Bumps in the Road Posted on February 15, 2006 Philip A. Fisher (bio) talks about being persistent in order to meet your career and research goals.

I worked a lot in residential treatment actually going back to when I was in high school. I really enjoyed working intensively with kids, but I also noticed that as much change as kids experienced in the context of working with them, they went back to the environments that spawned a lot of these problems.

And especially in the context of summer camps for troubled kids where we would see kids come back on a yearly basis, big changes would happen during the summer and then in the intervening ten months, things would get really difficult again. We saw many kids deteriorate over time as a result of going back to environments that were really challenging for them.

So I was really, in terms of pursuing a research career, looking for approaches that were more integrated into the community so that really the environment that the child existed in was the thing that was being targeted in addition to helping the child to make changes.

But it certainly hasn't always been a smooth process, and I think in particular that the training you get as a researcher is designed to help you understand pretty clearly the relationship between cause and effect and then can lead to the idea that if you put enough effort in and you have really good ideas that things will just move along.

There can be bumps in the road. You can have good ideas that are not communicated clearly enough at one time or another, or the ideas are, just in terms of timing, not where people are at in terms of thinking about things. I think the key is to allow yourself to feel discouraged when things don't go well, but to not let you stop you in your tracks.

All senior researchers that I've talked to have talked about having great grants that didn't get funded and having to really rethink them and not letting that stop them from what they wanted to do, but just continuing on the way. I think that's really critical to kind of moving ahead.

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