(bright soft music)
- So how do you create an IDP?
The first step is to self-assess
and reflect on your progress.
When we say self-assessment, what we really mean is
kind of thinking about what you need to do moving forward.
How has your progress and your research been going?
What skills have you been developing?
- Self-assessment is really important as you continue
along your trajectory in a lab specifically,
because your needs change over time.
So, when you're in a lab, you basically like,
look for a project that is gonna fit
your needs and fit your interests.
So, you have to basically know what those are,
but those needs and interests also evolve over time.
And so you have to constantly be
asking yourself certain questions
in terms of what motivates you as a scientist,
what types of questions you feel good about answering,
and the skills that you need to answer them.
- One of the hardest elements of self-assessment
is thinking about your own skills.
Some of things you might wanna consider
are your research skills and technical skills
and scientific knowledge.
And your graduate program or postdoctoral training are
designed to help you develop those skills as a researcher.
You'll also be developing particular technical skills.
If you wanna move into a different
type of methodology, for example,
you may need to develop technical skills in those areas.
If you want to move into a different discipline,
you may need to build some knowledge
and do some reading in that area.
- I basically started out as a pure experimentalist.
What I did, basically in the lab, was
take some DNA sequences, modify them,
put them into flies, and then see what they do.
And that allows you to answer very targeted questions.
But in terms of figuring out kind of bigger picture issues,
using that as a foundation, I realized I had to get some
more experience in bioinformatics and genome manipulation.
And so, I talked about that type of approach
with Angela during our yearly planning meeting,
which we have every single year.
And we decided together
that I needed to get a particular skill
and that I needed to apply it to a specific problem.
And so, I did a lot of research
and I talked to a lot of collaborators in bioinformatics,
and that analysis that I ended up doing,
basically, is currently the thing
that I am proudest of in grad school.
The fact that like, I was able to seek out a new skill set
and then apply it to the research
in order to further the project itself.
- There's also a whole 'nother set of skills
that I want you to remember, which are professional skills.
Professional skills I think of as being
communication skills with colleagues,
being able to present effectively,
being able to write and communicate in written form.
These professional skills are extremely important
for scientists.
In fact, what we often hear from employers
is that professional skills are the key skills
that they feel that PhDs might be weakest in.
So, if there are any sets of skills
that we need to really focus on for our future careers,
it may be working on professional skills,
which will, again, benefit our training
as graduate students or postdocs
but also benefit us in our future careers.
- I didn't really learn how to write a paper
until I began my own career here at Berkeley.
One of my first papers,
which I had a colleague of mine communicate to the PNAS,
I struggled with it because I hadn't developed a good style.
He had it reviewed by other people.
Then he called me to his office after about a month
and he threw the paper down on his desk and he said,
"Who wrote this paper?"
And I said, "I did."
And he said, "You've got a lot to learn
"about the English language" (laughs).
It was brutal,
but great advice.
And so, he then patiently went through
the paper with me and we rewrote it
so that it was intelligible.
I was so sort of embarrassed
that I hired at that point a scientific writer
to help me over the next year
with my grants and my papers.
The editor that I hired
helped me with basic grammar
and making things understood and logical flow.
It's now second nature to me,
and I've written so much now that it's not a chore anymore.
- In addition to skills and experience,
you may also need a network specific
to your career of interest.
Now, you might think as a scientist
that you don't need a network,
but, in fact, scientists network all the time.
That's what we do when we go to conferences.
That's what we do when we go to social hours
on our campuses.
That's what we do when we even sit
on study sections or review papers.
We're building our professional network.
So, you'll need to do that for any type of career
path that you want to move into.
Often, people hire based on what
they hear about a person.
So if you have a direct connection to someone,
you're more likely to get a position.
Developing a network and developing some
of these skills can take quite a long time.
So even as an early-stage student,
you should think about small steps
that you can take from the beginning
of your training moving forward,
so that those small steps can then
add up later on to leave you ready
to move into your next career step.