(instrumental music)
- Hi, I'm Laurence Clement
and I'm Program Director of Academic Career Development
at the University of California, San Francisco
in the Office of Career and Professional Development.
This video is part of a series called 'The Strategic Postdoc',
and this is module one, "Positioning Yourself for the Postdoc."
And today in this video,
we're gonna talk about 'Building a Game Plan' and really
backward designing your postdoctoral training strategy.
In the last video, we talked about
reframing your postdoc as a training,
and kind of made a comparison with soccer and professional soccer
And we talked about the fact that the postdoc
is a training that prepares for a career.
And the big important question to ask yourself when you're
really considering your postdoc training strategy
is to ask first, will your postdoctoral experience
provide you with the training you need?
The second piece is that postdoc ends with a competition
for a position and the question is,
what does it take to be competitive for this position?
And what do you need to demonstrate?
The third thing we talked about is that you need to see the
goal to get a shot and really specifically,
you need to think about what you're gonna need to learn
during your postdoc.
And that's gonna amount to your training objectives.
This is the reason why you're in a postdoc,
to learn these things.
So think about what your training objectives are gonna be
and I'm gonna give you a few examples
in the next few slides.
We're also talking about the fact that
it requires a coach and a strategy.
And so you're gonna have to think about what strategy you
need to put in place to succeed, and who might be the right
mentor to support that strategy.
And not every mentor is the right person for every strategy.
So if we put these things together,
when you backward design your training,
you basically start with what it takes to be competitive.
Which are your qualifications?
What are the qualifications
for the position that you're targeting?
And then you backward design to think about what you need to
learn during your postdoc,
which are your training objectives.
And then think about from that what strategy you need to put
in place to succeed and that's your
training strategy, right?
And so I'm gonna show you two examples of a backward design
plan for two people who we actually talked about in
the last video who are examples
of two types of people we meet in our advising role at UCSF.
Lily is applying for research intensive faculty positions
while Carlos is looking at other options.
And so when we look at the types of postdocs in academia,
Lily is gonna be trying to do something that's more like
a research intensive faculty postdoc while Carlos is gonna
be trying to do a research and teaching faculty postdoc,
but also trying to prepare maybe
for an industry scientist position.
So if we think about the qualifications that Lily and Carlos
need for their next position, and let's start with Lily,
we actually do know what qualifications are required.
Lily needs to have publications,
and you all know that you need publications to get a faculty
position at a research intensive institution.
But what you also really need to know is that these
publications need to be quite regular throughout your
graduate and postdoctoral training,
and they need to be pretty impactful and they need to also
demonstrate productivity like a lot of productivity
throughout your postdoc.
You also will need to develop a research program that's
fundable by an RO1 grant.
And what's really interesting is that a lot of graduate
students of postdocs actually don't really realize how
important that is in the hiring process.
And to be fundable by an RO1 grant,
this means that you're gonna have to propose something
that's really ambitious and impactful to the hiring
committee at the end of your postdoc.
And you're also gonna have to present
something that's long-term.
So you're gonna have to have a longterm vision and
strategy that's exciting, and that seems feasible.
You're gonna have to really demonstrate that you know how
to do this project, and then it needs to be independent
from your PI because you don't wanna be competing
with your PI for RO1 grants,
and the hiring committees are really aware of that.
So the independence is gonna be very important.
And then finally, you're gonna have to have stellar
and specific recommendations from your graduate advisor,
from your postdoc PI, and also from other mentors.
Better if they're well-known or if they're well-respected
in the field, but those recommendations need
to be really specific, and these people need to really be
able to talk about how much of of a leader
you're able to be in the field and in the future.
So how do we know this?
Well, we have a tool called the
Academic Career Readiness Assessment,
which we developed through a study of faculty
around the country, and this tool is available
on the UCSF website and it's free for all.
And there's also a research paper about this that describes
the methodology and gives a lot more detail about how
faculty make decisions when they're hiring.
So I really recommend that you check out the paper as well.
So Lily is gonna basically have to look at those
qualifications and think about the things she needs to learn
throughout her training to reach that goal.
And so some of the things that she might need to learn I've
listed here, and examples are things like designing
and conducting a high impact research project,
writing competitive grant proposals,
identifying fundable research ideas.
Also explaining clearly what the big picture of her research
project is so she can convince her audience that she has a
really exciting project and a longterm vision.
She's also gonna have to identify a research niche that
is her own, that is unique to be in less competition with
other researchers in the field.
And finally, she might need to learn to develop these
relationships with other mentors than her PI
and her graduate advisor
so these mentors can actually provide not only stellar,
but specific letters of recommendation.
And I find working with graduate students and postdocs
those are really tough ones.
A lot of them are not encouraged to actually go outside of
the lab and talk to other faculty
and this is one of the hardest things for them to learn.
So it is something that needs to be learned.
Now for Carlos, the qualifications he's gonna need,
if he's interested in a research and teaching focused at a
faculty position at a primarily undergraduate institution,
these qualifications can vary,
but we're gonna use an example where he's actually applying
to position that are very teaching focused
where there's a lot more teaching than research in the
expectations for these faculty
and so he's gonna have to have really,
to meet qualifications that are very different from Lily.
Carlos will need to demonstrate that he has experienced
applying evidence-based practices in his teaching,
especially with a student population that is similar to the
institution he's gonna apply for.
So if he's not at a similar institution
and most likely he isn't,
he's gonna have to go and get that teaching experience
during his postdoc if he hasn't gotten it during his PhD.
He's also gonna need to have experience using
addressing issues of racial justice and social justice and
equity, both in the classroom and in the lab,
especially if he goes to a primarily undergraduate
institution that has a very diverse student population.
And then he's also gonna have to have a research plan
that is really tailored to the student population and the
level of the students who will be working with him,
and then to the limited resources of the department.
And that might make some changes from what he's doing as a
postdoc, because we see a lot of postdocs that are using
really large machinery or really large equipments
or very expensive equipment that these institutions do not
have, or are using model organisms that cannot be housed
in those institutions.
So that means some reframing and that reframing can happen
towards the end of his postdoc,
but it's even better if he starts his postdoc
with that new research program.
And at least he needs to make sure he has the skills
to handle these organisms
or to do the research with other type of equipment.
And then he's gonna have to show that he's enthusiastic
about working at an undergraduate institution.
It can't be his backup plan and he's gonna have
to fit with the discipline of the department
and make sure that his discipline
is not already represented in the department
and that he can also teach all the disciplines
that you need him to teach.
And then last, he might need some papers,
less at a more teaching focused RT institution,
research and teaching institution,
but he might still need a few papers,
and so he'll still have to think about his productivity
in terms of research.
He just might not need highly impactful papers
and so that looks different for the PI as well.
Is the PI willing to publish lower impact papers
when Carlos joins the lab?
So if we think about this,
Carlos, will need to think about
what he needs to learn and he'll need to learn things that
are very different from Lily.
He'll need to design a curriculum using
evidence-based practices.
At UCSF we have a course called Step Up,
which is teaching evidence-based practices.
These courses exist across the country.
And in our course, we help trainees
learn to develop a curriculum using these practices.
So he will have to engage in a type of course like this.
He will also have to learn about inclusive teaching
and mentoring practices,
and that also will require training.
As I said, design a feasible research program
with limited resources,
he'll also have to demonstrate he can work collaboratively
in the classroom and in the lab,
so there'll be much more focus on we on the work we did
then on I, whereas Lily will have to talk about
her contribution to the work of the team.
She'll be very careful about saying when it's her work
versus it's somebody else's work or it's collaborative work.
And then he'll have to learn to design and conduct
some research projects independently,
but not at the scale that Lily will have to do with a very
large research program.
And so the last thing I'll leave you with is that really,
there are three main strategies to consider when developing
your IDP and if you kind of deploy this
across the different types of postdoc positions,
you can be engaged in.
Um, it can look really different,
and this is what the information you need to actually find
the right postdoc position for yourself.
Which is for a research intensive faculty postdoc,
you're gonna need to engage
in high level of training in the lab and learn a lot of
skills in the lab in a very intensive way,
but you're gonna spend a lot less time
on your career development strategy.
Whereas in a career exploration postdoc,
you're gonna need to actually spend a lot of time in the
career development, which is spent outside the lab.
And so you need to find a PI that is okay with you doing
that work outside the lab.
And that's also the case for a research and teaching
faculty postdoc, where you're gonna have to spend some time
outside the lab, learning to teach and teach.
And that should be also something that's okay with the PI
and that's even supported by the PI.
So I'll let you think about all the different dimensions
of the different strategies that you need to consider when
developing your IDP in the future.
And I wanna thank you for watching this video.
We'll see you in the next video.
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