Longitudinal Career Considerations Posted on October 26, 2007 Find a good mentor and find a good project, advises Mark S. Bauer (bio).

There’s about a half a dozen themes that come to mind for various longitudinal considerations in your career. One is finding a mentor, and finding the proper distance between you and your mentor. And it shouldn’t be too close because you need to differentiate, but it also shouldn’t be so far away that it’s a stretch for the mentor to really take an interest in your career.

And you should really, I think, have you know your mentorship relationship is going well if your mentor wants to meet with you as much as you want to meet with them. So set the right intellectual and professional distance there, not too far and not too close.

The second is that you should have a project, and this is true in all stages of your career. How do you know if you have a project? Everybody thinks they have a project, but I mean really have a project. A project is something with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the end is a product. And the product is a paper where you’re the first author on it to be very concrete about it. So you should have something that’s really yours that you’ve developed.

To complement that is the theme of other people’s work, and you should really be ready to do to a degree, other people’s work. Some of my, I think my very first data paper was a neuroendocrin response to cold stress, and that’s something I’ve never pursued, but someone asked me would you like to work on my dataset and I said sure.

That was my opportunity to learn how to do data entry, to do data analysis, to type, and you’re looking at a guy that got a D in typing in high school. I could not type to save my life, and doing this project for someone else really helped. So that can be very important. Seeing patients for other people, working as an interviewer, all these things are important. They also have the payoff that you then know how research is done from the ground up.

There should be no research task that is below you. You should be doing everything because when you’re running your own shop, you’re gonna know how to manage tasks and manage people much better than if you’d kind of floated along the surface and had somebody else do the scut work.

« Back to Article