’ve done shit for making friends in my new place of residence, and this needs to change. I don’t think my relative lack of friends, even drinking buddies, is due to a personality issue on my part–I’m not horrendous to be around (I think). A good friend of mine from grad school calls me ‘Game On,’ as in, I start something and I’m fairly focused. I’ve been incredibly focused on getting my career running while wiping baby bottoms and suffering severe lack of sleep. And jeez, I really need to find a baby-sitter. We have yet to leave the kids and go out for a night.

In general terms, I can speak to the difficulty of moving to a new place and finding friends–I moved, on average, every three years while growing up. I know how this works. Your first year you are just getting used to getting around, the new streets, finding the grocery stores that stock the random foodie items you use that no one in your county would recognize as food items, figuring out the traffic, where you can go for a jog without getting killed, etc. You might meet and hang out with people within your first year that seem alright. They’re nice enough, mostly. But within the next year or so, you realize that you in fact have nothing in common with this first group and you were really just trying them on. So you move on to another group, and generally it’s within the 2nd to 3rd year that you establish the life-long friend set. You know, your peeps. Finding real friends is just like dating–you keep trying until the right set of friends comes along.

When I was younger and child-less, at least, the above was the general pattern. For the above to happen, tho, you have to be around people, and this is the problem. We’re not the church-going type. The kids are little enough that they’re not yet doing a lot of extracurricular activities. We haven’t integrated into our new community, really. And work, well, people there are great, just not very social.

A recent book published by the Gallup Press breaks general wellbeing into five areas–career, social, financial, physical, and community wellbeing. Each aspect of wellbeing will have positive and negative aspects, and at certain points in your life some axes might outweigh the others in terms of positive versus negative influence. It’s not about perfectly balancing between the five (from what I can gather from a review on the book, I haven’t read it yet) — and your overall sense of wellbeing is rather subjective in how you weight each area. I could just be making this up at some level. In any case, I’m not trying to sell a book — but giving terms to these potential axes of wellbeing is interesting. The general rec from the authors to improve social wellbeing is to spend six hours a day socializing with friends, family and colleagues.

Six freaking hours? How in the crap is one who wants their career to continue its upward trajectory supposed to divert six hours per day to socializing? I’ve been making little changes where I can–having coffee here and there with colleagues, sometimes beer, etc, but certainly I have not made the kind of commitment to the process that I know it will take. Not to mention that I think making friends outside of work is a good idea, specifically for those times you need to complain about work.

In short, the question that is banging about in my mind is how should one go about developing their social network when serious focus and energy is required to keep that career trajectory moving steadily up, and, how important, relatively, is social wellbeing versus career wellbeing? I have recently been found out at work for lacking a social life–one of my colleagues who I talk to occasionally asked what my husband and I do when we go out? A relatively benign question for which I embarrassingly lacked a decent answer. Um, yeah, we’ve been out a couple of times? To the same person’s house? In X number of years? Erhm. Blush.

[Update] I’ve finally found a bit of time to start collating some links as resources, and at least one person (thanks Dawn!) has dropped some links in the comments section. I’m going to keep updating this post as I find relevant links or am pointed to them.

The Zuska, Explaining (Away) Women Geeks (A little off topic but relevant for my friend)

From Hermie’s wimminz in academia series:
Female Science Professor
Nicole and Maggie
PiT

Relatively random but seemingly appropriate links:
Formal and Informal Discrimination at Work, a pdf
Ms Magazine blog, Old Boys Club Still Meets on the Golf Course

Women in business, WSJ
Black women and exclusion by white men

One aspect of literature reading in grad school that I do not miss, however, is the discussion amongst the grad students of ‘Oh hey, did you read that?’ ‘What about this?’ ‘Wuuut? How could you possibly miss so and so’s Nature paper that definitively links an increase in squirrel pee in deciduous forests to the decline in alpine lichen communities?’

You know, your badassedness is directly tied to your general knowledge of random things.

Well, there’s a Portlandia for that. Enjoy.

I was reminded of this situation the other day when one of my grad-school BFFs, who decided to take a pretty awesome job working for the nation’s largest biotech company, in a pretty awesome city, mentioned that she is yet again confronted with ‘boy’s play’ — but in this case, kind of hilariously we think, it is some sort of online video game that involves a Star Wars type theme. Every now and then she gets snippets of their conversation. ‘Back-door junior jedi!’ (WTF does that even mean?). Bounty hunters. Etc.

Who are the they? The boys in her group. Her boss. The jerk-bro that’s been giving her a hard time for various reasons. And again we are confronted with the ‘Well, should you care?’ question. I think yes and it is time for her to switch groups, but I have a little more information on this particular issue than I’m relaying. The truth is that I still don’t know how to confront this avenue of network building. Personally, I do not ‘hang’ with any members of my lab — we talk at work or sometimes I have all of them over to my house, or, I have taken them out to eat before. But I take all of them, regardless of sex.

So what do you do in this situation? Do you begin to network with the more female-friendly associates, or faculty, whatever your situation might entail? Do you begin your own system of mentoring to create support and opportunity? How to best take action?

I’m now starting my third year on the TT and have secured funding. My publications have been light over the last 2 years since the majority of my post-doc work was published right as I left. I still have ‘extra’ data sitting around from then that I can analyze and write up but am less inclined to do so when preliminary data have been coming in from my lab members. We do have one paper from my group currently in review and I have one from post-doc that has been giving me issues which I need to flip–but, when you look at my CV it is noticeably light over the past 2 years–only 3 papers published, and two of them were reviews.

I have been focused on writing grants and since opening my lab have put in 5 federals and 3 locals. Now the focus must turn to getting papers out, and that is the plan. Where’s my bar? In good years I would like to aim for 3-5 solid data pubs per year*.

Based on recent experience, though, I am not sure this is possible. My lab members are all very young and inexperienced with writing for publication. I can write decently fast when I need–not as fast as some, but I can get a paper written within a month or less. I’m the kind of writer that doesn’t need to revise too much after the first draft. I know, there are issues with this strategy but old habits are hard to shake.

The point of this string of thoughts is that I am wondering how I can learn to produce papers and grants at the same time. I am limited to daycare hours, and I am not going to sacrifice my health any longer (ie working late into the night, not working out, etc). I am convinced there is a way to be smart about being productive. And still be highly productive at most things rather than a ‘cluster’ producer like I have been — one year I had 6 papers published, five of them first author. It’s just how I’ve rolled. And I’m re-thinking this–I’d like to show more consistency over time.

Thoughts?

*I’m assuming here that the experiments are panning out and the data are interesting. Huge freaking assumption.

And that’s whats-her-name from Sleater-Kinney. Um, yeah. Good thing I’m done with my grant.

STOP BITCHING ABOUT HAVING TO WRITE A BROAD IMPACT STATEMENT IN YOUR NSF GRANTS.

Full proposal, pre-proposal, whatever–broad impacts are important, as PLS is reposting to his blog for the upteenth time. PLS maintains that BI’s are important to NSF and thus they should be important to you and you should do a good job preparing this section. I want to pitch another reason you should care about BI’s — if funded, you will be required to get off your asse and get involved with, at some level, the taxpaying public. You know, those people like my old parents who are cranky Republicans (although they are seemingly evolving into nutso Libertarian-Teapartiers) and/or school kids or what have you. What have you dreamt up? How can you as a HIGHLY educated member of society improve society? What’s your mark beyond your science?

Bringing your scientific expertise and training outside your uni is not only good for the public. It should also be beneficial to your development as a human being. First, a decent BI section will likely require you to get away from your computer and possibly OUTSIDE. How much time do we spend in front of computers typing away? Does this repetitive activity help our brains or are we unwittingly, by performing the same keystrokes day in and out, shrinking them? Second, your BI’s will force you to interact with people that you wouldn’t normally, science novices, scientists from another field, teachers, or perhaps medical doctors. Having a conversation outside of your normal scientific sub-sub-discipline will likely make you think about YOUR project in a different way. It might in fact help you make a leap that you  hadn’t previously, or possibly, help you to explain a difficult concept in a clearer manner.

There are more benefits to caring and contributing some time to this section of your grants, but, for the love, STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT BROAD IMPACTS! Start enjoying them. They are a chance to get out and do something different for once, for crickey’s sake.

You know, there are things you have to do when you are the PI to preserve your research program and ensure that it is progressing. If there is someone who works within your sphere of influence that is not actually working on your behalf then it is your responsibility to critically evaluate the issue and determine the best course of action. If the problems are still occurring after you have changed your tone, considered your words, and bought a whole fuckton of treats from Trader Joe’s for the other person, then it is time to begin considering new options.