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It’s the dream on many a researcher’s internal playlist; become independent, where the sky has no limit and you are free to soar into the great unknown of your very best ideas. But a PhD doesn’t come with a compass to success and independence, and as you move through the ECR journey, it can be a challenge to figure out how to get there.
Although your direction is uniquely yours, like any path, there are signposts that will guide you to your destination. Building a successful research career takes time, patience, and love for what you do, which is why the most important thing is to know you are on the right path to begin with.
With guidance from Sydney researchers across different stages of the researcher journey, this article takes you through some key advice for setting yourself up for success as an early career researcher, and how to make the most of where you are at in the moment.
It is crucial to surround yourself with the right people. Building a network of collaborators is a great way to begin your career and the best way to cultivate work in and around your research interest. This has practical benefits such as potentially increasing your publication output as well as helping you to build your own projects that can be taken through to funding applications independent of your supervisor. It’s also inherently rewarding; you bounce off each other as your career grows, bringing a sense of camaraderie and connection to your research and work.
Dr Katherine Kenny, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology, confirms that in her experience, leadership and collaboration can go hand-in-hand. As the Deputy Director of the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, she has worked alongside Professor Alex Broom for almost a decade. She has had the vantage of building independence within her broader group, rather than elsewhere, as she has moved from early to mid-career. “I think a lot of people establish their independence by breaking off and leaving their group, sort of cutting their own path,” she says. “Whereas I have taken on increasing leadership as my career has advanced, but I've done so within our existing collaborative group. So my research profile has grown from within collaborations, not outside of them.”
For Dr Kenny, leadership is not confined to the domain of solo authorship or being committed to one’s own profile. Taking the time to step back – when the research calls for it – is also important. “If everybody wants to be leading in different directions, you don't actually go anywhere,” she says. “There have to be moments to learn as well as to lead.”
The chances for authentic collaboration increase when you’re genuinely interested in what other researchers in your field are doing. With a love for knowledge at the heart of any research career, it is great to remember that from first to middle to senior author, there are opportunities to expand your curiosity and enthusiasm towards your discipline. Professor Olivier Piguet, NHMRC Leadership Fellow and Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology, is currently director of FRONTIER, the frontotemporal dementia clinical research group, and can pinpoint his success to the simple act of exploration – and listening to gut instinct.
"I once took this job where I thought, well, it's a time-limited position, but I sensed that there would be potential opportunities for me to move on to something else,” he reflects. “And I ended up working with someone who then enabled me to develop all the research that I've done ever since. I've been lucky, no doubt. But also, I've been willing to take some risks and say, okay, I'm going to try and see where this takes me."
With an open mind and willingness to adapt to new ideas, working on other people’s projects can stretch the limits of what is possible with your research and teach you new skills. Of course, you’ll always want to think strategically about where you invest your limited time: are there clear benefits for your career? Or is your time better spent on projects for which you have greater ownership, which might lead to senior author papers or lead-CI grants?
Dr Kenny capitalised on opportunities after her PhD where she could diversify her research skills and interests. “I was really fortunatethat my first postdoc was in a different empiral area to my PhD, but a lot of the conceptual concerns were very well aligned,” she says. “So, it didn't feel like I was pivoting to something terribly different. I was able to build on the things that I was already interested in and diversify the kind of empirical areas that I was looking at.”
A helpful way to get your research funded is to build a name for yourself and work on diverse projects where you can leverage both your connections and your interest in the field. A collaborative strategy can be a win-win for your intellect and your ambition, and in Dr Kenny’s case, is fundamental to how she approaches research at large. “If I look at the ARC grants that I'm on, for example, some of them, I'm CIB, others I'm CIA. Some of the ARC grants that I've been on have been true collaborations in the sense that ultimately, who led them, or who went first in the CI order, was almost a coin toss decision, or came down to strategic conversations about feasibility, capacity, and what was going to be most favourably assessed.
I really enjoy that kind of deep collaboration. There are some projects that I'm very much invested in, even though, you know, my name doesn't come first.
Having a solid funding strategy as an ECR is a must, including when to spearhead your own funding bids as lead investigator and when to join others as a co-investigator.
As you build your funding track record, Dr Kenny suggests that you can start looking locally, right here at the Researcher Development Unit’s core programs. “You guys have so many different opportunities that range from $5,000 to the Horizon Fellowships, that are, like, enormous,” she says. “I think that no matter where you are in your career, there's going to be some kind of opportunity that aligns with your current stage. I think actively pursue those opportunities where you can lead, while also pursuing other opportunities that build your track record."
In many disciplines, authorship position – in particular first and senior authorship – indicate intellectual ‘ownership’ of the work. Don’t leave conversations about authorship to the end – or make assumptions about it. “It's so much easier to ask at the beginning and say, hey, what's the usual when you write papers?” suggests Dr Piguet. “Because finding out later close to the end that when you thought you'd be first, then you end up second or third, is not a nice thing to go through. And then it's not a nice conversation to have. It's much better to be open about it and say, hey, how do you work that out? How do you determine whether I'll be leading or not? And what does that mean?”
Research is nothing without vision, which is why establishing a niche in your field is the goal for anyone hoping to establish their own agenda. Working that out is often a challenge as you seek to distinguish yourself from your supervisor. For some, it can come through a “side project” or a creative exploration that grows to something fruitful.
It certainly has been that way for Dr Tess Reynolds, a biomedical imaging physicist from the Faculty of Medicine and Health who is also the Deputy Director and Thoracic Theme Lead of the Image X Institute, a Cancer Institute of NSW Early Career Fellow and a 2022 Eureka Prize Winner (Outstanding Early Career Researcher). “Some of my biggest ideas have come from things that I've been mucking around in the lab, just giving it a try and not having any restrictions or ‘is this really going to work?’” she says.
Dr Reynolds continued to play when she arrived at the Image X Institute at the University of Sydney in 2017, where she was able to maintain the momentum that exploration for the sake of it brings – sometimes for only an hour or two on a Friday afternoon. This can be enough to bring light to some of your best ideas, which will bring you independence in the long run. Then your job is to try and get recognised for them, as Dr Piguet reflects on early guidance from his colleague Professor Glenda Halliday.
“She was saying you need to be recognised for something early on,” says Dr Piguet. “You really you need to get an identity so people will start noticing who you are and what you're known for. And I think that is really good advice.”
As much as we all would appreciate the right network to land in our world when we need it, the reality is that it takes effort to find. The first step is knowing what to say – and then who to say it to.
“It sounds so silly, but in the shower, you've got 30 seconds to a minute while you're washing out the shampoo, and you can use it to practice your elevator pitch,” says Dr Reynolds. “How do you frame your research when you meet people? You’ll gain that confidence at conferences and other places to start conversations with people that you're interested in collaborating with.”
Whether it’s in person or on LinkedIn, research the field so you know who you need to know, and then reach out to them with your elevator pitch perfected. “Be focused with career progression in mind and identify people at a university level or at an international professional level who are in positions of power and influence that would be strategically aligned to help you reach your goals,” advises Dr Reynolds. Remember that this is a skill that will continue long after your independence is established, when you start to lead research teams and search for the right people to work with.
Being successful in prizes brings light to your research from unexpected corners that may not hear about you otherwise, but it’s often up to you to put yourself out there. If you think you’re competitive, “definitely just apply and ask other people to nominate you,” says Dr Reynolds. “I was naive that I assumed that prizes just go to people who are doing the best things. But actually they go to people doing the best things that also put their name in the hat. And it often builds from starting small. Whether it’s individual speaking prizes or faculty-based recognition, it can all build to bigger opportunities and larger scale recognition. Dr Reynolds explains:
As soon as you have that sort of recognition from your professional society or the wider scientific community, that puts weight behind the work that you're doing.
It will help to keep in mind that no researcher is immune to the blow of rejection, not even those who win the biggest grants or prizes. As Dr Piguet reflects, “Something that was not explained to me very well at the time is it's a hard slog,” he says. “And you need to be prepared to be to be knocked back again and again and again and again. But you need to be able to distance yourself from the fact that you didn't get your fellowship the first time, second time or third time. This is not a reflection of the quality of you as a person. It's a reflection of the way the system works and that unfortunately there's a finite amount of money available and some very good people are going to miss out. And these people might include you. And that's something I was not taught. And my goodness, that was hard. And at some point I was really, close to give up and say, no, that's it. That's not for me. Because it's not an easy thing to go through failure after failure.”
Such resilience requires an unwavering sense of self, and a belief in your work and research. As Dr Reynolds put it, your career is a long-term strategy, and people are going to say no. “I used to keep a log of all the grants I didn't get and horrible reviews,” says Dr Reynolds. “I stopped doing that because it was too long a list! Getting my Investigator Grant, it was the sixth time that I applied. I guess every time that I faced adversity, I just used it as extra motivation to prove people wrong.”
The blow from rejection also demands the ability look gently at yourself with a growth mindset. “I’d get strategic about identifying why I didn't get an opportunity,” said Dr Reynolds. “Maybe the track record wasn't there at the time, or I didn't have enough leadership, or I wasn't doing enough senior author research. And then I would make a real conscious effort between whenever that next deadline was to examine, how am I improving? How am I changing so that the next time around I'm putting myself in in a better position? I mean, aside from just also laying in bed for two days crying, but we probably don't need to tell people that.”
