A Lesson Learned the Hard Way
Success or failure in grantsmanship often depends on whether your proposal gets reviewers excited
Don’t Miss the Deal Breakers: Nine Questions for New Lab Staff Hires
Hooray! You’ve set up a lab. You have a scale and everything. Now the applicants are pounding down your door looking forward to helping you get the Nobel Prize. Before you hire the most enthusiastic person with the best grades, be sure you include some questions that could be deal breakers even for the candidates […]
Thirteen Rules of Success: Advice for Early Career Investigators
A few years ago I asked one of our primary mentors, Dr. Julie Locher, to share with our early career investigators advice that she shares with her mentees as well as advice she had been given throughout her career.
The Joke’s on You
What makes a funny joke? What makes a strong grant application? Sometimes, the same things. In the video below, Jerry Seinfeld describes his joke-writing process and takes the viewer through the evolution of a joke about Pop Tarts. It took two years, and as you can see, many revisions and rewrites to distill the material […]
The Recruitment Tool You Didn’t Know You Have
If you are based at one of 135 US institutions and you recruit human subjects, you need to check out ResearchMatch.org to find potential research participants from a growing pool that now includes 108,181 individuals willing to be in research.
How to Interview the Hell Out of Academic Job Candidates
One of my favorite parts of being a faculty member is interviewing students, fellows and future faculty members. For reasons that elude my tiny Fighty Squirrel brain, folks think if you are a female and people liked you when they interviewed, it means you are nice. I’m not particularly nice. Ask my kids. What I […]
Why You Should Read The Creative Habit
So you’re not a dancer. You’re not a musician. You’re not an artist or a poet. Why read this book? Because you have ideas: ideas for new population studies, new treatments for disease, and new ways to look at data. And this book will give you the habits that beget more good ideas and allow […]
Who Are You Really Talking To?
According to Morgan Giddings, creator of popular grant-writing resources and courses, you misunderstand the level at which you need to appeal to reviewers at study section. While you may think you’re speaking from the cerebral/rational (primate) part of your brain to the equivalent area of theirs, that’s not actually the level they’re paying attention on. […]
Is Your CV Making You Look Like a Chump?
CVs are a fabulous way to frame your skills and interests with institutions you are interacting with professionally. The Fighty Squirrel highly recommends you personalize each CV you send out for the audience. This is painfully true for applications for jobs and grants where your piles of accumulated titles and few papers can show that […]
Do Life
I despise the term “work-life balance.” The semantics evoke work and life as opposing forces locked in conflict – the bobbing bar of a doomed tightrope walker, a teeter-totter whose fulcrum defies equilibrium. Because we rarely talk of achieving balance, it is also code for inevitable failure or guilt. I propose an alternative. Life encompasses work. […]