Sunday, December 20, 2015

2015 "year in review" as a Y3 PI

The rules for the "year in review" post are simple:
-Post the link and first sentence from the first blog entry for each month of the past year.

I find truly amazing how well this reflects what my blog was all about this year 1) R01 writing, 2) mentoring and 3) promoting the lab. This is what I have been doing in 2015.

January: So, you are sitting at the bench in your graduate program/post-doc and you say to yourself; “this is not where I want to be.”

February: We are 18 weeks out from submission day and I have started putting all my ducks in a row to see if this crazy idea of submitting two R01s at once is really going to work.

March: As a new principal investigator, I'm always in a frenzy to promote my work, so that I'm going to establish myself in my field(s) presenting cool new data.

April: It's 730 days of being an Assistant Professor. After the absolute exhaustion and chaos of the first six months and the light at the end of the tunnel of finishing year one (Y1), year two (Y2) was a very different beast.

May: Despite the absolute madness of the past two months, I was still holding on to the hope I would be able to submit two R01s for the June deadline as detailed in a post earlier this year.
This was April 30th, but nothing was written in May because....R01 deadline on June 5th...

June: "Mirror mirror on the wall, what are aims to win it all?"

July: I thought I'd weigh in on the kerfuffle going on on Twitter about the mostly irrational fears that Obama will force us to pay postdocs $50K.

August: This week I was honored and excited to be cited, together with none other than DrugMonkey, as someone who provides good advice for new investigators, but what really caught my eye in the tweet was "NHLBI K-to-R01 Meeting". What was that, pray tell?

September: As a trainee I always wondered what my PI was doing cooped up on her/his office and when I became a PI myself I was shocked by the endless list of things I was now responsible for.

October: I launched the "day in the life of a new PI" challenge a few weeks ago to see what the days of principal investigators are like at different places and at different stages of their careers.

November: PharmaFriend here to give you a glimpse of my day while I’m at a scientific conference. I’m a few days late; so, please accept my apologies. There are a few differences between attending a congress as a participant/scientist, vendor for pharma client, and actual pharma client.

December: Sometimes insecurity and impostor syndrome work to your detriment.

2015 greatest hits:

The R01 twin strategy: Parents of twins will probably laugh at my naivete, but as someone who always wanted two kids, I always thought that twins were the most efficient way to achieve that goal: you have two of them at once and you're done. So I didn't bat an eye when one if my senior faculty mentors outlined what I will call the "R01 twin strategy" to me.

Questions you should as on postdoc interviews: Following the "Questions you should ask" for the faculty job search, I was asked for a similar post for the postdoctoral search.

Looking forward to 2016!!

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