Know What's Driving You Posted on February 14, 2006 Certain skills are important for success, states Bonnie Zima (bio).

It's very important for young students to understand what is really driving them and why they want it. And they have to be very very clear about their values and priorities, and that when they select an area of research that it truly be theirs, because they have to own it.

It's going to be a long haul in studying it, and you need to have that passion to sustain you during the very dry times when the analysis falls apart or when you don't get that first grant or that paper gets rejected. So you really have to make sure that it's your own.

And I think also those that are most successful also have a fair degree of social intelligence, that you have to be a collaborator, you have to be a listener. For those that are clinically trained, use your clinical skills to listen, whether it's the agency leaders or the providers or certainly your mentor, your department chair, your reviewers.

Listen and don't take it defensively, and understand what it is they're trying to tell you. Be open to integrating that feedback somehow into your studies because those are going to be the relevant variables, what they tell you on the straight not what you read in the literature.

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