Tell them a story-a believable, credible story-about what your lab will be like 5 years from now: well-funded, vibrant, productive, pursuing a valuable, ambitious but realistic research agenda that meshes well with the department's mission and with the other research going on in the department. How do you do this? Provide the committee a compelling, reassuring, believable image of what their life will be like when you are working down the hall. The aim of your research plan, then, as of the rest of your application, is to assure the hiring committee that life with you will be pain-free. Hiring committees desperately want to avoid making a serious mistake by investing institutional and intellectual capital in the wrong person. In that case what matters is, what is the committee looking for? Think of it as a rough draft, a fantasy trip for your career.īut never mind about that. So take a stab at writing a research plan, even if you don't expect to be on the job market for a while. And if you've already started to think about your own lab, it will help you to refine your plans. Writing a research plan casts your gaze forward and prompts you to begin planning for when you have your own laboratory. It's possible to function quite well as a postdoc or grad student while giving little thought to your future. Not yet on the job market? Just starting out as a postdoc? A research plan isn't just for demonstrating it's also for honing and refining. It's also an opportunity to begin to demonstrate the creative and independent thinking required of a successful scientist. As will become apparent later in this document, one of the functions of a research plan is to demonstrate your intellectual vision and aspirations. Your research plan is a map for your career as a research science professional. The research plan, however, serves another, very important function: It contributes to your development as a scientist. From your immediate point of view, the purpose of a research plan is to help get you hired. It depends on who's asking the question, and who's answering it. As a consequence this piece, like the other tools in the tool kit, will remain fresh and useful when other resources have become dated and useless. Our aim is to do some of your homework for you, to make sure that you'll never have to read more than you have time for.įurthermore, we'll keep talking to people about this topic, and we'll incorporate new responses into this document as we receive them. We considered everything, filtered out the muck, and distilled it all down to a general strategy and a few simple principles, with a few variations on the theme thrown in for good measure. All of our sources have experience some of our sources have a lot of experience. We interviewed and corresponded with faculty and research scientists who have served on hiring committees. Why? Because we talked to a lot of people. What is hard is finding advice you can rely on. Opinions, after all, are not in short supply in the academy. Okay, so that isn't exactly true: It isn't hard to find advice. And until now, there was little advice to be found. Which is too bad: Writing an effective research plan is tricky.
#ELUCIDATE THE STEPS IN PLANNING A RESEARCH PROJECT HOW TO#
Just as rare are programs designed to help doctoral students and postdocs learn how to create a research plan. Nearly every applicant for a tenure-track faculty job is expected to include a research plan.
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