Develop Your Story Posted on January 9, 2008 Megan R. Gunnar (bio) cautions against getting sidetracked from one's area of expertise.

Although there is the push for multidiscipline, and we certainly have to figure out how to evaluate and reward that kind of research, it is still the case that the young researcher needs to be building their resume as an expert in an area while they’re taking part in that kind of work.

Oftentimes you can do that by understanding what it is you are learning in that particular multidisciplinary team that contributes to your basic questions about the area that you’re an expertise in. So I mean it certainly is true that we can use risk populations, we can use these kinds of settings to ask questions we can’t ask in other ways. So if you know how the pieces are fitting into the grand scheme of the story that you want to be able to tell in ten years, then you’re probably fine.

If you’re just, have a tool, and many people want to use your tool, and so you get sucked into this and that and the other thing and you look terribly busy, but when you sit back, you’re not developing a story — stories are what we do in research.

We are trying to understand the story of how X happens, and if you’re not developing your story, if in a few years you can’t tell a story that has a middle, beginning and — it never has an end, but an “here’s where we’re at, at this point; here are the next set of questions,” that’s when as a young researcher you should be worried that you’ve been sucked into too many things, and you need to step back and say, “Who am I in this process?"

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