Willing to jump
With Dr Yi Jin
Yi received encouragements from both her Master’s supervisor in China, and an academic met at a conference, who encouraged her to apply for a scholarship with the British Council. When others show their confidence in us, it gives us the courage to go for opportunities we may not dare jump into otherwise. Yi changed not only country, but also research field and landed a PhD at The University of Sheffield (UK). She has moved quickly across 2 Postdocs, before landing her first independent research position at the University of Cardiff. Recently, she has obtained a Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Fellowship at Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (University of Manchester).
About Yi
Find out more details about Yi’s research and career track via her university webpage:
https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/yi.jin.html
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking
Why enabling autonomy in early career researchers support research transition to research independence
How your research niche becomes clearer steadily
How sharing your intentions when supervising others is effective communication
Some reflections and questions to ponder based on my discussion with Yi
The gift of trust
Yi was happily doing research as a Postdoc when one of her research friends informed her that a position was opening for a research group leader role at the University of Cardiff. It was not a lectureship, but a research focused position. An ideal opportunity to start a research group. He asked her whether she would be interested in applying. It would be hard to say no to such an opportunity!
Of course, her first reaction was fuelled with the self-doubts of anyone in research careers or any career transition stage: Have I got enough experience? Am I good enough? Am I ready to be a PI? Interestingly, in our discussion, Yi did not say…Do I want to be a PI? She already knew that this was a transition that she was aspiring towards.
The desire for this transition was anchored in the confidence she had built in knowing that she could develop her own research ideas. She was not completely reliant on the ideas of her PIs. She had taken the time to think hard about new small experiments. She had started to believe that what she was developing was innovative and creative.
She had a healthy attitude in acknowledging that there was an opportunity and that she would just have a go at applying, without worrying too much about the outcome.
This friend/ colleague showed he believed in her through asking her whether she was interested in the role. Through asking her about her interest, he was already giving her a gift through showcasing his trust.
o Do you get out of your way to contribute to building the confidence of others?
o Which actions do you take to make others aware of opportunities for their career transitions?
o Are you active in your research network to create links between others so that new opportunities arise for them?
Patience and courage- the assets of new PIs
The first few years as a Principal Investigator are not a settled and comfy time. During her first few years as a PI, Yi applied for some pots of funding and was successful with 3 small grants out the 4 she applied for (pretty awesome success rate!). She recruited PhD students and Postdocs. She set up a lab with all the equipment required.
Yi did not apply straight away for a fellowship but took the time to build her group and further refine her research niche before making a move towards developing a fellowship application. The development of her application was a slow process. She accepted that it would take time. She was keen to craft an excellent application. Maybe the drafting of her application could have been faster, but as she was developing her research niche; it took further reading and developing. Patience in the slow development of ideas and the refining of her proposal has been an asset for her success.
Yi could have remained in Cardiff for her fellowship. After setting up a research lab, who would want to move straight away. That’s where courage and ambition contributed to her decision. Yi’s drive to continue learning and to be part of an interdisciplinary environment were key drivers in her decision to move to a new institution. She chose the University of Manchester to take her fellowship. Changing the location of your lab takes a great deal of courage. It means having to restart from scratch setting up your lab. It also means accepting that some of your PhD students may not want to move with you to another city. The impact of this is that Yi is now supervising students from a distance which brings many challenges.
o What would be the next courageous thing for you to do as a research leader?
o Do you have a strategy to protect yourself from rushing into research projects before you are happy with them?
o Between the comfort of staying put in a research location and being strategic about the best career next step- who are you having conversations with to help shape your research career as a leader?
Crash course for PI transition
· Don’t rush the development of your research niche
· You don’t have to have all of the skills you need for your fellowship- the fellowship includes a significant amount of professional development/ training.
· Learn new research skills through collaboration
· Seek the support of peers- other new PIs who are also setting up their team.
· Supervising others is not about “being nice”; sometimes you may appear pretty tough, but you are responsible as a PI for the training and research philosophy of your team. An important aspect is to better communicate your intentions to your team and to learn to adjust projects so that individuals can develop professionally- keeping in mind what they aspire for in the future.
· Giving people a chance is part of increasing diversity. The expectations placed by the research community of what a research career owe to look like means that many potential research leaders are not given the opportunity to show what they are capable of. You can become a change maker for more diversity in research environments, if you become more open with who you are recruiting and give people a chance.
· A joy about being a PI that you may not have thought of before, is when members of your team can do something that you could not, when they get a results you’ve being stuck with yourself, when they take the research even further than you would have imagined.
Other reflections
As a new PIs or lecturer, you may be put under a lot of pressure to start applying for a great many grants and fellowships. This type of pressure may make you feel like a headless chicken running around in all directions and feeling completely overwhelmed about developing a multitude of new and innovative research projects.
Building your resilience as a new PI is likely to mean resisting the pressure of throwing yourself all over the place when it comes to applying for funding. Slow and diligent work is probably not the ethos that departments and institutions are promoting. Deep work and innovative research may not always fit well in the mad and unsustainable cycle of research funding.
Finding your own pace to develop the research that matters to you will take the courage to resist to the grinding research wheel. Becoming highly strategic in deciding what funding to go for is hard to do alone. Resisting the pressure to send half-baked applications when you fully know they may need more time to be refined, is something your department may not give you the opportunity to do. Alternatively, for some, perfectionism in developing research application will be in the way of sending them off for review.
Becoming a new research group leader is incredibly complex and challenging!
o Who do you have in your network who can provide effective mentoring to assess the funding landscape and advise on which research funding to focus on?
o Do you have clarity about the funding expectations placed on you by your department?
o What’s in the way of your next funding application (procrastination, lack of collaborative partners, perfectionism)?
“as long as I can come convince them, what is my intention and what is our goal of doing this piece of research? And as soon as they understand why, everything is easy. ”
