Hunting for treasures
Dr Amy Lam
When researchers and research leaders start asking themselves “what do I want to do next?” whether they are considering leaving research, developing a new research portfolio or changing institution, these periods of transitions can be filled with much anxiety.
Knowing whether the choices we make are the “right choices” is something we all battle with. Learning to live with the uncertainty that our choices create is part of building our professional mental resilience.
In this interview, Dr Amy Lam shares her own experience of moving into intellectual property. Through focusing on what she really enjoyed in her role as a neuroscientist, she was able to create a path into a new professional exploration.
About Amy
Dr Amy Lam is an intellectual property and commercialisation specialist for medical and life sciences, who made the leap from working as a neuroscience researcher. She has now extensive experience in her field. She reflects on the past, the choices she made and her transition into IP.
Get in touch with Amy
This will get you thinking about:
· Why asking the question “What are you going to do next?” to ourselves or those we supervise, is always helpful not just at endpoints
· What types of activities an IP specialist actually does
· How considering the experiences you gain through each role as a treasure hunt is a helpful metaphor in navigating careers
· Where you live and work- can you make this an active choice instead of feeling that circumstances are forcing you into restricting options
· When do you know that you need to transition to something new in your professional life
Some reflections and questions to ponder based on my discussion with Amy
Who are the voices of wisdom helping us navigate our careers?
When Amy started her professional life, her PhD programme was an industrial studentship and she had already had experiences in industry as an undergraduate student. Her initial idea was to work in industry, not in academia. Through listening to the voices of her environment, she understood that progressing in industry would be helped through holding a PhD. At the end of her PhD, even though the research had been hard, she wanted to still have a go at doing research, so she went to do a Postdoc in the US.
She probably already knew that a long-term academic career track was not what she wanted. During her Postdoc, she spent time expanding her horizons through meeting lots of different people and taking part in lots of different activities. Being exposed to various activities is a way of experimenting further what we really enjoy as research professionals; this can make career transition outside of research much easier.
Listening to our instincts is probably something that many of us avoid doing. For me, listening to instincts in navigating career and professional lives, is about accepting that we are who we are. It is about accepting our preferences, our qualities, but also our limitations. It is not about saying that we should not step out of our comfort zone, of course not. Most importantly, it is about accepting that we are enough. Many of us thrive to learn more and better our professional skills but we need to be able to say- that’s who I am- that’s what I have got as a professional, without constantly feeling that we are lacking in something. This is an important position to reach when we want to convince others to recruit us.
What Amy found very helpful in exploring what to do after her Postdoc was having a support network with individuals with whom to bounce ideas. When we are a bit lost in our professional lives, we may believe that we should be figuring things out by ourselves. I have seen so much loneliness in researchers trying to navigate their research careers, that I have always proposed programmes that aim to bring people together. These gatherings have been about using the collective intelligence of the group to help individuals articulate and experiment with their thinking about their career and context. Vocalising to others how we are doing in our professional lives is an incredible valuable process of unpeeling the layers of our doubts, exposing them to others to help us reframe how we are seeing our own context.
Through taking part in discussions with such network of other individuals also in career transition, Amy was able to acknowledge that what she really liked in the process of research was to see the big picture of discoveries, not the detailed and laboured process of lab work. She liked to see what was going on in research more broadly and how this may change things for the future. This led her to step into the world of intellectual property and commercialisation.
So, whose voices are you listening when you are making decisions in your career? We are often scared of making big transitions. Our worries may be less about our fear of making a mistake in our choices, than how others may perceive our choices.
Our parents, families, friends, colleagues, supervisors, and line managers may all have their own take on the decisions we are making in our professional lives. They may share their wisdom about what we should be doing. This can stop us in our tracks, or it may derail what we were intending to do. Reclaiming trust in our instinct when making professional or career decisions is a way of living more aligned with our values.
o What are you currently doing to be mentally prepared to take a leap into your next big professional/ career transition or decision?
o Whose voices do you hear at the tipping point of decision-making- your own voice or mostly that of others?
o If unsure in a career decision, do you just need to give yourself more time to further explore, or do you need to listen more to your own voice and inner wisdom?
Treasure hunt in navigating your career
I really enjoyed the metaphor used by Amy to describe how she navigated her career. She talked about a treasure hunt as a way of pulling together all the experiences she was gathering through the different roles she held.
When we describe the narrative of our career, it can be challenging to make our path sounds as strategic as we wish it would look like from the outside. We may try to weave a thread to brings together different choices that we have made. The carefully curated story we tell others about our career path can be quite different to the story we tell ourselves.
What is nice in the metaphor of the treasure hunt is that our professional journey can be a very ‘zigzag’ path with many turns, side paths and returns. If you imagine in children’s book the treasure maps of pirates and how to reach the chest of gold, the path is always complex and twisted. What you know with clarity is that the goal is to get the gold! In the case of our professional lives, the goal is to have our values met in our professional lives. We gather treasures through acquiring experiences that enrich us as professionals.
Seeing our various professional experiences as treasures we take to our next roles is an important reframing. When we reach a trigger point and feel that something needs to change in our professional lives, it can be difficult to feel positive about some of the choices we have made before. When we present ourselves for our next research contract, academic role or when we transition to non-research roles, having a mindset where we can articulate our experiences as being our treasures is a key step in being able to convince others that we have much to offer. The challenge of many in research is of being so self-critical that our treasures are not visible to us anymore, and as such become invisible to others.
o What treasures are you currently gathering in your current role?
o If you do not see your treasures anymore, who can you speak to that can help you reframe your treasure hunt?
o Is there a treasure that you have not reached yet and are eyeing with envy?
“we like well-rounded individuals…we like to see people who have other experiences that might not be directly related to the job, that shows us that they have an ability to work in a different way, whether it’s volunteer work or coaching work, sports activities, something else that shows that they can apply themselves in different ways because what we do changes so quickly… we’re often put outside of our comfort zone”
