Attending a Career Development Institute Posted on November 21, 2007 Michael J. Ostacher (bio) established key relationships as a CDI trainee.

So my experience as a CDI participant was clearly important to me in my development as a researcher. I had originally been a clinical administrator and clinician in practice after my residency for about 10 years. And at some point I decided that I was not satisfied with where my career was going, and I made a decision to try to return to research. And so in order to do that, I had to take a number of different steps including getting an entry-level research position.

But also figuring out how a research career unfolded. And so I was doing this from my perspective late in my career because a lot of people start to do it while they’re still in their actual psychiatric or graduate school training, and I waited until much longer.

It was even in getting to know people prior to my applying for the CDI, that I had started to build my research career up from essentially nothing. The CDI was a really important part of this.

The relationships that I’ve developed with senior people there are ones that I still continue to have today.

They really helped me figure out how I was going to strategize over the next several years. How I was going to get research money and also what it was like for them to have research careers and also have families and activities in the rest of their lives. So that was really, it was really quite a personal experience for me. So I was learning technical things about how to develop research. How to present research, how to design studies. How to understand statistics that might be involved in research. But I also had an opportunity to be mentored by people in terms of how to integrate a research career into the rest of their lives.

I think research is necessarily especially today a collaborative endeavor. And so relationship building and networking, even though those are sort of cliches, are really important in terms of being able to establish a career and the CDI is really sort of remarkable in that the people who, the faculty who are involved seem to me to have made a commitment to people’s careers on the long haul in terms of begin mentors for them. And so it’s been really useful in that way.

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