When I showed up to work on my first official day as a faculty member, there was little fanfare. July 1st, 2016 was a Friday, and with the holiday weekend approaching, the building was quiet. I have found it frustrating that in science, the time to celebrate is rarely obvious. With papers, the final acceptance comes after a slog through resubmission. With grants, the notice of award comes months after the initial (often revealing) score. After my first day, I went out to a nice dinner and embraced the inherent optimism of celebrating the future.

I was right to be optimistic, because I’ve generally had a good year. I’ll list some of the things that have worked for me in a minute, but first I want to reflect on two themes that have emerged as I’ve settled into life as PI.

First, I have found myself wanting better for my students than what was expected of myself and my peers. In some sense, this has been a matter of timing. The replicability crisis came to a head as I transitioned from grad school to postdoc, and in response, psychology and neuroscience researchers have raised their standards for what constitutes good science. So have I. Lab culture starts from day one, and I’m grateful that my students will never know a day when transparency and reproducibility were not expected of them.

Second, I have spent the year viewing my research area through the lens of a novice, both in the lab and in my teaching. In the lab, whereas I once might have been content to leave some ends untied or ideas still fuzzy, I have to take a new approach when training junior lab members. Ambiguity doesn’t cut it. If I have a vision, I need to communicate it, because realistically I am not the one who will do the heavy lifting.

I was lucky to teach undergraduate cognitive neuroscience this year, where I got to take a step back from my own niche area more than I have in a long time. It was energizing to rediscover concepts I had forgotten and to learn about new findings that hadn’t been on my radar. Teaching, of course, is not all sunshine and rainbows, but I genuinely liked the way that it put my research back into perspective. It also made me reflect on my own scientific writing. We read several primary articles in the course, and I was reminded that a mark of a good article is that undergraduates can understand what was done and why it was important.

Those are my big-picture take-aways. Now for some specific tips that I have found helpful:

  • I wrote a lab manual, and it has been useful for onboarding and for setting expectations.
  • I read a weekly email about staying committed to writing and research as a junior faculty member. One tip I picked up is to hold a “Sunday meeting” with myself, where I write down everything that I need to do that week and roughly sketch out when I plan to do it.
  • For new projects, we’ve been writing pre-analysis plans, which helps to ensure that we’ve worked through our hypotheses and plans before we begin.
  • For keeping on top of the data, I’ve found R notebooks to be incredibly valuable, both for my own data analyses but also for reviewing my students’ work.
  • For teaching, I procrastinated deliberately on course prep (following the advice that it would take as long as I let it), and although the spring semester was exhausting, everything got done.

The best advice, as always, is to hire people who are talented, friendly, and resilient, which I’ve been fortunate to do. Many thanks to the first generation of the MemoLab: Kyle, Max, Rosie, and Rose.