Jump to: How it started • Helpful things • Surprising things • Ongoing struggles • Strategies
At this point, I still feel new; I don’t feel like I really “know the ropes” or have things running smoothly; TBD on whether I’m doing things “right”. Regardless, I hope my experience can be helpful as just one data point of how things can go, and I can pass along some of the advice that I took or things I found helpful. For context, I’m a systems neuroscientist doing in vivo electrophysiology in rats with a long (7+ year) postdoc in an HHMI lab and K99/R00 transition funding, starting a position in an R1 medical school with minimal teaching load and a primarily research-focused position.
After negotiations wrapped up, I signed my offer letter from UW in May 2022, with a start date of January 2023. The earliest I could have started was Fall 2022, but I was happy to have 6 months to wrap up things in my postdoc lab and prep for the transition. During this time I was working on revisions on a manuscript, organizing and documenting my samples, codebases, and data, making detailed lists of everything in my postdoc lab that I knew I’d want to buy, submitting my R00 transition application, and starting to work with UW on some hiring and purchasing. I hired a lab manager who started on the same day I did. Our renovations where not done when we arrived; I had a temporary office and we used the two benches of our wet lab space that were move-in ready as a prep area for storing and assembling all the items we were accumulating. The initial estimate for our space was March, then April, and ultimately, we only fully moved into our complete wet and dry lab in August 2023. Our first rotation student and undergrad started that Fall and we collected data from our first implanted subject in October. The next year, our team grew with the addition of a full-time technician and another rotation student (who joined the lab in June 2024). We launched our second major project in the lab, got much of our data storage and analysis working properly, and collected more data for the initial project.
-Hire someone ASAP. I’m so glad I had a lab member right off the bat. I would have felt completely overwhelmed facing the endless task list alone, but it was helpful to have someone chipping away at things with me, sanity checking, and preventing me from getting too much in my head. Finding someone who might be a little more experienced with relevant skills and/or already has experience at the university can be a particularly worthwhile hire (even if they require a higher salary). Consider hiring into a 1-year temp position (probably a different job code) rather than a permanent position right away. Especially if technician positions are unionized at your school, it can be really hard to terminate a position if it’s not a good fit or even if you just want to restructure the team, hire someone else, etc – it’s helpful to have a trial period before you permanently commit. Unfortunately, we didn’t have an option for a two-year tech contract – just 1 year or indefinite.
-Start early in the year. At UW and many other schools, the tenure clock starts in July regardless of your actual start date. Thus, starting in January was recommended as it gave me 6 “free” months to make progress before the clock started, while starting in the fall would have shortened my time window.
-Order critical equipment ASAP. I worked with the department to place orders for a few big pieces of equipment well before my start date knowing that they’d have a long lead time (ephys data acquisition systems, stereotax, surgical stereoscope). Even post-covid, supply chain issues frequently delayed delivery estimates further. Before I left my postdoc lab, I made meticulous lists of everything in lab that I knew I’d need (part numbers, vendors, versions). Even with this detailed list (& pics & videos), it was STILL extremely time consuming to track down everything we needed to order, make sure it actually arrived, and check that it was indeed what we wanted. Trust nothing until you actually test it.
-Find young faculty friends. Having a cohort of other young faculty (in a range of departments) to hang out with, commiserate with, and celebrate with, was really wonderful. They will understand the very unique challenges of starting a lab more than anyone else.
-Get to know the department staff. Figure out who really knows how to get things done and how to work and learn from them. Appreciate them, because their expertise in navigating the often super obscure processes of financial systems, bureaucratic hurdles, HR requirements, etc will come in extremely handy. You will likely mess up some/all of these processes and they will have to fix it.
-Be organized. There’s so much to keep track of and you can’t really count on anyone else to be on top of their job (ie make sure your grants come in as expected, make sure orders actually arrive and are correct, make sure animals are being taken care of the way you expect). Many things that you might have taken for granted or assumed in the past might need to be communicated/documented/explained in extreme detail and this also takes a lot of time.
-Find a journal club or relevant group to talk science with – I definitely felt intellectually lonely at first, especially when your days are filled with purchasing and logistics and paperwork rather than anything actually sciency.
-Because I came in with funding, I took the advice of focusing on just getting the science going for the first year rather than spending too much time writing grants. I did apply for private foundation awards but these were usually quite short and less effort than NIH/NSF grants
-Make a lab manual (you can get started on this early!) and a standard onboarding document - there’s so much to communicate to new lab members, trainings/paperwork to get through and it’s easy to forget things as you do it over and over.
-How draining the job is. I have never felt more acutely that I am an introvert and it takes some getting used to talking to people all day, constantly being “on”
-How I am pushed out of my comfort zone constantly. Giving talks all the time with very little preparation, fielding a hugely wide variety of questions, being the default leader of most lab discussions instead of just participating in them, constantly doing things that I have no idea how to do. This job definitely makes you grow a lot, and fast!
-How long things take (factoring in how much time it takes to train people, choose items to buy, receive those items, construct and debug, etc)
-How confusing the financial system is - hard to get info, hard to know the rules, extremely easy to spend money
-How time-consuming teaching is, but also rewarding
-How interesting and complex and frustrating/rewarding it can be to work with different people with different quirks, priorities, personalities, and skill sets.
-How much like an echo chamber it feels like when you are the one teaching everyone in the lab things- you get your own opinions repeated back to you as fact, but sometimes without the nuance that you’d intended or failed to convey. It’s hard to always communicate what is generally accepted vs controversial vs your particular take on things, especially when there’s time pressure. It definitely makes you communicate more precisely! This might be alleviated if you hire folks with a background in your area, but it can take a while to recruit others who already come in with expertise.
-How tricky it is to set goals reasonably- I feel like we go through times of not doing enough and times of doing way too much. It’s so different to push yourself hard in crunch times individually vs now learning how to push a group
-Time management/prioritization. It feels like I’m gradually starting to not be the bottleneck for as many things but I still feel like I end up helping everyone else achieve their goals all day and then my important but less urgent tasks get pushed.
-Delegation - Making people feel ownership of the parts of the experiment that they’re doing rather than just following my instructions. Figuring out how to delegate work equally so folks get the help they need, don’t feel unfairly burdened, carry equal weekend/tedious tasks. I still feel like I’m working harder than everyone else at times and that can sometimes make me feel resentful or bitter (this has also gotten much better as lab members gain independence)
-Feeling like I’m not making enough time to read and stay on top of the literature and think carefully.
-Feeling confident in interviewing and deciding who to hire and how to staff the team
-Having lab meetings that are fun and useful and interactive and not so exhausting for me - it really helps to have critical mass!
-When possible, tack on extra studies/extra data collection to existing studies to help generate preliminary results/figures for grants or rotation projects with minimal new time investment
-Get people fast (but not at the expense of them being good)
-Hire staff to a temp position (1year) first so that you can decide whether or not to make them a permanent team member
-You will receive SO. MUCH. ADVICE. Much of it will conflict, not all will resonate. It’s useful to hear different perspectives but definitely don’t feel obliged to follow any of them; do what feels right and relevant to your specific circumstances and what feels true to your style