(gentle pulsing music)
- Planning in grad school is very essential, it's very easy
to watch months, years go by, where you look up
and you're kind of like wow, what did I really accomplish?
I think I actually started to accomplish things
when I started to make a plan
and make milestones for myself.
- Some of the most successful people in my lab
are not necessarily the ones who worked day and night,
but rather the ones who are organized.
- In 2005, the professional society Sigma Xi
surveyed postdocs across the country.
The purpose of this survey was to identify factors
that contributed to having higher satisfaction
with the postdoctoral experience.
An interesting thing that came out of the study
was that having a structured plan and discussing it
with your mentor was one of the factors
that had a high correlation with postdocs
publishing more papers, and reporting higher satisfaction
with their postdoctoral experience.
- Research is very different from the undergraduate training
because you're no longer the consumer,
you don't consume education, but you're a creator,
and it's only up to you what you do with the time,
it's up to you what project you define.
And you're the driver of that project.
- What planning really is at the heart
is simply being reflective and thinking about
what you want to accomplish in the future.
And thinking about what types of actions you need to take
to get there, and what goals you need to set.
- In my opinion, planning is very essential
in a scientific career, and that particularly is true
for the PhD position, the postdoc position,
and everything else that follows.
And the main reason is, even starting in the PhD,
that during your undergraduate training, you had classes.
The classes last a semester, you have exams,
you're constantly being checked on your progress,
and you actually have no choice but to run along
with everyone else in that course curriculum.
Now in graduate school,
which usually lasts about five years,
that's a very long time.
And so if you don't have a plan going into that,
or a plan while you're in it, chances that
you're not going to use the time well are very high.
- Interestingly, I was once talking with a faculty member
and she told me that one of the hardest things
about transitioning from academic setting
into a company setting, was that suddenly she was asked
to put her research projects on a timeline.
And in her mind, she'd never done that in academia.
We just follow the research questions
and see where they take us.
And so thinking ahead, it's good to develop skills
to be able to set up your own plan on a timeline,
and stick with that timeline as best you can.
Or to learn how to navigate around the plan
as you need to change it.
- Project plans are aspirational.
No one ever actually executes the plan as written.
I've never seen it happen.
Pieces of it happen, but they're an important straw man
to help you organize your time and get going.
- Sometimes you plan an experiment, your cell's not ready,
so you have to push it back a day.
If you didn't have the plan, you could keep
pushing stuff back every single day,
and that just causes months and time to go by.
I think just having that plan of knowing what needs
to get done really helps you to stay focused.
But like I said, you can't always plan things.
Sometimes your mice don't want to cooperate,
sometimes they don't want to mate when you want them
to mate, and you don't get pups
when you need to get the pups.
But as long as you know this is an experiment
that needs to get done, I have it on the list,
I planned it out already.
As soon as those pups or your cells are ready to go,
you can do your experiment, so you know what you need to do.
By not planning, you're planning to fail.
- Even though project plans change over time,
it's important to have a framework so that you can
talk to other people about your plan.
It gives them a way to give you input in a structured way.
- If you have a plan, and you say,
okay, we're really interested in getting this type of data
by this point, and you realize that is not going to happen,
it is much easier to come to your PI
with a very targeted thing to talk about and say
this was in the plan, this is why
it doesn't seem to be working out,
and then come up with a solution to go forward.
- It also helps you to evaluate your own progress,
and how things are going along, and to always make decisions
in terms of how things are fitting into the overall story
that you're building with your work.
So that you may be pursuing a new lead,
but by having a plan in place, you understand how close
that is to the central premise of your overall plan.