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.
