Starting Over: 5 things you didn’t realize would slow you down in a new post doc.

You leave your PhD lab feeling confident because you just spent 4-8 years in your field, where you have read, researched, and written parts of your field.  You believe that you have a strong technical background in what you’ve done, and you may decide to change fields slightly for your post-doc. Doing this opens you up to expanding your knowledge much further than if you maintained a position in your current field, and it also opens you up to feeling stupid most of the time. (See The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research: http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771.full.pdf+html).

Don’t worry – this is normal.

Just like when you first started graduate school and knew nothing about the field, you will need time to adapt. I changed from a microbiology lab with a focus on the immune response against whooping cough (vaccinate your kids!), to an erythropoiesis lab, learning how the body deals with stresses that cause dramatic loss of red blood cells due to either trauma or leukemia. Because these fields are very different, I expected it to take some time to adapt, but I wasn’t sure how long before I started to really get going. 

Here is what I’ve learned:

1. Paperwork doesn’t normally transfer. Even though I have decided to continue my career at the same institution that I carried out my graduate work in, new paperwork is needed as an employee that was either different because of my change in status from graduate student to employee or did not transfer to my new laboratory. You will be expected to complete the same training you have already completed because you are in a different building, lab, or department. You will need to be added to new IACUCs, IRBs, and IBCs, because these are laboratory specific. This paperwork will take a while.

2. Just because you learned a technique previously doesn’t mean you know how to do it.  Every lab has their own way of doing things. Some may extract bone marrow by drilling into the bone and flushing the marrow out while others may just pulverize the whole bone and filter out the unwanted cells. Neither of these versions are incorrect, but labs have a tendency to maintain their standard operating procedures (SOPs) to make sure that data are comparable among members within the lab. It will take time to learn from the lab members to know how certain procedures and techniques are expected to be performed, which leads to our next point.

3. You will need to work on someone else’s schedule until you have learned those SOPs. When you first start a lab and are trying to learn how that lab does things, you will need to observe other labmates, and even work side by side with them until you can master their SOPs.

4. You will need to learn a new set of jargon and the literature of a new field. This one is pretty obvious. Whether you change course slightly or hop into a brand new field that you know little to nothing about, you will need to learn the update views, big names in the field, and

5. You will need to learn how your new boss operates. How often do you meet? Are you expecting to share data on a specific day at a specific time or should you report new data as it comes in? Is there a regular lab meeting, and if so, what is the format? Will you share or present data every time? Is this a general update on progress? Are important journal articles discussed? How closely related are the journal articles to people’s work? This is very much so lab specific, and every lab has a different way of doing things. The best advice suggests that you talk to labmates to discover how things run and how you should contribute.

For these reasons, it really will take you about 2 months to start being a productive member of the lab when you change field. Most PIs expect this, and although you should be working hard to get yourself deeper into the new field, give yourself a break now and then to step back and realize how much you will have learned when starting over.

This post was written by Dr. Laura Goodfield, post-doc in Dr. Paulson's lab. 

It’s a bird! No…it’s a plane! No… its “The Speed of Trust!”

In August, Rick Parmely of Professional and Polished, LCC visited our CMIID group and mentioned “The Speed of Trust” by Stephen M.R. Covey as part of his professional development talk.  As of late, I’ve been very interested in leaving grad school being well-rounded - that is, having more skills under my belt than flow cytometry and mucosal cell isolations, so I decided to read it.

While there were many good points and interesting ideas from the book, I came away with two points that really made me think.

1: Trust is made of two parts: integrity and capability.  I would trust my lab mate to homogenize the spleens from my experiment but not to perform my open heart surgery.  My doctor could perform the surgery but probably not isolate my lamina propria lymphocytes.

2: The degree of trust is directly proportional to how fast tasks get accomplished and inversely proportional to how much it costs to finish the task.  For example, if trust is low, it can take a long time for a collaboration project to produce data, which will cost more money and result in fewer publications or patents.  But if the trust is high, the collaboration can work quickly to produce results, which will cost less money and result in more frequent publications. 

The majority of the book focuses on how to increase trust within your organization which was interesting to me because as I said before, I had never thought about how trust could be important in the work environment.  “The Speed of Trust” has definitely made a strong case for trust in the workplace.  Trust within personal relationships is also discussed in this book but for this, I’ll stick to the workplace examples.       

While we are all science nerds and therefore notorious for our lack of social skills, we still need to have interpersonal skills in order for our work to run smoothly.  Isn’t it easier to have a lab mate that you trust take care of a small part of your big experiment so that you can focus on the main objective?  Isn’t it easier to communicate with your PI when you trust them to guide you through a rough patch of experiments and when they are confident in your ability to perform the actual science correctly?  Doesn’t the work get done faster when you’re not worried about whether the PBS you made last week hasn’t been swapped out with HCl by one of your lab mates? (I haven’t had any experience with this but it was a horror story somebody told me while I was interviewing at grad schools.)

All of this has made me think about how my actions are perceived in the lab. Do my actions help people trust me?  Do my actions help me trust me?  I believe that people want to be connected to other people and by having integrity and expressing compassion.  I personally feel my best when I’m working positively with others, making a connection with them whether it is through a collaborative experiment or an idea exchange.  When we connect with other, it forms a network of support and a platform for productivity and positivity.  Learning how to build a network and platform now will help us transition into any job opportunities, research based or non-traditional, and any professional and personal relationships we have in the future.

And on that note, what do your actions say about you?  Can your lab trust you to get your work and participate positively as member of the lab community?   Or are you that person that nobody wants to work with and has a reputation for being unreliable?  Are you in the process of building a supportive network?  If you are interested in learning about how trust is a vital part to our lives in and out of the lab, I highly suggest reading “The Speed of Trust.”

“Whether you’re on a sports team, in an office or a member of a family, if you can’t trust one another there’s going to be trouble.” – Joe Paterno

“There are no moral shortcuts in the game of business – or life.  There are, basically three kinds of people: the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful and those who become and remain successful.  The difference is character.”  - Jon Hunstman, Chairman – Huntsman Chemical

“What creates trust, in the end, is the leader’s manifest respect for the followers.” – James O’Toole, Author of Leading Change

This post was written by Kaitlin McDaniel, a 5^th yr PhD. Candidate in Dr. Cantorna’s lab.