By Kristen Mitchell
Aspiring academics are taught throughout their education that being anything less than a faculty member doing research in a university setting or a scientist running a lab is failure. This bias sets young researchers up for a career of self-doubt and anxiety, said Sharon Milgram, director of the Office of Intramural Training and Education at the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Milgram spoke about planning for career satisfaction and success at the George Washington University Tuesday as part of the university’s Postdoc Appreciation Day. The event was planned by the GW Postdoc Association, an organization that focuses on networking, professional development and social engagement across fields and school boundaries.
Postdoctoral fellows participate in temporary mentored research and training for a set length of time. Many of them hope to find careers doing university-based research, however, the number of available tenure-track positions is shrinking. This forces scientists to make a difficult choice between their desired career path and the types of grant manager, public policy expert and governmental research positions their peers have shunned, Dr. Milgram said.
“We struggle to live up to expectations that we set ourselves, that our families set for us, and that our mentors and teachers and important people set for us. We walk around carrying all of that like a massive ton of bricks,” she said.
There is no need to compare one career to another, Dr. Milgram said. The scientific enterprise would collapse without people interested in the breath of jobs necessary to do the work. As long as a position pays what a person expects it would pay and the work fulfilling, it is a worthy career, she said.
“There is nothing alternative about the career choices out there, and the only person who needs to be happy with the career you chose is you,” she said. “Others might get to weigh in if you choose to let them weigh in, but honest truth is you and you alone get to decide.”
Dr. Milgram was a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill before she joined NIH a decade ago. Even though she was looking for a position that would give her more influence in the research world and fell in love with Washington, D.C., she said she still fretted over her decision to leave the university. Her status as a researcher was a cornerstone of her identity.
“When I got the job at NIH, it caused such an existential crisis about my identity as a scientist that I literally had to talk about it with a therapist,” Dr. Milgram said.
It is important for postdocs to think about the kind of lives they want to have— including what they want from their family life, hobbies and community—and plan a career path to pursue those ends.
Researchers should build resilience that will help them weather the difficult seasons of life in the academic world by avoiding negative self-talk and focusing on the things that nourish them, Dr. Milgram said.
“We need to learn to see mistakes and setbacks as a learning opportunity not as something that is devastating and catastrophic,” she said. “We need to really take care of ourselves.”
