Self-manage in Academia Like a Pro: What Is the Currency, and Why Understand It First?

Science is business. If you don’t understand this simple fact, you won’t get too far in academia. Unfortunately, very many of us, PhD candidates, do not understand this.

This might be because, in science, the real currency differs from money. In fact, there are several currencies. The number of publications, impact factor, time.

Of course, even if two publications appear in the same issue of the same journal, it does not mean anything. Their worth is not necessarily the same in the author’s eyes.

If a given publication includes a new method, it is gold. This is because you can recycle the same Intellectual Property and come up with applications to mint more scientific publications.

Then come the citations, and invitations to collaborate and co-authorship begin. Furthermore, there are invitations to top lectures and workshops training others to use the method — this constitutes the fame and the praise.

According to Merton (1968), early recognition tends to snowball. Scientists who are already well-known get disproportionate credit for further work, making reputation accumulate faster once it has a head start.

Well, any new method is difficult to obtain. Yet another way to spark interest in public opinion is to break the status quo.

This means criticizing popular approaches to a given problem. Such a body of work also attracts attention, but at the cost of immediately acquiring enemies for life.

On the other hand, if you are one of the followers, a person who skillfully used the existing methods to achieve interesting, novel results, you cannot count on anything. Your reward will be other than quotations.

Self-manage in Academia Like a Pro: What Is the Value of Self-Branding?

Another thing is self-branding.

Some researchers have an idea for their own image right from the get go. After a few years, they are recognizable for their achievements on a specific topic.

Others go round and round. According to Gorbatov, Khapova, and Lysova (2019), employees who actively engage in personal branding tend to report better career outcomes. These outcomes include greater subjective career success.

As an academic, you should become the to-go-to person of sorts sooner or later. But of course, delving into one topic relatively early on carries a risk.

This risk is delving into a research subfield that will die a natural death. That’s the price to pay for joining early — high risk, high reward.

So, how to self-manage here? The best answer to this question might be balance. This means intertwining some highly specialistic papers with some papers meant for the masses.

That’ll be fine. But basically, using intuition to choose the research topic won’t hurt.

Self-manage in Academia Like a Pro: What Is the Value of Intuition?

Honestly, I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe in intuition. And on top of that, I believe you can exercise your intuition, it is just like exercising your muscles.

After over three years spent in neuroscience full time, whenever I encounter a new potential method of solving a problem that I am working on (and this is now the problem of causality in fMRI), I immediately get some qualia associated with it. They might be positive, such as “nice,” “simple,” “clear,” “tasty”  or negative, such as “ugly,” “broken,” or “dark”. It is an immediate impression, even before I get to know this method in full detail.

And then it turns out that 90% of the leads that I thought of as “pretty” from the very beginning were successful. They led me somewhere indeed. While 90% of those that I thought of as indigestible from the beginning lead nowhere for real.

Why Do Most Leads Go Nowhere?

It seems to me that I developed this feeling. This was a result of a long-term conceptualization of problems and breaking them down into independent subproblems.

According to Kahneman and Klein (2009), this kind of reliable gut feeling is exactly what genuine expertise looks like. It only becomes trustworthy after prolonged practice in a domain with regular, learnable patterns.

Most students do algorithmic stuff most of the time. They get some typical, conventional problems to solve and step-by-step instructions.

So, they google the codes already written before, read the codes, load the data, and produce the drawings. These are done to present the results of the analysis.

Creating a new project and figuring out a path to solving this problem takes 2% of their time at best. Therefore, they spend the remaining 98% of the time on writing code, data, and drawings, and of course, sitting in meetings where they can demonstrate these drawings.

Self-manage in Academia Like a Pro: What Is My Take On It.

In my case, the proportions are completely different. I sit and think 70% of the time. Or I stroll and think.

Or I run and think. I try to organize what I already know and find relationships between various bits of knowledge, models, data… Most of this process only happens in my head.

For the first year of my current doctorate, not a single graph was created. Furthermore, not a single code was created in the first 7 months of the project.

And now, after spending a year figuring out everything I need to do in my head, I’m producing like crazy. I have maybe five projects open, which I pursue hard.

Since I quickly see what is worth investing my time in, I also know what is not worth it. Consequently, I save myself a lot of time.

I also try to predict potential missteps. Sometimes I see others’ missteps when other students present their projects. If I like someone, I tell them the ugly truth straight in the eyes…

Of course, I still have to work a lot on my intuition, but I think I’m halfway there. And some haven’t even started.

Conclusion: What Does It Take To Self-manage in Academia?

What else about doing science read business … In my opinion, there are also many completely unscientific aspects to the matter.

Some people are remembered or invited here and there partially because they have good publications. They are also remembered partially because they speak colorfully or even because they have a characteristic appearance.

According to Nisbett and Wilson (1977), a single vivid impression, like a warm delivery style, can unconsciously inflate how people rate someone’s entirely unrelated qualities. This includes the substance of their work.

As my face is completely forgettable and I have a hopeless voice, my life is not easy here. Well, life.

But I have a sharp sense of humor. This was a problem in my previous lab, but in my current lab, it is, surprisingly, strengthened.

I slowly begin to feel something remarkable. For the first time in my life, I can benefit from my sense of humor.