Getting Your Sea Legs Posted on February 28, 2006 Velma McBride Murry (bio) advises junior researchers to start with pilot work before starting large projects.

My advice is to start small doing pilot work because a lot can be learned from doing this work on 15 to 20 families. Rather than taking on an entire community, they may decide on a particular block group area. I want to go in, and I'd like to find out how to do this research, but I want to start out by them teaching me how to do it well. And taking that, rather than me telling them what it is that I want them to do, learn from the audience for which you're planning to do research on. Just take it that way.

Apply for a much smaller grant than this would take because the kind of work that I'm talking about is work with a lot of resources behind it, meaning R01s. Start small, like a R03 or exploratory studies. A K award where you're having someone teach you how to do this is another way to do it.

Attaching oneself with people in the field who've done this work for a long time, and have them mentor them through the process of doing this, but I would caution a very junior person from starting out doing this work from the get go. The first approach might be to just do empirical work on a small sample and then once you get your sea legs as we say it sometimes, then you can really start wading in deeper waters.

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