I am often in a position to give advice to young scientists who want to know, how did I become a professor.
In these discussions it is always important to remember one key aspect of life: luck. Those of us who have achieved success should not fool ourselves into thinking that we owe this purely due to our hard work and grit. Luck plays a big part. I was lucky to have been born into a middle class family in a tolerant society (at least tolerant of my background - more luck), and I had the opportunity to follow my passion.
I won’t belabor the importance of luck, or how this is constantly undervalued by those who are successful. For more on this, I highly recommend Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by the Cornell economist Robert Frank. I can also recommend a few videos on Derek Muller’s channel Veritasium.
Now of course we shouldn’t extrapolate this to the extreme. Not every lottery ticket is the same.
So what helps?
In my experience, there are a few qualities that distinguish those students who perform well in the lab and go on to have successful scientific careers. Some of these are what you would expect: a good work ethic, a willingness to do the hard work and not cut corners, good hands, a broad knowledge base. Another important characteristic is curiosity.
But the one factor that can make a big difference, and in my opinion can greatly boost the value of your lottery ticket, is extracurricular activities.
When I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Rapoport lab, I was involved with many activities away from the bench, but impactful in my development as a scientist and as a thinker. One of these extra curicular activities was blogging.
I started my first blog with a few goals. I wanted to improve my writing. I had a lot to say and needed an outlet. And I wanted to really engage the public at large. As scientists, we are largely funded by taxpayer money, and the least we could do is communicate back why this funding is essential. It not only funds discovery, but also provides unique training for undergrads and grads. There is no substitute to working in a lab to teach you about how we build knowledge and how messy it can be. This understanding is critical for a society to function. This has been evident in the last two years.
I started blogging in 2004/2005 and was part of the first wave of Sci Comm. I first started off on my own site, and was soon picked up by Scienceblogs, a site that was put together by SEED magazine. I was on Scienceblogs quite early (after wave one and before wave two - for more on this see the Wiki entry) because I had happened to post about SEED magazine way before Scienceblogs was launched and this likely caught the attention of those in charge (more luck). Other bloggers on this site would go on to become a who’s-who of Sci Comm.
What I did not anticipate was that my experience in science blogging became critical for my development as a scientist. Through blogging, I became exposed to different ideas stemming from different disciplines, including population genetics, and the philosophy of biology. It also forced me to sit down and think about the major developments in science, probably the biggest one being the ENCODE debacle and the ensuing “function wars” that followed. All of a sudden, my perspective, that of a cell biologist who was studying mRNA metabolism, could be put into a broader context, one that I would have never gained if I had not engaged with those other communities through my blogging. This eventually led to my collaboration with T. Ryan Gregory on The Case for Junk DNA, which was then covered in National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine by the Scienceblog alumni, Carl Zimmer. Through my blog I met Larry Moran, who was a big supporter of mine when I gave my interview for a faculty position in his home department. Larry went on to be a sort of mentor for me. He constantly challenged my ideas and helped play a key role in shaping how I see the roles of evolution and drift in shaping the genome.
So, yes, I was lucky--a job appeared in the very same department as someone with whom I was interacting on social media. I was even lucky to hear about the job at all! I was alerted to it by Stephane Angers, who graduated from McGill Biochemistry the same year I did. He had kept track of me and my publications after I had gone on to grad school and my postdoc. It probably helped (although I should check with Stephane) that I once sat on the Biochem Undergrad Society (BUGS), the student union, and as a result was very visible to the rest of my cohort during my undergrad years. Again, this is another example how participating in extracurricular activities can increase your luck.
Another extracurricular activity that greatly helped me through the years, was my involvement in the now defunct New England RNA Data Club (or NERD Club as we were affectionately called). This brought together RNA labs from across the New England region for monthly meetings. I founded this group while I was a postdoc with the help of Neil Kubica (a postdoc in the neighboring Blenis Lab) and under the guidance of Danesh Moazed. Neil and I really tapped into a need. And through this organization I met every single future faculty of my generation who studies RNA and was trained at Harvard, MIT, UMass, Brandeis, Tufts and Yale. And as luck would have it, we had great supporters. Julie Claycomb, who at the time was in Craig Mello’s lab at UMass, would hunt down speakers for us. Christine Mayr who was in the Bartel lab would do the same but at MIT. Julie is now a faculty in my institution (in fact her office is two doors away from mine), and Christine is at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Was this luck? Neil and I provide a venue that was (by chance) sorely lacking. If such an organization existed, we probably would not have put in the effort, and we would not have met all the great postdoctoral researchers that eventually became colleagues and friends.
So to all you young researchers, go forth, work hard in the lab. But also be active in the science community at large. Science, after all, is not just working at the bench; it is exchanging ideas. In the process you may end up building up your luck.