to be continued

to be continued

* * *

Those scientists and institutions--the ones sitting at the experienced far end of the continuum--are exceptional. Indeed, second-tier research institutions tend to expect the most experience; Harvard and Johns Hopkins do not expect you to have your own research grant. Most hiring committees aren't looking for completely independent work; they're looking for original, creative ideas, together with a record of accomplishment. Few people applying for tenure-track jobs have had the opportunity to start their own research programs. After all, traditionally that's what assistant professorships are all about, and most institutions still think that way. It helps to be somewhere in the middle of that continuum, but most committees are still looking more for promise than for guarantees.

Demonstrate your promise by displaying your potential and actual independence. Show the committee that you have the deep thinking and talent to operate independent of your adviser.

How do you demonstrate your independence when you have never been given the chance to work independently?
Likely as not, all your data were collected in someone else's lab, as a part of someone else's research agenda. How, then, do you distinguish your research from your adviser's research?

* On paper. It's an apparent Catch-22: You need to show that your ideas are fresh, new, and yours, and you have to show they're grounded in work you've already done, usually in someone else's lab. It's a tough sell, but most of your competitors are in the same boat.

So how do you do it? One respondent said it beautifully: "The best plans usually build on the prior experience of the applicant, but are not direct extensions of their postdoctoral work."

I'm going to type that phrase again, it's so important: The best plans usually build on the prior experience of the applicant, but are not direct extensions of their postdoctoral work.

Unless you're one of the select few applicants with lots of experience leading your own lab, that's the key to your rhetorical strategy. That's the outline of the story you must tell: "I did this work as a grad student/postdoc and it was important and it was great. Now, as a faculty member, I want to do something a little bit different, but the work I'm proposing takes full advantage of the knowledge and skills I gained during the training phase of my career." It's different enough to be original, but similar enough that your years of training aren't wasted.

Another respondent wrote, "Most candidates (95%) stick to extensions of what they are most familiar with, but the key is, have they figured out some rather creative new directions for the research and have they done a good job convincing us that they can do it based on what is already known?" "Once we have a short list of candidates," writes yet another source, "the research proposals are looked at more carefully for imaginative ideas that differ from the candidates’ Ph.D. or postdoctoral research." Get the message?

* With your adviser's cooperation. One key to doing this successfully is to make sure your boss tells the same story. Hopefully you have a good, open relationship with your adviser; if you do, go in and chat and coordinate your strategies. Decide what turf is his or hers, what turf is yours, and what story you intend to tell in your research plan and his or her letter of recommendation. But make sure they don't match too precisely.

Is this sort of coordination unethical? Hardly. There's no deception here, no attempt to pull the wool over the committee's eyes. On the contrary, it's clarity you're seeking: in your relationship with your adviser and with the hiring committee.

Be careful though: This is tricky ethical territory. The ideas you're claiming must be yours. Don't just take your adviser's ideas and package them as your own, even if your adviser signs off on the plan.

If your relationship with your adviser isn't so chummy, you still want to do these same things; you just want to do it more carefully.

* If you still have time, set up your own lab in the corner of your adviser's. If you aren't applying for jobs right now, there's still time. Talk to your adviser about carving out your own research niche within the larger research effort, where you do work motivated by your own original ideas, something related but oblique to what your adviser is doing in the rest of the lab.

Is the research plan more important in the screening phase or late in the game?
In general, research plans are weighed more heavily later in the game, with more readily comprehensible evidence (especially pedigree, letters of recommendation, impact factor of journals, etc.) being weighed more heavily in the early rounds.

However, your research plan must be designed to serve more than one purpose. It must withstand intense scrutiny in the later rounds of the job search, and it must make a good first impression.

* * *

How long should it be?
Opinions vary. One person I spoke to said that a research plan should be "about three pages of 1.5-spaced text, and NEVER more than five." Another source prefers "three semi-independent (but related) subproposals not more than about three to four pages (single-spaced) each with a half page of important and relevant references." That's nine to 12 pages. There is some variation from one discipline to the next (the first of these recommendations came from a medical school, the second from a department of chemistry), but there are few if any standards even within a field. This shows how much of a crap shoot getting hired can be: Because you usually don't know in advance how long a document the hiring committee is looking for, there's little chance of the same candidate, no matter how qualified, getting offers from both of these institutions.

My recommendation? Call the chair of the hiring committee (or send e-mail) and ask for advice. If no advice is forthcoming, aim for five pages, 12-point Times New Roman, 1.5 spaced. Some will think it's a bit too long, others a bit too short, but no one will throw it out because of its length.


Remember that we said that a research plan needs to help you through initial screening and withstand careful scrutiny in the later stages.