Advice for Advancement Posted on December 6, 2007 Celia B. Fisher (bio) offers some key approaches to career growth.

For young researchers in academic settings where they have to think about promotion and tenure, there is this tension between being a good departmental citizen and ensuring that you’re going to get the research done that is going to advance your scholarly career and actually allow you to get tenure. And one of the things that I always recommend to junior faculty — or a couple of things.

One is, talk to senior faculty. Talk to senior scientists. Ask them what they see as priorities in terms of your role. Find people that you really relate to, senior people in your department, that can serve as mentors for you.

Another tack that I took when I was a junior faculty was to be very pragmatic and so any project that I worked on had multiple levels of practicality. So if I worked on a grant for example, I was also writing a review article so that the literature review would become a review article that could then get published. And I always think, because it takes so long to get grants. It takes so long to get material published, that you really need to be very practical and to see what are the multiple goals that I can achieve through this line of endeavor?

Another issue to look at is whether or not there are actually participants available for the type of research that you want to use. And you can have a great idea, but if, in fact, there’s not a population that’s available and sometimes people overestimate the availability of the population.

So one of the things you want to do is have a five year plan when you come to an institution. And that five year plan should be based on long range goals that may be longitudinal studies or attempting to obtain participants where you need a lot of community collaboration and more short term goals, which will be research that might be more easily conducted within a short time frame.

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