HHMI has also created a course and several materials to expand the reach of its training course with the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (see box). "Graduate school and postdoctoral training rarely, if ever, train people to be in charge, to hire and fire staff, to write and manage budgets, to do all those things that are akin to running a small business," says Peter Bruns, HHMI vice president for grants and special programs. "These are critical skills for principal investigators (PIs) in academia as well as scientists who choose careers in other settings."

		HHMI has developed several resources for the development of early career scientists. Each can be downloaded from the HHMI Website: www.hhmi.org/resources/labmanagement. Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty is a collection of practical advice and experiences from seasoned biomedical investigators. A new second edition contains three new chapters on laboratory leadership, project management, and teaching and course design. Training Scientists to Make the Right Moves is a guide to help universities and professional societies develop their own programs in scientific management. Entering Mentoring is a guidebook to becoming a mentor by HHMI professor Jo Handelsman and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Postdocs with an interest in nonacademic careers must first overcome long-standing expectations within the culture of science that lead trainees to fear voicing any career aspiration other than that of principal investigator.

Bonnie Baxter, an associate professor of biology at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, was a graduate student in the early 1990s at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Like her fellow students, she considered the PI route to be her only acceptable option. Then one day she met with a thesis committee member, Professor of Biochemistry Aziz Sancar, who asked, to her surprise, "What do you want to do with your life?" She gathered up her courage and told him that she wanted to teach undergraduates, steeling herself to a negative response. Instead, Sancar replied, "That's fantastic!" And he told her how he had been pushed into a research track when what he really wanted was to be a pediatrician. "He said, 'Don't let anybody tell you to go and do anything you don't want to do.' It was so empowering to have someone I respected so much tell me this was a good idea," says Baxter.

"We need to move beyond the mindset," says the NPA's Reed, "that if you are not emulating your PI there's something wrong with you, or that if you don't end up getting that faculty job you are somehow a failure."

Lori Conlan, program manager of the Science Alliance, a career-development and mentoring program at the New York Academy of Sciences, says that while having dinner recently with a group of Ph.D. scientists who are now program managers at public and private granting agencies, two of them told her they no longer considered themselves scientists.

"That floored me," she says. "How are we going to change the culture to make people see that their jobs—which usually are very good jobs in science—are valuable and that you are still a scientist even if you leave the bench?"

Conlan traces the problem to the structure of graduate science training, which values laboratory skills, research results, and publishing above all. To expand the agenda, the Science Alliance, NPA, and others are helping postdocs see the entire range of career options open to them (see "Balancing Act", page 7). For example, these organizations have lobbied the federal funding agencies to make it incumbent on PIs who receive training-grant funds to help postdocs enhance their professional skills, such as teaching, public speaking, grant writing, and managing a budget, so that they have the best chance of landing whatever type of job they want.

In 1998, the Association of American Universities (AAU) observed that "virtually no institutions" offered job-placement or career services designed specifically for postdocs. In a 2005 survey, 16 of 39 AAU members who responded reported that they provided career-development services for postdocs.

None of the institutions, however, reported offering incentives to faculty members for providing mentoring to postdocs. Yet that too may be changing, as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is moving toward increased accountability for the mentoring component of training grants. The most recent announcement of NIH's Research Training Grants, a major source of funding for doctoral and postdoctoral stipends, includes the statement that grantees "should provide trainees with additional professional development skills and career guidance." The announcement stops short of requiring such training or providing funding for it, but it's a big step in the right direction, says Reed.

	PAGE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7	Go Back | Continue