WINTER
2016–17
Back in the lab—this time, as the boss
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n a mid-December day in Ithaca, N.Y., with the first semester at Cornell on its last gasp, Lin was feeling really good. His first-year grad students were nearly done with their final exams, putting them that much closer to being in Lin’s lab full-time, and Lin himself had just wrapped up teaching for the school year. He was getting ready to head to Italy for a well-deserved break and expected that when he returned, his spring semester could be more about the part of the job he loved most: the chemistry. Lin’s research was going surprisingly well—so well that he was hoping to have a publication ready by late spring. “That would be amazing,” he adds softly. And Lin’s genuine enthusiasm for his research and earnestness to match his strengths in the lab in other parts of his job had definitely earned the respect of his colleagues at Cornell. “I see myself growing as a professor, as a lab manager. That’s something I’m very happy with,” Lin says. Still, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. By December, he had 10 people under his wing, and figuring out the right management style for each of them was a work in progress. One major hurdle for Lin was clearly going to be tempering his expectations for younger researchers. It takes just a few minutes of chatting with Lin to understand what an ambitious scientist he is. His work ethic will always be hard for his students to match. Lin was also a bit perplexed by some students’ failure to prioritize research over classes. For an analytical mind, cracking the emotional problem of what motivates different personalities brought him out of his comfort zone. “I definitely feel a little stressed,” Lin says. “This is going to be a pretty steep learning curve for me to start to actually manage graduate students.” He was characteristically determined to figure out the best way to manage each member of his lab. Senior faculty had become an indispensable resource, offering advice and a gut check on whether Lin was taking the right approach to dealing with his students. For now, his default mode was to lead by example. “When they see their adviser in the lab, hopefully they’ll be excited, as well.” At the halfway mark, the new professors are starting to feel the growing pains experienced by any young start-up, be it an academic lab or a company. Virtually overnight, they’ve gone from a mentorship role as a postdoc to a management role as a professor, and everyone was having trouble adjusting. “When you’re getting your Ph.D., you’re focused on hard skills, like chemistry,” says Raychelle Burks, now a year into her assistant professor role at St. Edward’s University. “And yet it is the soft skills that are the most difficult—managing teams, coordinating a lot of different personalities, and navigating diplomacy—the human side of running any endeavor.” Burks’s experiences outside academia were far more helpful on the soft skills side than anything she learned while in grad school. She jokes that the best preparation she had for managing students was a college job running a retail store.
New professors discover that management challenges quickly escalate. As fall turned to winter, it became increasingly clear that neither Kalow nor her postdoc was happy with their arrangement. By February, Kalow found a place for him at another lab at Northwestern, but that hiccup was troubling even for someone living this year with a “no regrets” mantra. Although uncharacteristically uncomfortable talking about the situation, Kalow seemed genuinely glad to have learned something from the experience. In hindsight, her definition of a “good” postdoctoral candidate might have been flawed. Kalow had always thought that a résumé that featured big-name labs was the best indication of someone’s strengths as a scientist. “One thing I realized is that having a good CV might just mean that they haven’t faced a lot of experimental obstacles,” she says. That researcher might have excellent hands but not be well equipped to drop into a lab where everything is new and projects aren’t going to run smoothly—or might not even work at all.
Schmidt and two students flip through papers after an exam. “Now, I’m looking for candidates who maybe didn’t have the perfect Ph.D. but where I can see clearly that they overcame some sort of obstacle experimentally. That, in my mind, shows they’re good at problem solving and pushing through things.” But times when the job feels particularly tough are thankfully balanced by periods where everything magically falls into place. By late February, Kalow’s group was starting to function more as an autonomous team rather than needing direction from her at every turn. As a group meeting began, one of her graduate students, unprompted, raised the issue of how to redistribute jobs that the recently departed postdoc had handled; everyone stepped up to take something on. Some of that cohesiveness can be achieved only with time. A group holiday celebration in January was way less awkward than a barbecue Kalow held at her house in the summer. By then, everyone simply knew each other better. A lot of becoming a good leader can be chalked up to getting MAY 22, 2017 | CEN.ACS.ORG | C&EN
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Lin listens as a student presents at group meeting.
comfortable being the boss. As Alison Narayan, who is wrapping up suggestion.” Luckily, her students largely interpret her suggestions her second year at the University of Michigan, puts it, “As the leadas commands. er, you want to make sure everyone feels like you’re in control of She was finding her own ways of getting her students to take on the ship.” Having opened the doors to her lab just 11 days after givresponsibilities. After bringing all the essentials to her first few ing birth to her second child, Narayan was juggling more than the group meetings—the room key, a laptop, cords, the projector—she typical new professor does. Under those circumstances, conveying sent a clear message one Friday afternoon by showing up empconfidence and organization to her students felt extra important. ty-handed. When her students looked at her blankly and asked One of the first tests for new professors is figuring out how to es- where everything was, she could only laugh. “I was like, okay, you tablish clear expectations for their students. Establishing boundar- guys have to do this stuff.” And from then on, they did. ies sounds deceptively simple: Lay out a time commitment for the Beyond setting the rules and solving interpersonal problems, lab, assign each member jobs, be clear about research goals. leaders need to be champions for their students. Earlier than exWhen setting expectations, most take a cue from the lab culture pected, UCSD’s Schmidt found herself contemplating the shortthey experienced as a graduate student or postdoc. But deciding and long-term goals of her group members. Whereas many top-tier how and whether to enforce those rules is graduate programs offer only a doctoral something they just have to feel out. degree in chemistry, UCSD offers a terminal University of Maryland’s Gutierrez recalls master’s degree. By winter, two students in a student in his newly formed group asking Schmidt’s group had not much more than a if their weekly meeting could be moved so year left to wrap up their research. he could do an activity. Although Gutierrez’s That meant finding the best way to train instinct was to be accommodating, he also students whose time horizon was different didn’t want to set a precedent that the time from what Schmidt experienced in graduate of the group meeting was up for debate. “You school. She needed to come up with research don’t want to have them running the group projects that they could do in a truncated rather than you running the group,” he says. period and yet could ideally still yield a Yet professors walk a delicate line: Within publication. those boundaries, they also want to be flexiAnd a new deadline loomed large. UCSD’s ble and acknowledge that their students are master’s students are generally focused on human. Lin assigned lab upkeep jobs to mem—Alison Narayan, University of getting a job in industry, a career aspiration bers of his group but struggled with whether Michigan that Schmidt needed to help them achieve to enforce them. “If you see some people sooner rather than later. not doing their job, are you going to jump in and do it for them, or “Usually with a Ph.D. student, you have four or five years to should you keep testing them?” he wonders. worry about those things—to initiate the type of outreach to While Lin wants his group to know he expects them to be reget folks employed,” Schmidt says. Now, just a few months into sponsible, he also doesn’t want to seem above hard work. “One the job, she was already making calls and probing contacts from piece of really good advice I got is that you shouldn’t feel like you grad school for leads. are too good to do anything in your lab,” he says. “I do go in and orAs new professors test out different approaches to being an der things for students and send empty bottles to the dumpster or advocate, a boss, an educator, and a mentor, they do their best at make substrates and clean up.” accepting that the learning curve is steep. “You just have to try to By winter, Kalow was starting to feel more at home at the helm of keep your perspective that we’re going to get there,” Schmidt says. the ship. “It’s been hard for me to learn how to boss people around. “It’s an investment in time and people, and I have to be as patient I still say everything as a suggestion, even when I don’t mean it as a as I can be, which is easier said than done.”
“As the leader, you want to make sure everyone feels like you’re in control of the ship.”
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C&EN | CEN.ACS.ORG | MAY 22, 2017
