Even the Brainiest May Need Help

The Society for Neuroscience is a prestigious organization for scientists studying the brain. More than 30,000 people from 80 countries, mainly hard-science PhDs, attend its annual conference, which will end today.

For the last two days, I was privileged to do 15-minute one-on-one career coaching with attendees. Here are summaries of some of the sessions. I offer them to you for four reasons:

1. They might contain career advice that’s useful to you.

2. They might legitimate your desire to get help.

3. They demonstrate that advice-giving can be wise, especially if solicited. Axiomatic in psychology is that, where possible, the helper’s job is to facilitate the client coming up with his or her own solutions. And in my private practice, I typically hew to that but in this setting, in which I had only 15 minutes per client, I felt I should, after listening carefully to their situation, offer suggestions. Invariably I sensed they appreciated that.

That comports with my experience with my regular clients: Yes, default to facilitating the client coming up with their own solutions but when s/he has run out of ideas and is seeking input, if I have a potentially worthy suggestion, it is helpful to offer it tactfully. Of course, listen carefully for even a subtle negative response to it, for example, a flat tone of agreement. But I believe that tactfully offering advice while paying close attention to the person’s response is an underrated tool.

4. The following examples demonstrate that you can help a technical person in a short time without technical expertise. Yes, my being a career counselor helped but I believe that if I weren't one, I would have come up with most of the same suggestions. I've changed the coachees' names and irrelevant details to protect anonymity.

Sherry works at an prestigious research institute. Although she already works 60 hours a week, her boss keeps piling on the work and finally, when Sherry said it was too much, her boss threatened to fire her. Sherry slunk out of her office. Sherry asked me what to do. I suggested she not back down but rather, return to the boss’s office with a list of all her tasks and the approximate time each takes and then ask the boss how Sherry might get it all done. That will likely result in--without direct confrontation--the boss realizing she was being unfair and perhaps suggest how Sherry might delegate some of the work.

David is a 64-year-old professor at a university that will likely close. He can’t afford to retire and wanted my help in vying for a new position. He said that he has an interesting research agenda and is a good teacher. I suggested that one advantage of age is that he has made a number of connections. He should invoke the most respected of them to tout him to department chairs. That’s more credible than touting himself. I also suggested he give his referrers ammunition: a one-pager describing his research agenda plus a two-minute highlight video from a class he’s teaching. He said he hadn’t thought of either and will try them.

Phyllis runs a lab at a small college and has no extramural funding. I suggested that, as soon as we got off the phone, she write a one-pager to crystallize her thinking about what’s most worthy of funding, and then verbally pitch it to the many funders at the conference: NIH, NSF, DOD, etc. She hadn’t thought of that but said she’d do it immediately. She just emailed me to say that an NIH funding decision-maker said he was interested in three of her projects.

Robert is a post-doc and would like to work for a consulting company such as Deloitte or Accenture but when he tried at Accenture, after one conversation, she stopped returning his calls. On probing, it was clear that the person at Accenture was a data science expert not at all involved in Robert’s field, neuroscience. We laughed at the fact that Robert was broadly generalizing based on an unrepresentative sample of one, something he’d never do in his research. So I suggested he identify—from the companies’ websites and LinkedIn-- an on-target scientist at a half dozen consulting firms---big ones like Accenture and boutique firms and email them.

Deborah runs a lab at a mid-tier university and believes her lab deserves more national recognition. I asked if she felt her writing and presentation skills are all they should be. She admitted that neither hers nor her post-docs are--They’ve focused on their research. So I suggested that in upcoming staff meetings they watch highly rated TED talks by scientists, discuss what they learned from the TED talks, and then do mock mini-talks for each other, giving honest but tactful feedback. She said she had never thought of that but loved the idea.

Neuroscience Essential Reads

What Your Favorite Movie Genre Reveals About Your Brain

The Illusion of “Now”

Rachel supervises a post-doc, Danielle, who refuses to do much work because she says she doesn't believe in the research. When I asked Rachel whether she thought that was the real reason or rather, that Danielle lacked the necessary ability or skills. Rachel thought the latter. I then asked if she had spent enough time watching Danielle work and coaching her to help her fill the skill gaps. Rachel said she hadn't but thinks it's a good idea.

Anna is finishing her bachelor’s at Berkeley (with honors) and looking for a good Ph.D. program to prepare for a career understanding the mechanism behind why people develop severe mental illness in adulthood. I said that such research gets best funding at prestigious universities, for example, Cal Tech, MIT, and Princeton. She should search those programs’ sites to find a professor at each institution with compatible interests and then write or phone the professor to ask such questions as, “What sorts of research work might I be doing if you were to be my advisor” and “Every graduate program has a distinct culture. What makes yours different?” She said she liked the idea and will do it.

The Takeaway

Do you need to get help from someone, yes with some relevant experience, but perhaps more importantly, who has a lot of common sense?

Do you want to offer such help, perhaps to one or more highly accomplished people? At the end of each session at the Society for Neuroscience conference, the counselee and I felt s/he was more likely to make a difference—the result of just a 15-minute session.