A guide to success: early careers
18 October 2011. By Professor Danny Altmann
The early choices you make about a career in science may be some of the most important of your life. Biomedical researchers come in many shapes and sizes, and good ones may encompass a variable mix of theoretician, mathematician, technophile, inventor, observer, naturalist, philosopher, storyteller and visionary. Which are you? Where are you going to apply these talents?
Even if you've already decided that you're headed for, say, molecular genetics, public health or stem cell biology, each field contains a multitude of questions you may wish to address. This work is, hopefully, going to fuel the next few years of your professional activities - is it an area where there is unmet need? Can you amass the tools to make an impact and continue to do so for a number of years?
If you're interested in an early-career fellowship from the Wellcome Trust, you'll need to persuade the committee that you're sharp, have a great project, and have a suitable supervisor with whom to work. You wouldn't walk out of your house and marry the first person you bump into, so why follow this logic in your academic career?
What you should be looking for in a supervisor is an experienced figure in the field who can nurture your career, from shaping the research question and study design to advising you of the best experimental approaches. This suggests that they should have extensive, direct experience of the field, a department equipped with the infrastructure to work on it and, most of all, the time and inclination to talk science with you.
Go to conferences and seminars and chat to prospective supervisors, but don't believe all they say. Of course they consider their own research area to be important, but what is the rest of the community saying about it? Is the approach central to the question or considered marginal? At this stage, you need to read a lot of papers and see where the field is really heading.
Visit the supervisor's department, speak to the other students and staff there and gauge the atmosphere. Science is generally a communal activity in which people benefit from discussion, critique and interaction - is this happening where you visit? Does it feel like a thriving, buzzing research environment? If nobody else is succeeding there, it's likely you won't either.
As you audition prospective mentors, bear in mind Nobel laureate Paul Nurse's description of his own, Murdoch Mitchison:
"Every couple of days he would pull me into his office, and puffing endlessly on his pipe, discuss the latest experiments and what he was thinking about. These discussions, although they could go on for hours, circling topics, departing on tangents, and becoming blocked in cul-de-sacs, were frequently stimulating, often provocative, and always driven by his passion of wanting to know answers just because he wanted to know, rather than in pursuit of publishing papers." (1)
If you come for a fellowship interview at the Trust, you'll almost certainly be asked if you wrote the proposal yourself. What we're really asking is whether you've engaged in a dialogue with the most appropriate possible supervisor and co-evolved the best possible proposal. We wouldn't imagine that you could or should draft it without strong input from those in the host department who hopefully have insights into the details and pitfalls of doing the work.
After all, if your supervisor can't offer substantial input to your initial proposal, how valuable will they be if you do get your fellowship?
Danny Altman is Head of Pathogens, Immunology and Population Health at the Wellcome Trust.
This feature also appears in issue 68 of ‘Wellcome News’.
Image: Danny Altmann. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
Reference
(1) Nurse P. Murdoch Mitchison 1922–2011. Nat Cell Biol 2011;13(5):520.
