How to explore your scientific values and develop a vision for your field
It is a well-known irony of academia that the job of a principal investigator (PI) requires skills professors are traditionally not trained for. From teaching and mentoring to project managing and budgeting, PIs are required to know many things that don’t come up during the pure research they do as Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers. To some extent, these are “known unknowns,” meaning skills an incoming professor knows they’ll need to learn, even if they haven’t had much experience in them yet. I can say from personal experience, however, that one part of the job caught me off guard: my role as an evaluator.
In just over a year and a half as a new professor, I have read about 400 research statements, including applications for scholarships, Ph.D. programs, postdoctoral fellowships, faculty positions and grants, written by everyone from undergraduate students to full professors. These statements represent the plans and hopes of a whole crop of budding scientists, and my job is to help decide whether those plans will play out.
On what basis are such decisions to be made? Most postdocs have some experience evaluating research, notably from serving as a reviewer on a paper. For journal reviews, the task is constrained, the standards are somewhat clear, and the outcome is a full report detailing any concerns, which is returned to the authors and an editor. Evaluating research proposals and other types of future work, however, is quite different. Proposals often lack the level of detail needed to fully convey how rigorous the eventual work will be. There may even be uncertainty as to whether the work can be done at all, or at least whether this specific person in this specific place with these specific resources can plausibly do it. In many cases, the evaluation of the proposed work can’t be nuanced but rather needs to collapse to a thumbs up or thumbs down.
