Advices regarding academic life

Advices that I’ve mostly picked from Jonathan Tonkin (here) about unwritten expectations and hidden challenges of academic life.

“The road to wisdom? Well, it’s plain
And simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again,
but less
and less
and less.” - The Road to Wisdom - Piet Hein (poem)

On daily basis:

• Use your time wisely and enjoy the freedom that you have before responsibilities increase. Career progression means more demands on your time.
• Once you need to, protect your time like it’s gold. Create space for deep work. Block out your calendar. Don’t let others choose how you spend your time (e.g. in meetings, admin etc.)
• Talk to people who are different to you, who disagree with you, who have different values from you. Diversity of perspectives is critical for progress.
• Hone your craft. Academic writing is a craft. It can be learned. Your papers, proposals, and emails are often the first impression you make—make them good. Editing is where the magic happens. Good writing can be the difference between a funded and non-funded grant.
• Work on refining your message. Successful grants are those with a clear message, where a clear and important gap has been identified, and the solution to fill the gap is clear.
• Spend time de-stressing.

Research strategy:

• Concentrate on your niche (for a while). It helps immensely to be known for something in particular. This requires working in your niche to build up a track record of credibility.
• Once you’ve done that, expand your niche. Let yourself collaborate widely and explore shared interests with interesting people.
• Be flexible—sometimes the funding leads the way. Some of my best collaborations happened because I followed where the opportunities were.
• Follow your curiosity. Let this be your compass. It’s easy to lose it amidst deadlines and metrics. But it’s key for career sustainability.
• Apply for things (awards etc.) even if you don’t think you deserve it. You’re better than you think you are. You gotta be in it to win it.
• Don’t stay in the same place. Moving around institutions and lab groups is critical for your growth. This is particularly important early. I stayed in the same place early, but grew scientifically when I went overseas for postdocs in different groups. You miss out if you’re exposed to limited ideas. Few people become brilliant on their own — you need to be exposed to different ideas, frameworks, ways of thinking to learn your own. I also fully acknowledge that mobility isn’t equally accessible to everyone. Receiving a diversity of experience and mentorship can be found in other ways though, such as through building relationships with collaborators and mentors online.
• Drop everything if you get a big interview.
• Work with good people and cut ties with others.
• Say yes to opportunities early on. If it seems like a good opportunity, it’s worth being in the mix
• Say no, once you start to need to. Our time is finite — saying yes to something means saying no to something else in the future.

Building relationships:

• Build relationships, both professionally and personally.
• Remember you are the sum of the five people you associate with the most. So choose those you frequently work with wisely. They can either build you up or bring you down.
• Mentors matter. Be proactive in finding them, but make sure you show up prepared.
• Ask questions and engage. Don’t sit back and be shy. Be curious and show it. Good questions are way more valuable than good answers.
• Have a digital presence. A website is useful for people to find you. It doesn’t need to be much, just a place to house your publication list, research interests etc.

Efficiency (from Clotilde Djuikem):

• Is not linear.
• Rest is not a luxury but a strategy.
• Is to have enough energy to create without emptying yourself. Knowing to stop. To move forward with joy and clarity.
• Popularizing means seeking clarity. It takes more time to get to the point without betraying the substance: explaining simply is often the most demanding.
• Archimedes had his famous idea in a bath. Henri Poincaré used to explain that his ideas arose while he was walking, often when he was no longer thinking about the problem. This stands for deep research is often born in calm, not in frenzy.

Conclusion:

The metrics—citations, grants, publications—are just proxies for what really matters: contributing meaningful knowledge, fostering the next generation of scientists, and building a community that tackles important questions together.

The important thing is not so much the content, but what it evokes in those exposed to it. Good ideas emerge from exposure to reflections and free time for reflection.