A: Criteria for promotion: When you take a faculty position or are in the process of getting one, I think it's good to find out even at the outset what are the criteria for a promotion and what constitutes evidence of scholarly activity. I don't think you should be shy about it. I think you should find out once you've decided where you're going to be what goes on. It's not bad, and in fact I would suggest it ought to go on, that you do have an annual review, and I don't mean a review every 3 or 4 years. I don't mean something perfunctory. I think it's useful to find out at least in the view of others where you are within that department.

If you're not independently wealthy, you'll want to have some notion of how you're going to pay for your household expenses, your hobbies, and other kinds of things. Even if you are wealthy, it's not bad to get paid for what you do, so this whole notion of what constitutes compensation and how it gets linked. Universities don't operate like a union, where you put in your years of service, and you get the same percent, etc. I think it's useful to find that at the outset. What if I get a R01? What if I get a K award? What if I do this or that or win some sort of award? Is anything going to matter in terms of any kind of financial compensation? Am I going to get a parking place that's closer to where I work? Is my office size going to increase?

Career development: Some departments have career development opportunities, and so the only way you can find out about it unless there's a rumor mill is you've got to ask about it, ideally when you're interviewing for the position. In Pittsburgh, for example, we have a limited number of junior faculty scholar awards. In these cases, thanks to an NIMH R25 grant that we have, we can cover 25% of your time, and your requirement is to attend classes, learn some survival skills, and take the time to write a first-class career development award application. We've certainly found that to be quite successful. Now that usually doesn't cover all your time unless you go to a place which believes in you so much, it says, "You know, we're going to give you 100% freedom to run up and down the block, ride your bike, do whatever you want, and what we'd like you to do is be successful from a research point of view in a couple of years, and we'll call you up at that point." Not too many opportunities like that are available, and I'm not sure even if they are available that they're such a good idea. Probably more likely you have clinical assignments in addition to your assignment to write a career development award. Part of the negotiation here is to get a clinical assignment that relates to what you want to do. Often times, say if you're a child psychiatrist you may find yourself, if you didn't ask, working in an area or on a unit which may not be so relevant to your research issues, but if you ask about it, you may find yourself actually using that clinical time to fit in very well with your research interests. Again, to me that's part of the negotiation.

Administrative support: Some of you may be terrific at typing and using the computer. Others are not so good, but whether you are or not, it's not bad to have some support in terms of filling our paperwork, and not using all your time for that. Again, you've got to ask for that. You've also got to find out what kind of support you can get from an office of grants and contracts within a university, within a department, within a medical school in terms of putting together research budgets. Most of us were not trained to do that. Most of us did not get a CPA degree or major in economics, so we often find that while it's important for you to learn about this stuff, you shouldn't have to spend all your time doing it.

Support at critical transition points: When you go in for your interviews, ask them questions such as, What kind of vision do you have about this place that goes beyond next week? Where are you going? Do you as a department or you as an institute think about developmental needs of trainees? Do you have anything in place to deal with high-risk transition? OK, my postdoc is over; I become a faculty member tomorrow. What does that mean? Or I am doing 100% clinical work; I get my K award, and what happens to me the next day? What are these kind of critical transition points, and what kind of strategies do you have in place? What's going to happen if I don't get my K award the first time I put it in? What do you have in place to help me realize that I may have to apply a second time, and I may have to apply a third time? Those are important issues.

Collaboration: Another series of questions that you ought to be asking about is the collaborative atmosphere. Is there a culture of collaboration at the university, or is everything a series of silos or Byzantine empires filled with all kinds of boundaries where you need visas and passports to get from one section of the department to another section and you have to take loyalty oaths all the time? I'm not being facetious. Some of our foremost departments have such apparatus in place. They do not realize that what took place in central Europe a couple centuries ago is over and they continue in many ways to perpetuate that form of organization. That doesn't work too much in terms of creating a culture of collaboration, and so you should be asking questions about that.

Are there any group activities for young people to get together other than the annual picnic that sometimes people have? What else goes on? Is there a journal club? Is there other things that sort of move to getting people across some of these terrains or boundaries? So these are things that I think are very, very useful.