Between Papers & Patients Posted on November 21, 2007 Michael J. Ostacher (bio) outlines the challenges in moonlighting as a researcher.

I’ve had several experiences with people who have tried to do the same thing that I did at the bipolar program. That is, people who have been primarily clinicians came into the program and tried to develop their careers.

And nobody yet has been able to successfully really change from being a full time clinician to a primarily full time researcher. It seems to me that I got lucky in a lot of ways and was in the right place at the right time in terms of that.

The most important thing, looking back on it, for me was that I knew that I wanted to do this. I knew that I wanted to ask these kind of questions, do research to find out the answers to them. And that I had a strong motivation to become an established researcher.

And so I had a certain amount of drive that pushed me through periods where it was not certain where I was going to get funding, where it was not certain that I was going to be able to study the questions that I was interested in. And so if people are interested in becoming researchers, it’s certainly possible to do it. But I think you’d have to be fairly certain of that’s what you want to do and motivated to do it.

As I mentioned earlier, Gary Sachs said, he’s a clinician as a hobby and a researcher as a career. And I think ultimately he’s probably right. I don’t think it would be that easy to be a researcher as a hobby. It takes an inordinate amount of effort in terms of hours and amount of thought that goes into it to do it. And so unless it’s really something that you want to have as a central part of your career, it’s very difficult to be successful at it I think.

Clinical work is, from my experience, much more draining in terms of my emotional energy than is research to me. I mean there are times when things are very stressful when I’m trying to get grants done or there’s deadlines that need to be met. But clinical work pulls at you much more. Patients get sick in the middle of the night. My papers, nothing happens to them in the middle of the night. They just sit there.

And so if you have a primarily clinical position, that’s a tremendous drain. And being able to have energy beyond that to do research work on the weekends and in your spare time, it’s something that I think would be difficult to do.

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