Stay Focused Posted on October 24, 2007 Andrea Fagiolini (bio) advises becoming an expert in one area before broadening your interests.

My primary advice for anyone that is starting a research career is to stay as much focused as possible. As we’re starting to do some research activity, we may have several ideas and jump from one to the other and find one that is interesting on top of what we are already doing. So, it’s very tempting to go from one place to another thinking that it is an improvement, but without realizing that at least at the beginning of the career, it’s very important to become the expert in the field and it is important for yourself, because this permits having enough time to read all what is published in that particular topic, to know as much as possible and to be as productive as possible.

And it is also important from a more practical perspective because you have then to write grants to get funds. They want to see that you’re goal oriented, that you know as much as possible about your topic and that you are investing as much as possible in improving the knowledge in that particular topic.

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