Congratulations! You are getting ready to start your own lab. Or maybe you are just thinking about it. Or you want to know what it would be like if you did. Let’s talk about it!
Being a professor is an incredible job and for myself, I can’t imagine a more gratifying and rewarding career. That said, with all the talk about how difficult, competitive, random, and frustrating the academic job market can be, there is a lot less discussion of how hard it can be to actually get that lab started. It’s like running a small business: you’ve got to hire people, develop and execute projects, order equipment and supplies, acquire funding, manage budgets, and market your work to the outside world.
It can be an isolating place. Robert Sapolsky once told me his first year and a half of his faculty job was the one of the hardest periods of his career, and that it got a lot better after that; I found that to be true too. When I was starting off, I often felt baffled and overwhelmed. I became shockingly forgetful. I forgot names, faces, and whole half-hour-long conversations. I made silly scheduling errors all the time. I constantly felt blindsided by new and immediately pressing responsibilities that I felt I had no preparation for.
I realize now that what I was feeling was mental overload and decision fatigue. Not only was almost every aspect of the job new, but all the people were new, the location was new, the routines were new, and even going to the grocery store required opening a maps app. But that also means it gets a lot easier after the first year or two, when you’ve got the lay of the land and you have some systems for handling common things. There are fairly predictable cycles of tasks that emerge in the academic calendar: prospective grad student inquiries, fellowship deadlines, recommendation letter requests, committee meetings, department social activities, administrative deadlines, and grant proposal dates. Being able to plan for these proactively lightens the mental load, but is very hard to do at first.
So how do you navigate those difficult first couple of years? Here are a few thoughts based on my own experiences. I’ll try to keep the basic overview short, but follow me to the footnotes if you want details.
1. Put systems in place
2. Expand beyond your comfort zone
3. Stay focused on your highest priorities
4. Prioritize recruiting great people
5. Establish lab norms and culture
First, putting in place systems really helps. These systems can scale up as your lab gets larger and you take on more projects. A few key areas include: (i) developing a system for responding to common types of inquiries such as prospective graduate students, undergrads interested in summer research, postdoc inquires, and recommendation letter requests; (ii) how to manage meeting with your current lab members; and (iii) how to handle developing new collaborations.
For prospective student inquiries, I developed templates for how to respond based on categories: high school students, undergraduates from my own versus other institutions, prospective graduate students, prospective postdocs. Within those categories, over time I developed benchmarks for what merits a more in-depth, personal response versus a more cursory response versus no response.[1] Creating these benchmarks helps me to reflect on my goals for my lab, including scientific interests, background, and composition of the lab, being mindful of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I also try to batch prospective grad student inquiries so that I read and evaluate them all at once, making comparison easier and streamlining the scheduling of zoom calls.[2]
For meeting with my lab members, thanks to fantastic advice from colleagues I’ve adopted a few helpful systems. First, I try to meet one-on-one with every member of my lab every 1-2 weeks.[3] I ask each lab member to maintain a running shared document that they update in advance of (12-24 hours before) each meeting with me that lists the items they’d like to discuss, and can also be used to show plots of data, links to other files they want me to read, and questions. This is great for helping me to get up to speed quickly with what each lab member is doing and think through ideas before the meeting starts, and it is helpful for lab members to reflect on what they want to discuss before we meet.[4]
Managing new collaborations is a tricky balance as a new professor. You want to expand beyond your comfort zone without overextending yourself. Collaborations within your own university can be a great way to meet new people and get integrated into the university, within and beyond your department, and these relationships can help to support your tenure and promotion case down the road. On the flip side, a bad collaboration can be really deflating and time-consuming. It is important to seek out collaborators with which there is mutual respect, good communication, and a general feeling of good vibes—find people you like working with who bring in interesting ideas, who do what they say they will do and pull their weight, and who help bring new perspectives to the work. Avoid collaborations with people who don’t seem to value or respect your ideas, don’t follow through, or are too overextended to stay engaged. It’s okay to have a meeting or two and then change your mind if it’s not feeling right.
In your first few years you want to launch your core research program, which will usually be centered on the things you know well and are already good at. As you do this, though, you can also start to reach a bit for new directions and ideas that come along—often serendipitously—through chance conversations with colleagues, ideas from students and postdocs, interdisciplinary collaboration opportunities, and so on. The art here is to sift through the ones that are exciting, energizing, and fruitful in the long term from the ones that are momentarily exciting but quickly fade into a chore. This only really comes with experience (and even then it's never perfect), but a good rule of thumb is to wait a day or two before responding to any new inquiry or invitation to make sure it remains exciting. Another helpful strategy is to open the door a little, with a preliminary meeting or phone call, maybe some initial reading and data-digging, but be open to stepping back if the project loses your interest. You can be proactive about this by thoughtfully engaging in your own collaboration-building, for example by proposing and leading a working group on your chosen topic with your dream-team of colleagues, but do this very selectively as these groups can take time and it’s difficult to accomplish much without very focused leadership.
My most important advice to a faculty member is to stay focused on your highest priorities. Make sure to use your precious money and hiring power to build the team who will pursue your core projects. Don’t let too many side projects divert you from these. Make sure that you schedule time to prioritize research (including manuscript writing and editing, grant proposal preparation, collaboration management, and logistics) along with your teaching and service commitments. Say “no” liberally when something does not align well with your top priorities, including many forms of university committee service, journal reviewing and editing, collaborations that are not central to your interests, and student requests from outside your lab, classes, or closely aligned research areas. In my experience one of the best excuses was “I’m really trying to stay focused on building my research program right now.” Who can argue with that?
Who you recruit to join your lab has as big of an effect on your developing research program as almost any other decision you make. When taking on a mentee, make sure they are someone you want to talk to every week for the next five years—even if they are brilliant and have an amazing skill set, if you don’t work and communicate with them well it will be a strain not just on you but on the whole lab. I look for people who express a strong and focused interest in our lab’s area of research and are able to articulate research questions that are specific, interesting, and ground-breaking, rather than reiterating the lab’s general research interests. This expectation is scaled with career stage, so I expect postdocs to have a clearer grasp on the cutting edge of the field and my own lab’s work than prospective grad students and undergraduates, but every prospective member should have some clear rationale, motivation, and knowledge of our specific research program (beyond just ecology research in general). I look for evidence in their previous experience that they know how to be self-motivated, learn on the job, and complete research projects—such as publications, presentations at national conferences, and strong recommendation letters from previous advisors speaking to their independence or ability to make the most of the opportunities they’ve had. I also look for statements of interest that provide strong scientific rationale for their interests and convey a good conceptual understanding of the field, rather than just a general overarching interest in it (again, scaled by career stage).
To recruit people, I post ads on my lab’s website, listservs like Ecolog and IDDjobs.org, and in emails to colleagues. I try to meet prospective students and postdocs at conferences (such as this awesome one this summer!) and if possible hear their talks or poster pitches and chat with them in person. For prospective grad students, I have a zoom meeting with the strongest candidates before deciding who to invite for on-campus interviews. For prospective postdocs, I follow up an initial zoom chat with a more formal zoom research presentation (45 minutes on current research and future potential interests in my lab, and 15 minutes for Q&A), which I invite my current lab members to attend. Feedback from lab members and other faculty members is extremely helpful for picking up on things I missed and either confirming or providing a different perspective on my own impressions, giving me confidence that I am recruiting the right person.
Having a fantastic lab culture goes a long way to making your job fun and your work successful. At the beginning it’s awkward when there are just one or two people. Try holding joint lab meetings and social events with other closely aligned labs and including undergraduates and students from other labs in your lab meetings. Spending casual time with lab members, such as regularly eating lunch or going on walks together, to build connection and rapport. Communicate your expectations for how you want group meetings to run: for example, for everyone to be on time, attend every week in person, read papers in advance, provide thoughtful feedback, and contribute actively to the discussion but be self-aware that they’re not dominating and overpowering others. Establish norms for lab meeting presenters too: send papers out with ample lead time for everyone to read them, present manuscript drafts and practice talks are far enough along that they are ready for specific feedback[5], and make it clear what kinds of feedback you are looking for. You can try to make sure everyone engages by saying “I want to hear from everyone because you all have really different and interesting perspectives” and if people still don’t speak up, “I’d love to hear from X, Y, and Z who we haven’t heard from yet.” If needed, privately and respectfully communicate with people who are inadvertently taking up too much space or shutting others down by asking them to self-reflect or by gently pointing out the pattern and its effects. Over time, these traditions and practices[6] will become ingrained and new members will automatically adopt them, especially if you focus on recruiting people who are good vibes and buy into the lab culture.
Starting a lab is hard but also so rewarding as you get to see your ideas come to fruition, your research grow beyond your own imagination and expertise, and your mentees flourish in their programs and careers. Where else do you get to choose who you work with and what you work on in both a daily and long-term basis?
[1] While I initially believed in responding to every student inquiry I received, as the volume of email I receive has increased I have started to include relevant information on my website and filter out inquiries from people who clearly have not done any homework beforehand, including high school students (I don’t accept high school volunteers in my lab because it creates inequitable access to science) and prospective students and postdocs who don’t make any attempt to personalize their inquiry to my lab. These inquiries no longer get a response.
[2] Recently I’ve streamlined this further by putting a link to a Google form on my website and asking students to respond there, though that wasn’t initially necessary when I got fewer inquiries.
[3] I’ve tried a few scheduling methods but what I like the best is using meeting scheduling software (I use a free Calendly account) that allows people to automatically book meetings based on rules and availability you set; you can limit the number of meetings per day, the hours of those meetings, the time between meetings, and availability on specific days and it integrates with your calendar, so it gives me a feeling of control while dramatically cutting down on scheduling emails. I only share this link with people who I want to meet with, so I avoid having unwanted meetings appear in my schedule.
[4] I have found that these running documents help to cut down on miscommunication and frustration in situations where a student might otherwise jump right into the nitty gritty details of a project when I’m not up to speed.
[5] One important part of our lab culture is that we expect for practice talks and draft manuscripts to be ready for prime time when shared at lab meeting. This doesn’t mean it has to be perfectly polished, but it should be at a point where there is enough substance that people can give concrete and specific feedback. Any holes or gaps should be intentional—”I need feedback on this specific part”—rather than just incomplete. Practice talks should be given with enough time in advance to actually make substantive changes but close enough to the event that the presentation is well developed and in a very solid draft.
[6] One of my favorite lab traditions is our Goals and Intentions lab meeting that we hold at the start of every quarter. We each share our concrete goals for what we want to accomplish that quarter (e.g., analyses, manuscript drafts, presentations, applications), along with our intentions for how we want to go about our work and life (e.g., time management, work-life balance, mindset, values). We first discuss these with a partner for 20 minutes, during which we also reflect on the previous quarter’s goals and intentions and what we learned from them, then we go around the room and everyone shares their goals and intentions for the quarter. It’s a wonderful way to get up to speed on what everyone is working on and to get ideas and inspiration.