Pacing the expansion of your research group
With Dr Saida Caballero-Nieves
When Postdocs transition into lectureship positions, there is often an expectation about the pace at which one owe to build a research group. Having the confidence to hold on your fire and say- hang on a minute…I just need to follow a pace that we will work for me and the way I want to be able to support my students. Well, that’s exactly what my Podcast guest did when she started her lectureship position.
About Saida
Dr Saida Caballero-Nieves, who is an Assistant Professor in Aerospace, Physics and Space Sciences at Florida Tech in the US. She has a Ph. D. in Astronomy and a Masters in Physics from Georgia State University. She spent some time as a Postdoctoral researcher at The University of Sheffield in the UK before her transition to her current academic position.
Get in touch with Saida:
https://www.fit.edu/faculty-profiles/7/saida-caballero-nieves/
Some coaching questions for you to ponder based on my discussion with Saida
The learning curve of lectureship transition
Understanding institutional structures and politics as well as administrative processes, can be one of the big challenges in transition from Postdoc to lecturer/ research fellow.
It is something that researchers may have been protected from during their postdoctoral time, but as lecturers/ fellows, learning how to establish yourself and understanding the internal mechanisms to make things happen in your institution are not as easy as it sounds. It is also the case that researchers may land a teaching/ research position in a country where they have not lived or worked before.
New lecturers are also very likely to be really hard on themselves as they get started. They may have waited so long to finally gain an academic position that when they do, they are likely to want to hit the ground running quickly to get on with setting their research group. The scale of what is required in getting a research group established may come as a shock.
The pace at which you may be expected to build your research group may not fit the pace at which you want yourself to build your team.
Saida showed great self- knowledge in resisting the pressure to expand her research team quickly and made the decision to build her group at a pace that felt more attuned to how she wanted to be able to support her researchers.
o Who do you have as a helping hand to get you to understand better the rules of the game in this particular institution, as you settle in your new leadership role as a research fellow or lecturer?
o How will you control the pace of expansion of your research team, so that you feel in control and able to support all your team members well?
Prejudices are not just about other people
Being a Latino woman physicist has meant being the only one in the room for most of her career. Having experienced biases and prejudices, Saida is fully aware that biases are within us, whether we like it or not. Accepting that she is not immune to prejudice herself and asking her own students to be open about pointing her to any issues she may not noticed herself, demonstrates great openness to changing practices and leadership.
Saida is working hard on helping the next generation of researchers to become very self-aware about biases, by asking her own students to point things out if necessary. We will only fight biases, if we are prepared to show our own vulnerability and accept that we will get things wrong sometimes, even with the best intentions. Being prepared to have conversations about biases and prejudices from the early stage in researchers’ training is certainly an important step in reconfiguring the research culture.
The pace of change in understanding the needs of others has changed in the last decades; many more academics have raised their awareness about issues of equality, diversity and inclusion. We learn in small steps and we have many blind spots and lacuna in our understanding of others. Being prepared to continuously increase our knowledge about diversity of needs, and being open to say…I really do not know about this…will make the difference between research leaders who are just researchers, and research leaders who will reshape the research culture across institutions.
o Have you ever asked your team members to tell you if the language you use, conveys limitations to how others can be themselves in your team?
o Are you actually truly open to be told when you makes a mistake regarding equality, diversity and inclusion?
You are not in this alone
Having interviewed many researchers over the years, it is clear that there can be a discrepancy between those who feel very isolated and those who are able to reach out to get some help.
Many elements will influence whether a new research fellow, lecturer or Postdoc has the confidence to reach out to others to get help.
As a new research leader, you are fully aware that your network is important, but making actual use of your research network is another story. Saida suggests in her interview that what you need is a group of people who you can reach out, depending on what you need. Your support network needs to have a broad base, so that you can make the most of what different people have to offer.
Saida gives the example of her ex- head of department. She had developed a good working relationship and although this colleague moved to another institution, she has continued to use his informal mentoring in supporting her professional development. Getting mentors who will give you an external perspective or people who you admire, will all bring you another part of the puzzle to navigate your professional life.
Informal professional interactions have the potential to build as long-lasting mentoring relationships. Saida describes an academic who she had met through some outreach work, but with whom she had actually never worked. The relationship has been such, that Saida has felt able to reach out for help and advice a very long time after the interaction took place.
o Do you have an old contact that you have not contacted in a while- could you reach out to maintain the link? An informal conversation without any specific purpose is just about maintaining the relationship. You never know what may come out from a simple conversation!
o If you are reviewing your circle of advisors, you could ask yourself: who is being really helpful? Who should I drop as the interaction does not feel very satisfying? Who am I really missing or who am I avoiding bringing into the fold of my support network?
Always have a plan B
Having a plan B whatever your career stage is the advice that Saida keeps giving her students.
Having a plan B is not about having a 2nd rated next step, it is just about having a range of options, and being ready to take opportunities whatever is thrown in your direction.
If we see the planning of multiple options in our career’s next step as a way of creating more opportunities and preparing ourselves for a great many possibilities, then when things don’t work out in the way we wanted them to go, we do not need to dwell on what has not worked, and we can be much more willing to welcome other opportunities.
We construct for ourselves a mindset where our failures (at getting jobs, grants or experiments not working) won’t stop us in our track; they are just part of the things we encounter in our professional lives.
I, like many other researcher developers, have often been frustrated when people talk about alternative careers, when they are referring to non-academic careers. I have always felt that planning our professional lives through a range of what I call professional dreams, which you may call plans A to Z, is a more helpful way to creating options.
When we do not get what we want, it may take us some time to mourn a professional dream, but dreams are endless. Navigating our professional lives through a panoply of dreams to drive our motivation and ambitions, feel a more beneficial approach to me. It helps us to not get stuck in the frustration of not succeeding the way, we had initially conceived. Applying our creativity to navigating our professional lives is a valuable skill.
Putting your imposter syndrome in your pocket
Discussions about imposter syndrome is a recurring theme in many professional development programmes with researchers and research leaders.
I often use the expression of putting your imposter syndrome in your pocket.
It is about accepting that it is just there. It is unlikely to go away. We just need to learn to live with it.
Saida refers to the idea of “fake it until you make it”, but most importantly she says that what matters most is about exemplifying the skills and attitudes of those we admire. To become research academics, we may not feel like “a research academic”, we just have to do the tasks that research academics do.
Experiencing the emotional pull of imposter syndrome could potentially be enhanced when you are part of a minority group (as a Latino woman in stellar astrophysics for Saida!); you may be telling yourself- “Am I the token woman? Am I the diversity token? Was my recruitment just part of positive action?”. So rationalising your thoughts and directly telling yourself “I am qualified and they would not give me the job if I could not do it”, is part of the mental practice you may need to do to fight the negative beast (Imposter syndrome).
It will take time and efforts to internalise the voice of reasons that reminds you that- yes you may have had some luck in getting the position, but you have worked very hard to get those skills.
Doing this rationalising is a useful practice to build the belief that you belong to a professional context where you may not see other who are like you.
“exemplify the skills or the attitude that you admire and people who do have those, who you feel do meet those requirements and in doing so you may find that you, yourself are what you didn’t think you were.”
