Twenty-three unsolicited pieces of advice from me, a Brand New Associate Professor
The roadmap you didn’t know you needed (or might not)
Actually get to know people. I made a practice of getting coffee or taking a walk with at least one new person per month. The most important lesson came from Diana Hernandez. When I discussed collaborating, she said, “I really want to get to know you.” And we did. Now, I learn from her personally and scientifically. You don’t have to rush to scientific collaboration. Build a foundation first.
It’s a (ultra)marathon, not a sprint. As someone who ran the 100m hurdles in college, I found this lesson to take time to sink in. There will be ups and downs. Papers will get accepted with minor revisions. Grants won’t get discussed. Family members will get sick, or your family will grow. Just keep moving forward, doing the day-to-day things that make science happen. Read papers, push to GitHub, meet with your students, attend committee meetings. The path to tenure unfolds very slowly.
You won’t know what you’re doing for 3+ years. It’s a long runway. You’ll get comfortable feeling uncomfortable. Get ready to ask a lot of questions. Try to figure out early who will answer you candidly. You don’t have time to figure everything out on your own. In addition to navigating funding, teaching, and service, you have to figure out departmental politics and norms. Then, how the school and university function (work in progress for me).
Develop time management skills. I always tell doctoral students, “This is the least busy you’ll ever be, so enjoy it.” The more your career progresses, the thinner you’re spread. You transition from writing code for 8 hours to having 8 Zoom meetings. This is not bad and is rewarding in many ways, but like all change can be disorienting. The hardest part can be figuring out what to prioritize and when. For this, you need to develop time management skills. Andrea Baccarelli provides some basics here.
Routinize. It was good enough for Obama, and it has helped me. Do the same things every morning (exercise, meditate, drink coffee, beg your toddler to wear pants). Try to block the same time periods each week for specific activities. Figure out how people can easily schedule you or request a letter of rec. If you have to complete a somewhat complicated task many times, write instructions for yourself. Track manuscript progress and add things to your CV at a specific cadence. I have not gone so far as wearing just blue or grey suits, but never say never.
Have a ‘no’ committee. People will ask you for things. If you do them well, the requests will multiply. This is called the competence curse. Still, better to be cursed this way than the alternative. Anyway–have a no committee. These are people, probably of similar career stages, who you can ask about requests and whether you should do them. A huge shout out to Marianthi Kioumourtzoglou and Elizabeth Rose Mayeda who received texts at all hours of day and night (when Marianthi was often up anyway) regarding requests. Often, just writing out the request and why or why not, you might say yes helps you decide what to do. I try to say ‘no’ at least five times for each ‘yes.’
Know and love your administrative staff. These are the people that truly make or break it for you. They have likely been at the institution far longer than you and can guide you to make fewer mistakes. Meet with them in person. Or call them. Thank you to Raquel Sotelo, in particular (oh, and nominate them for awards!). Along with Marianthi and Francesca Dominici, she’s the main reason I had grant success early on.
Celebrate successes. Academics fail a lot. We admit doctoral students who pick another institution. We write grants that people say are “estimated to have a low impact” (R21 proposal with Rachel Morello-Frosch) and that have “many gaps in significance and the approach, especially in terms of rigor that lower the overall impact of the proposal” (R01 proposal with Mary Willis). We submit a manuscript 10+ times before it gets reviewed (like this one with the brilliant Jackie Torres [now cited 130+ times]). I learned this lesson best from Ray Catalano, who I’ve had the joy of working with since my postdoc at UCSF/UC Berkeley. Plus he introduced me to wonderful humans in Deb Karasek and Sidra Goldman-Mellor. When you get a paper accepted, an oral presentation, media coverage, **A PROMOTION**, celebrate it! Buy a boba, take a long lunch or a long hike, enjoy the moment.
Regularly remind yourself why you’re here. In 2023, the median annual salary at Meta was ~$380K. We are not in academia for the money. I try to hold a quarterly meeting with myself to remind myself of the reasons I do this work and to help guide my limited ‘yes’ responses to projects that support my central tenets. Also, remember you don’t have to be here, and if things don’t work out, there are many other jobs you’re qualified to hold and where you can make a difference.
Science as a team sport. You don’t need to know how to do everything or read every paper. Collaborate with people who can do aspects of your projects better (e.g., Lucas Henneman moving this paper to this paper) or improve your ideas. Work with people in government, and non-profit, healthcare. Mentor (and learn from) a medical student (e.g., Alex Northrop, now all-star resident at CHOP). See if your doctoral student can work with another colleague’s postdoc on a project (thanks, Chen Chen!). Welcome talented undergrads (Audrey Arthur, Maria Navarro, Daoming Liu).
Mentor and be mentored. People matter most. I hope I’m mentored forever. While you build new relationships, keep the old ones alive. You can never develop new old mentors. My OG mentor, Brian Schwartz, gave me the blueprint for being a strong mentor. The main things are time and attention. Brian always said mentors should not be the rate-limiting step in a student’s progress, and I try to uphold that. Other long-term mentors, like Keeve Nachman (dissertation committee) and Ana Navas-Acien (likely the reason I was admitted to Hopkins in the first place), have been invaluable. Plus, always keep cultivating new mentors among people you admire. I reached out to Rachel Morello-Frosch when I first applied to the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars program and have not stopped reaching out since (thank you for everything!). When I got to UW (Jan 2023), I found Joel Kaufman, Catherine Karr, and Sara Curran (🙏). I didn’t feel ready to mentor a postdoc right away and that worked for me. Once I did, having rock stars like David Gonzalez and Jenni Shearston definitely made me look good. Also, enjoy your students being smarter than you (👀Vivian Do, Nina Flores, Heather McBrien, Katelin Teigen, Lauren Wilner + my first and straight to tenure-track faulty member student, Misbath Daouda), as well as your colleague’s students (Taylor Mobley, Xiaorong Shan). Try to help them reach their potential. I think Holly Elser (MD/PhD) and I mentor each other and it’s great.
Find your peer and peer 2.0 mentors. Find the people you connect with and hang on tight. Your peers or those one step ahead (2.0) often provide the best insights. Jackie Torres (congrats on your old promotion that, in true Jackie-style, you mentioned to no one), Kara Rudolph (congrats on your recent promotion!), and I have met monthly since ~2014 to talk about academia, goals, and life. Maya Deyssenroth, Tiffany Sanchez, and Brandon Pearson have helped me navigate life as an academic parent. New folks at UW, Marissa Baker, Nicole Errett, Karen Levy, Anjum Hajat, and Erica Furmeister have also made a big difference.
Love the one you’re with. And, good news, in academia, you pretty much get to pick the one you’re with. Figure out who is smart, nice, funny, innovative, shares your rationale for doing this whole thing, and doesn’t take themself too seriously, and collaborate with them (looking at you, Tarik Benmarhnia, Maria Glymour, Matt Kiang, Betsy Ogburn, Nicole Deziel, Sara Tartof, Alice Pressman, Ellen Eisen, Corinne Riddell, Dana Goin, Alison Gemmill, Danielle Braun, Jonathan Buonocore, Sarah Robinson, Dione Mercer, Elena Krieger, Cavin Ward-Caviness, everyone else I’ve mentioned on this page and many that I’ve failed to mention). Hire determined and talented RAs who run complicated code and occasionally mail your packages (Ben Steiger, Milo Gordon, Elizabeth Blake). Plus have people you really enjoy but haven’t collaborated with (e.g., Gen Wojcik, Jessie Buckley, Shorheh Farzen, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field).
Figure out how to enjoy the activities you have to do. This is easier when you love your collaborators (see #13), appreciate your students (see #11), and value staff (see #7). Not all tasks are glamorous but most can be made more enjoyable. I treat myself to fancy coffee when doing grant reviews, listen to Spotify (Beats to think to, Ocean sounds, Classical takeover, not Frozen 2), co-work on hard tasks, re-frame, use Pomodoro, alternate hard tasks with easier ones, or figure out how to get out of it.
Find a society you like. For me, it’s been ISEE. With Marianthi, I co-chaired the North American Chapter and I’m sure this helped with my promotion. Thank you, Jane Schroeder (former EHP Science Editor) for encouraging me to join. Plus ISEE has been held in Basel, Utrecht, Sao Paolo, and Rome. I’ve also enjoyed SER, PAA, and IAPHS. Conferences break up the routine, give you new ideas, let you chat with your friends over (always) mediocre coffee. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet a Peter James or a Tamarra James-Todd and get to start an EJ short-course with one of them.
Do your part, but don’t ask for more responsibility upfront. Try to review 1-2 manuscripts per month (but not more) and know this cadence doesn’t have to be even. Consider saying ‘no’ during high-workload grant writing, teaching, or family periods. Say ‘yes’ to serving as a grant reviewer for NIH (you’ll learn a lot and you can laugh at your hourly rate: mine is about $4/hour). Serve on committees when asked but don’t ask to serve just yet (this will come, I promise). Don’t feel pressured to take a lot of students or any other responsibility right away.
Keep improving your writing. If you can’t write well, people can’t learn from what you’ve done. They won’t cite you as often and it will be harder to publish in glamour journals. I estimate something like a 5:1 ratio of credit for a first or last-author JAMA-style vs. field-specific publication towards tenure. Read books about writing well and try to co-author with people whose writing you admire. Ask them to explain their process from big picture framing to the order of words in sentences. Plus, keep reading. Figure out what you like about well-written papers and emulate it.
Middle-author papers don’t matter much. Not to say you should not participate in them. They can be great ways to learn new things or build and sustain existing collaborations. Just don’t overdo it as a middle author (spend 3-5 hours instead of multiple days). Provide your expertise, the reason you’re on the paper, but try to reel it in otherwise. When I filled out my tenure worksheet and it asked for counts of (a) total papers, (b) first-author papers, and (c) last-author papers I finally got the message.
Spend your start-up. Figure out when (or if) the funds expire. Use them! This can make your life easier and can help you get grants and publications. Hire an RA or half of a postdoc. Pay the expensive open-access fee (aside: in 2018, Nature interviewed about whether I’d pay $10K to publish with them and I laughed. Joke’s on me because it now costs $12K+). Fly somewhere to meet in-person or attend a few extra conferences. Take your people out to lunch. Be generous.
Take time to talk to non-academics. This means reporters, community members, non-profits, policy-makers, think tanks, your family, kids, and whoever will listen. Write blogs (I didn’t do this Heather McBrien tells me what I’ve written here is a blog), join podcasts (I did), write for the Conversation, figure out what comes after Twitter (haven’t managed it). I spent time talking with policymakers to translate my dissertation into something that supported new policy and kept thinking about whether that policy worked or not.
Take advantage of the flexible schedule. You basically don’t have a boss. You can work when/where you want. Some weeks you’ll have to work 55 hours but then remember to work 25 another. Figure out where you work best. For me, it’s in my campus office. This way I get to see other humans and create some separation between work and my outside life (see #22).
There’s no ‘ideal’ time for anything. You want to adopt a puppy? Do it when works for you. You’d like to have a kid? Go for it. Someone once told me to have a baby before 30 or after I got tenure. I shot the gap and slipped in pre-geriatric at 34. I pumped during a lot of Zoom meetings. Once a student asked me if I was playing techno music, and I got to tell him that it was my breast pump. It will be fine. Your outside life won’t wait for you to succeed at work, so don’t try to make it.
Don’t forget about life outside academia. It can feel all-consuming but this is just a job like any other. You need to spend time with the people and do the things that bring you joy and purpose. This is my last point but probably the most important. These people and experiences keep you grounded, relevant, sane (or as sane as possible). If you sleep 56 hours per week (8 hrs * 7 days) and work 42 hours per week (8 hrs * 5 days + 2 other hours), that leaves 70 hours for everything else. So, the ‘everything else’ is the biggest block in your life. Imagine yourself 20 or 30 years from now looking back, and make sure you’re satisfied with how you spent those 70 hours per week.
Actually get to know people. I made a practice of getting coffee or taking a walk with at least one new person per month. The most important lesson came from Diana Hernandez. When I discussed collaborating, she said, “I really want to get to know you.” And we did. Now, I learn from her personally and scientifically. You don’t have to rush to scientific collaboration. Build a foundation first.
It’s a (ultra)marathon, not a sprint. As someone who ran the 100m hurdles in college, I found this lesson to take time to sink in. There will be ups and downs. Papers will get accepted with minor revisions. Grants won’t get discussed. Family members will get sick, or your family will grow. Just keep moving forward, doing the day-to-day things that make science happen. Read papers, push to GitHub, meet with your students, attend committee meetings. The path to tenure unfolds very slowly.
You won’t know what you’re doing for 3+ years. It’s a long runway. You’ll get comfortable feeling uncomfortable. Get ready to ask a lot of questions. Try to figure out early who will answer you candidly. You don’t have time to figure everything out on your own. In addition to navigating funding, teaching, and service, you have to figure out departmental politics and norms. Then, how the school and university function (work in progress for me).
Develop time management skills. I always tell doctoral students, “This is the least busy you’ll ever be, so enjoy it.” The more your career progresses, the thinner you’re spread. You transition from writing code for 8 hours to having 8 Zoom meetings. This is not bad and is rewarding in many ways, but like all change can be disorienting. The hardest part can be figuring out what to prioritize and when. For this, you need to develop time management skills. Andrea Baccarelli provides some basics here.
Routinize. It was good enough for Obama, and it has helped me. Do the same things every morning (exercise, meditate, drink coffee, beg your toddler to wear pants). Try to block the same time periods each week for specific activities. Figure out how people can easily schedule you or request a letter of rec. If you have to complete a somewhat complicated task many times, write instructions for yourself. Track manuscript progress and add things to your CV at a specific cadence. I have not gone so far as wearing just blue or grey suits, but never say never.
Have a ‘no’ committee. People will ask you for things. If you do them well, the requests will multiply. This is called the competence curse. Still, better to be cursed this way than the alternative. Anyway–have a no committee. These are people, probably of similar career stages, who you can ask about requests and whether you should do them. A huge shout out to Marianthi Kioumourtzoglou and Elizabeth Rose Mayeda who received texts at all hours of day and night (when Marianthi was often up anyway) regarding requests. Often, just writing out the request and why or why not, you might say yes helps you decide what to do. I try to say ‘no’ at least five times for each ‘yes.’
Know and love your administrative staff. These are the people that truly make or break it for you. They have likely been at the institution far longer than you and can guide you to make fewer mistakes. Meet with them in person. Or call them. Thank you to Raquel Sotelo, in particular (oh, and nominate them for awards!). Along with Marianthi and Francesca Dominici, she’s the main reason I had grant success early on.
Celebrate successes. Academics fail a lot. We admit doctoral students who pick another institution. We write grants that people say are “estimated to have a low impact” (R21 proposal with Rachel Morello-Frosch) and that have “many gaps in significance and the approach, especially in terms of rigor that lower the overall impact of the proposal” (R01 proposal with Mary Willis). We submit a manuscript 10+ times before it gets reviewed (like this one with the brilliant Jackie Torres [now cited 130+ times]). I learned this lesson best from Ray Catalano, who I’ve had the joy of working with since my postdoc at UCSF/UC Berkeley. Plus he introduced me to wonderful humans in Deb Karasek and Sidra Goldman-Mellor. When you get a paper accepted, an oral presentation, media coverage, **A PROMOTION**, celebrate it! Buy a boba, take a long lunch or a long hike, enjoy the moment.
Regularly remind yourself why you’re here. In 2023, the median annual salary at Meta was ~$380K. We are not in academia for the money. I try to hold a quarterly meeting with myself to remind myself of the reasons I do this work and to help guide my limited ‘yes’ responses to projects that support my central tenets. Also, remember you don’t have to be here, and if things don’t work out, there are many other jobs you’re qualified to hold and where you can make a difference.
Science as a team sport. You don’t need to know how to do everything or read every paper. Collaborate with people who can do aspects of your projects better (e.g., Lucas Henneman moving this paper to this paper) or improve your ideas. Work with people in government, and non-profit, healthcare. Mentor (and learn from) a medical student (e.g., Alex Northrop, now all-star resident at CHOP). See if your doctoral student can work with another colleague’s postdoc on a project (thanks, Chen Chen!). Welcome talented undergrads (Audrey Arthur, Maria Navarro, Daoming Liu).
Mentor and be mentored. People matter most. I hope I’m mentored forever. While you build new relationships, keep the old ones alive. You can never develop new old mentors. My OG mentor, Brian Schwartz, gave me the blueprint for being a strong mentor. The main things are time and attention. Brian always said mentors should not be the rate-limiting step in a student’s progress, and I try to uphold that. Other long-term mentors, like Keeve Nachman (dissertation committee) and Ana Navas-Acien (likely the reason I was admitted to Hopkins in the first place), have been invaluable. Plus, always keep cultivating new mentors among people you admire. I reached out to Rachel Morello-Frosch when I first applied to the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars program and have not stopped reaching out since (thank you for everything!). When I got to UW (Jan 2023), I found Joel Kaufman, Catherine Karr, and Sara Curran (🙏). I didn’t feel ready to mentor a postdoc right away and that worked for me. Once I did, having rock stars like David Gonzalez and Jenni Shearston definitely made me look good. Also, enjoy your students being smarter than you (👀Vivian Do, Nina Flores, Heather McBrien, Katelin Teigen, Lauren Wilner + my first and straight to tenure-track faulty member student, Misbath Daouda), as well as your colleague’s students (Taylor Mobley, Xiaorong Shan). Try to help them reach their potential. I think Holly Elser (MD/PhD) and I mentor each other and it’s great.
Find your peer and peer 2.0 mentors. Find the people you connect with and hang on tight. Your peers or those one step ahead (2.0) often provide the best insights. Jackie Torres (congrats on your old promotion that, in true Jackie-style, you mentioned to no one), Kara Rudolph (congrats on your recent promotion!), and I have met monthly since ~2014 to talk about academia, goals, and life. Maya Deyssenroth, Tiffany Sanchez, and Brandon Pearson have helped me navigate life as an academic parent. New folks at UW, Marissa Baker, Nicole Errett, Karen Levy, Anjum Hajat, and Erica Furmeister have also made a big difference.
Love the one you’re with. And, good news, in academia, you pretty much get to pick the one you’re with. Figure out who is smart, nice, funny, innovative, shares your rationale for doing this whole thing, and doesn’t take themself too seriously, and collaborate with them (looking at you, Tarik Benmarhnia, Maria Glymour, Matt Kiang, Betsy Ogburn, Nicole Deziel, Sara Tartof, Alice Pressman, Ellen Eisen, Corinne Riddell, Dana Goin, Alison Gemmill, Danielle Braun, Jonathan Buonocore, Sarah Robinson, Dione Mercer, Elena Krieger, Cavin Ward-Caviness, everyone else I’ve mentioned on this page and many that I’ve failed to mention). Hire determined and talented RAs who run complicated code and occasionally mail your packages (Ben Steiger, Milo Gordon, Elizabeth Blake). Plus have people you really enjoy but haven’t collaborated with (e.g., Gen Wojcik, Jessie Buckley, Shorheh Farzen, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field).
Figure out how to enjoy the activities you have to do. This is easier when you love your collaborators (see #13), appreciate your students (see #11), and value staff (see #7). Not all tasks are glamorous but most can be made more enjoyable. I treat myself to fancy coffee when doing grant reviews, listen to Spotify (Beats to think to, Ocean sounds, Classical takeover, not Frozen 2), co-work on hard tasks, re-frame, use Pomodoro, alternate hard tasks with easier ones, or figure out how to get out of it.
Find a society you like. For me, it’s been ISEE. With Marianthi, I co-chaired the North American Chapter and I’m sure this helped with my promotion. Thank you, Jane Schroeder (former EHP Science Editor) for encouraging me to join. Plus ISEE has been held in Basel, Utrecht, Sao Paolo, and Rome. I’ve also enjoyed SER, PAA, and IAPHS. Conferences break up the routine, give you new ideas, let you chat with your friends over (always) mediocre coffee. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet a Peter James or a Tamarra James-Todd and get to start an EJ short-course with one of them.
Do your part, but don’t ask for more responsibility upfront. Try to review 1-2 manuscripts per month (but not more) and know this cadence doesn’t have to be even. Consider saying ‘no’ during high-workload grant writing, teaching, or family periods. Say ‘yes’ to serving as a grant reviewer for NIH (you’ll learn a lot and you can laugh at your hourly rate: mine is about $4/hour). Serve on committees when asked but don’t ask to serve just yet (this will come, I promise). Don’t feel pressured to take a lot of students or any other responsibility right away.
Keep improving your writing. If you can’t write well, people can’t learn from what you’ve done. They won’t cite you as often and it will be harder to publish in glamour journals. I estimate something like a 5:1 ratio of credit for a first or last-author JAMA-style vs. field-specific publication towards tenure. Read books about writing well and try to co-author with people whose writing you admire. Ask them to explain their process from big picture framing to the order of words in sentences. Plus, keep reading. Figure out what you like about well-written papers and emulate it.
Middle-author papers don’t matter much. Not to say you should not participate in them. They can be great ways to learn new things or build and sustain existing collaborations. Just don’t overdo it as a middle author (spend 3-5 hours instead of multiple days). Provide your expertise, the reason you’re on the paper, but try to reel it in otherwise. When I filled out my tenure worksheet and it asked for counts of (a) total papers, (b) first-author papers, and (c) last-author papers I finally got the message.
Spend your start-up. Figure out when (or if) the funds expire. Use them! This can make your life easier and can help you get grants and publications. Hire an RA or half of a postdoc. Pay the expensive open-access fee (aside: in 2018, Nature interviewed about whether I’d pay $10K to publish with them and I laughed. Joke’s on me because it now costs $12K+). Fly somewhere to meet in-person or attend a few extra conferences. Take your people out to lunch. Be generous.
Take time to talk to non-academics. This means reporters, community members, non-profits, policy-makers, think tanks, your family, kids, and whoever will listen. Write blogs (I didn’t do this Heather McBrien tells me what I’ve written here is a blog), join podcasts (I did), write for the Conversation, figure out what comes after Twitter (haven’t managed it). I spent time talking with policymakers to translate my dissertation into something that supported new policy and kept thinking about whether that policy worked or not.
Take advantage of the flexible schedule. You basically don’t have a boss. You can work when/where you want. Some weeks you’ll have to work 55 hours but then remember to work 25 another. Figure out where you work best. For me, it’s in my campus office. This way I get to see other humans and create some separation between work and my outside life (see #22).
There’s no ‘ideal’ time for anything. You want to adopt a puppy? Do it when works for you. You’d like to have a kid? Go for it. Someone once told me to have a baby before 30 or after I got tenure. I shot the gap and slipped in pre-geriatric at 34. I pumped during a lot of Zoom meetings. Once a student asked me if I was playing techno music, and I got to tell him that it was my breast pump. It will be fine. Your outside life won’t wait for you to succeed at work, so don’t try to make it.
Don’t forget about life outside academia. It can feel all-consuming but this is just a job like any other. You need to spend time with the people and do the things that bring you joy and purpose. This is my last point but probably the most important. These people and experiences keep you grounded, relevant, sane (or as sane as possible). If you sleep 56 hours per week (8 hrs * 7 days) and work 42 hours per week (8 hrs * 5 days + 2 other hours), that leaves 70 hours for everything else. So, the ‘everything else’ is the biggest block in your life. Imagine yourself 20 or 30 years from now looking back, and make sure you’re satisfied with how you spent those 70 hours per week.