It's Not About Competition Posted on January 28, 2008 Margaret Beale Spencer (bio) suggests that combining a sense of purpose and a standard of excellence allows natural career evolution.

I think it's very important to not think about oneself as becoming, say, the head of something. I think it's really important to define one's role as trying to help in understanding some issue, some phenomenon. I think the big task is to compete against yourself, have a standard in terms of excellence that you think is important, and then galvanize your resources and focus in order to meet that standard of excellence for yourself. And I think when you do that things evolve.

And for me it always has to do with what's comfortable for you in terms of your conscience, your sense of responsibility, your sense of purpose, your sense of mission. And those were values and perspectives that have always guided me, and they continue to guide me. And I think it gets you out of this dilemma of competing against other people. And it's not about competition, it's about doing the best science possible and understanding phenomena that will make a difference in other people’s lives.

I tell my students that all the time, that you have to choose a dissertation project or a set of ideas that will keep you up at night. What are the issues that are most burning for you? Because 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, you'll be at your computer alone; what's going to keep you looking at that screen? And you can't do it if you're responding to someone else's agenda or in essence some criterion that has to do with a status, versus trying to understand something that's really important to you.

So we often tell students that science is objective. I think the very fact that we choose to research certain questions and publish or not publish certain areas of research or for funders to fund certain areas, by definition, those are value decisions.

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