What does it take at each career stage?

I think academic scientists need different skills at different time points in their careers.

There is no single way forward in science. For all of the talk about pipelines, it’s clear that there are a variety of ways into careers in academic science, and a broad variety of destinations. You get to define the terms of your own success. You want to publish a ton of papers in exclusive journals? Okay. You want to support others to build their careers? Cool. You want to be the best classroom instructor and make everybody think science is cool and important? Right on. You want to develop a few big ideas that change how our species views the natural world? Have at it. You want to occupy a position of power so you can whimsically control the fates of others? Ick. Please don’t. But do you want to become faculty member, end up with traditional forms of structural power, and then move into leadership and work towards change in areas that are important to you? Then good on ya, and also, it’s unfortunate but that pathway kinda sorta looks like a pipeline, or at least, most people who have gotten there have followed the parallel routes.

When I’ve interacted closely with people who inhabit positions of great traditional power in academic science, I feel like there are two kinds:

• those with absurdly great talent in a few key areas, who are kind and generous

• those who are principally talented at exploiting others and making themselves look good, who generate more fear than respect

and there’s not many folks in the middle.

Let’s look at folks in this first category, and examine the career stages that they go through before rising to this position. How did they get there? What helps you move up at each step of the way¹? I feel like every person would come up with a different list, and I’m totally welcome to feedback (comments quite welcome), but here’s the one that I cooked up. I look at this as what it takes to succeed in each of the transitions that The System expects you to make. It’s not like you need all these traits, but these are the ones that make the transitions easier, methinks.

High School —> College

It helps to be born into born into the right zip code, and have parents who know how the game works. Be good at standardized tests, know what to give teachers to make them give you high grades, and dedicate some time into additional things that make you look fancy to admissions officers at exclusionary colleges (and I suspect whatever that thing might be, the rules are different for white people. Only some people are allowed to be quirky, I’ve heard.)

College —> Grad school

Those things that you did to get good test scores and grades as a high school student? Those still help in college. But another thing that will matter is being able to communicate in a way that makes your professors think that you’re engaging, thoughtful, and smart. Since more professors come from upper-middle class backgrounds, the more relatable they find you, they more likely they’ll see potential in you, and the harder they’ll work to create opportunities for you².

Your odds are better if you ended up enrolling in a high-endowment SLAC or a more prestigious research institution, because that way when you start applying to graduate programs, you’re less likely to get ignored when you try to apply. You’re going to want to get some substantial research experience, so it helps to find a lab to work in that has a strong record of getting their undergrads into grad programs in your field. If you wound up at a less prestigious undergrad institution, can you cultivate some kind of connection to prestige through an REU program or internship or something?

Another thing that you’ll need is the capacity to be mobile. What are the odds that the graduate program that will get you where you want to be is in the same place you went to college? You need to look like you have potential as a researcher. What does that take? I think having good ideas about the kinds of research you want to do, and genuine enthusiasm about it, can help.

Grad school —> Postdoc

The greatest resource that can serve you well throughout your career is the relationships that you build in grad school. Your field of research, whatever it is, is astonishingly small. There are some people who you’ll be interacting with in your field on a regular basis for decades, and this is when you’ll be getting to know them. If I had to identify a single thing that separates out people who advanced their careers in traditional academic science, it’s being well connected. Grad school is the time to forge those connections, or to learn how to forge those connections. Conferences, workshops, field stations, mentoring, social media, organizing the seminar series, whatever³. Get to know people, let people get to know you. You want to find your way into academic communities that extends beyond a single location.

Networking sounds gross, because that term makes it seem like you’re treating other people as extractive resources. That is gross. But if networking is getting to know others, letting others get to know you, and building ties of awareness and friendship among peers who you can learn from and who can learn from you, then that’s a very good thing. If you consider that you can offer people as much support as they can offer you, then “networking” is simply about building ties that creates something bigger and stronger than can be made by any single person. Science is built on strong relationships, and so it’s important to make sure you are forming those relationships.

While it might not feel like it in the moment, grad school is a moment of relative leisure where you have the bandwidth to try things and fail, and invest time into developing specialized skills, and figure out what excites you, and to dedicate time into passion projects. Your job as a grad student is to grow into a particular direction, which means that you’ve got to take that time to grow.

You will also want to make yourself a genuine expert in a one or two things to the point that other people will want to leverage your expertise for projects. Make yourself needed. Be that person who is really good at building gorgeous figures, or doing scientific illustration, or performing metaanalyses, or identifying mites from a particular region, or dissecting bee brains, or collaborating with indigenous partners, or doing mentorship training. Opportunities emerge when you are the person who can add something to a project better than anybody else, and grad school is just the time to build those skills and the reputation to go along with that.

Grad school is where confidence will serve you well in advancing up in the hierarchy. Failure is the norm in this business and the best indicator of success is the number of attempts, so believing yourself, and developing a community around you that supports you, is critical. I think this area is where folks who come from wealthier and non-minoritized background often succeed, and some are endowed with a surplus of unearned confidence.

It also helps if you come from a background with enough economic security that you have the comfort of knowing that you won’t wind up unhoused if you take a misstep or two. Risks at this stage are often rewarded, and having the latitude to take risks can make all the difference. Also, all that stuff from undergrad about knowing how to sound middle-class and fit in with people whose parents were college professors? That’s still key in grad school, sadly. Some folks do this cultural code-switching better than others.

Postdoc —> Assistant Professor

A. B. C. Always. Be. Closing. At this point in the career, you’ve got to be great at sales. If you give an amazing talk, then you can blaze a path forward for yourself. Don’t underestimate the power of an absolutely perfect 12-minute conference talk or ability to give a job talk that totally knocks it out of the park. That two-sentence elevator sentence that you practiced in grad school? If it’s objectively great, that can be all the difference in the world. I’m not kidding.

Communication matters as much in writing as it does in giving talks. You need to lead authorship on manuscripts that make it into good journals.

This is the point where you need to develop your own intellectual trajectory so that your own professional identity is distinct from the labs from which you emerged. If you become a postdoc of Famous Dr. X, then are you going to be simply known as “X’s postdoc” or are you going to be known for your own thing? Can other people look at your CV and think, “That person has the chops to be a good first author, a good middle author, and a good last author?”

I think this is the point where developing mentoring skills really matters. At this point you're likely to be working with junior graduate students, and perhaps teams of undergrads. Can you foster their professional development while simultaneously converting the data they produce into publications? Now that you’re in a position of substantial authority as Dr. Postdoc, are you able to navigate within that authority to listen to others and build trust? You won’t have the time to learn how to mentor well later on, so now is the time to make sure you’ve got the chops.

Assistant Professor —> Associate Professor

I think the prerequisite to advancing is the ability to write fundable grants. Because if you can’t write fundable grants, then you can’t have a lab full of people. And if you don’t have a lab full of people, then you’re limited in how much you can get done⁴. Because the volume of product seems to be important to people no matter how amazing your work is. Even if your position doesn’t expect you to bring in grants, if you don’t, it’s a lot harder to generate impact.

The other skills that you need at this stage are business operations and managing people. Being the PI means that you’re the boss, and you need to run a tight shop in which people understand their roles, work together well, behave safely and ethically, and are excited about getting cool science done. Just like teaching, we are never trained how to run a lab effectively, but this talent is paramount. Can you balance a budget, delegate effectively, keep staff motivated, repair areas of conflict before they escalate, handle inappropriate challenges to your authority, keep projects with multiple pieces on schedule, and so on? Even if you have the best intentions, if you don’t have the skills to run a lab effectively, then you might end up with trainees who are having bad experiences. You could have someone in your lab who bullies other people and you could be entirely unaware of it. Without the time put into proactive communications, your trainees might end up inserting your lab into conflicts where you don’t belong. If you haven’t developed adequate mentoring skills by this point, then your trainees might end up getting shafted by you.

And you’re teaching, too! I would like to think that teaching well matters, and if you’re in a teaching-focused institution, then it surely does. (I can’t not mention it, if you feel unequipped to teach at this stage, as so many of us have been, I wrote a book just for you. For reals, just to get you started.)

Because you’re now doing eight different jobs, you’ve got to get time management sorted out. Which is really about identifying your priorities and then coming to grips with the reality that you can only do a small number of the things that you would like to, which means even more identifying your priorities, again and again, by not doing things that are not your priority.

Associate Professor —> Professor

I think this is kind of return to the talents that you worked on in grad school and your postdoc, but this time, you’ve gotta take it to the next level. For example, giving a good seminar is the thing that cements you as the person for your thing. That network that you’ve developed? It’s been growing for a couple decades and so now everybody knows and remembers you as the person for your thing.

This sounds kind of gross, further progress is about branding. Think of the people who give TED talks, the people who become MacArthur Fellows, and stuff like that. You know what they have going for them? They can summarize the point of their major scholarship thrust in a single amazing two-sentence elevator speech⁵. You might know people who are extremely impressive and do great work, but if you can’t explain how that work is great in a couple sentences, then that’s where the ceiling is. Are you doing impactful enough work in an area specific enough that in a couple sentences you can say how you’re a leader?

Those collaboration skills and networking that you were working on as a trainee? That’s where this bears major fruit, because now you have an orchard in your backyard. You and the people in your lab can be brought into broader projects, and you also can choose to lead one. More people want you to be involved in cool things than you could ever say yes to.

Which leads to the last skill you need at this level. The ability to say no⁶. In theory, you’ll chances to so many things, both for the broader academic community and on your campus: Be leader for your academic society, put together an edited volume in your field, serve on editorial boards, serve on academic senate, serve on a government advisory panel, direct the graduate program, serve on grant panels, give invited talks, write a blog, have a big TikTok account, run a big multi-department site grant, become interim associate dean, take a part-time DEI role (if your state hasn’t made it illegal, that is), run faculty development workshops, develop a consulting thing on the side, (or if you’re me) direct a field station or become the director of undergraduate research. You cannot possibly do all those things, and it’s important to say no to enough things so that you have the time and energy to do the things that really matter for you. (It’s also important to note that there is such much gendered inequity in who does the low-visibility leadership roles that many women don’t progress in their careers as much as the men do, so when I am saying that you should say no: if you’re a guy, I’m not saying you should leave all the dirty work to your women colleagues. I think what’s important is that when you do say yes, that you do it well so that no body else has to clean up your mess. I think it’s up to department-level leadership to make sure that this ends up equitable, but at this stage in your career, that leadership includes you.)

Professor —> Next Level

For those who want to be “beyond” professor, what does that mean for them? I suppose it could mean Dean/VP/Provost/President, or leadership position in an academic-adjacent organization, leadership role in some kind of movement, the head of a Center or an Institute, or the person who writes lots of books and is on TV a lot, or whatnot⁷. (As an aside, I think it’s super cool what ecologist Harini Nagendra chose at this stage, becoming a best-selling author of a series of mystery books while maintaining a strong voice on issues in urban ecology and climate change.)

These are all very different things. For those who have made it to this stage of the academic career, is there anything new that you need that you haven’t had to have had before? I believe there is.

It’s what people call “soft skills,” or “essential skills.” Or whatever they’re called. This is the stuff that most people need to get ahead in most jobs, but in academia and higher education, I think people can go through their entire careers being bad at this stuff. But once you start being in charge of stuff that goes beyond your own laboratory and your own narrow research discipline, then this is where it matters. The stereotype of the “absent-minded professor” is what happens when you can get through your whole career to advance to a position of seniority without these skills that are essential everywhere else. While this is a skill area that will always be helpful to academics at any stage, this is what you need to advance “forward,” if that’s your goal.

The last thought I’d like to leave you with is something I’ve said before, and I’ll say again: There is no such thing as a single permanent dream job. Because over time, the job will change as your career advances. And the people at that job will change over time, which will change how good the position is. And you’ll also grow as a human being, and hopefully your dreams will change with you. It’s funny that when we hire faculty members, a lot of the people involved are planning for an entire career. But how often does it shake out that, even if the person hired does stay at that institution for their whole career, that everybody’s plans work out like they had imagined?

1. This hopefully is self-evident, but there are aspects of identity here including gender, ethnicity, spousal occupation, parental care, other kinds of caregiving, etc, that intersect heavily here.

2. Is this too cynical? Maybe. I hope I’m wrong but I’ve seen it happen far too often that I can’t think otherwise.

3. One thing that kept me going for a long time in the midst of feeling academically isolated in a small institution with nobody who had research interests like mine were the communities that I build in grad school and working at a big field station for my dissertation. While a lot of my fellow professors who were early/mid career stopped going to conferences because they said they felt increasingly isolated, I kept going because it was a chance to spend time with old friends who I had gotten to know working side-by-side in a field station for months at a time. If I hadn’t created so many connections that were important to me (personally as well as professionally) when I was in grad school from the field station and from conferences, I doubt I would have kept at it with research when faced with obstacles as a junior faculty member.

4. I suppose there are some areas where folks who work independently can still crank out quality work at moderately high volume to get ahead. I suppose this might be in the realm of theory, computational work, and, um, I dunno. But I know some folks who fit this model well.

5. Which is why I’m never ever going to be nervously checking my emails when those announcements are in season. I mean, I don’t even know when those seasons are? (And if that was my ambition, I guess I’d have to change a bunch of things to narrow things down to that elevator pitch, and I wouldn’t enjoy life if I did that.)

6. I just looked back at a thing I wrote when I was at this career stage, 11 years ago, and I was very explicit about saying no to so many things even as I was meeting all expectations and obligations for university-level service. I would never write something like that about myself now, because I’m in a different place and my role is to support junior faculty now.

7. And honestly, this is the stage that I’m at, even if I’ve ingloriously floundered my way across some of the prior stages to get here. What is next for me? That’s a good question. I have a sabbatical to sort this out. It doesn’t have to be a step “up” per se, but I would like to move in some direction, and am open to a few avenues. I once asked a group of friends, “What role do you think I should move into at your university,” and a few people said, “Chief Innovation Officer,” Which I think would be super cool, I think. How many places have something like this up my alley and is anybody hiring? Hmm.