Effective Self-Management for Early Career Researchers in the Natural Sciences

Invitation to project

Natalia Bielczyk & OHBM Student and Postdoc Special Interest Group,
Edited by AmanPreet Badhwar

Early career researchers in different parts of the world face similar challenges, but not everyone has the same access to mentoring and career development resources. While online mentoring programmes, such as the OHBM International Online Mentoring Programme, are available, it is hard to cover the needs of the whole population of early career researchers in the natural sciences.

In order to tackle this issue within the OHBM Student and Postdoc Special Interest Group, we are developing a set of advice relevant to early career researchers in the natural sciences. The aim of this project is to empower early career researchers to positively influence their future career opportunities on a daily basis - regardless of the circumstances. The main points which we aim to cover are the following:

• Taking charge of your career development by goal setting and making one’s own opportunities
• Managing your time properly
• Tips on taking care of yourself and surrounding yourself with positivity
• Recognizing and addressing bottlenecks in your projects
• Growing your network
• Mentoring and being mentored
• Staying vigilant to opportunities outside science and keeping several doors open

The project will take the form of a full-length manuscript. The draft working paper has been posted under the link https://osf.io/53yrv/.

We would, however, like to further develop the manuscript before submitting this work for peer review. Therefore, to provide advice that can be generalizable to a wide variety of situations, demographics, and countries, we are seeking contributions from the OHBM community. We would like to welcome everyone willing to participate to join us and discuss this subject on the associated Google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/effective-self-management-for-ecrs

We look forward to your contributions. The manuscript is dedicated to early career researchers but we welcome the expertise and experience of seniors researchers on this topic as well. We hope the group endeavour will not only make for a better manuscript but also serve as a platform where early career researchers can give each other support and advice, and make new friends! Depending on the traffic, the Google group might be sustained after the final form of the manuscript is formed. The official starting date of the Google group is Monday, January 14th 2019, and we close collecting contributions on Thursday, February 28th 2019.

Active participation in the Google group will be interpreted as an academic collaboration. Therefore, we will bring together feedback received through the group, invite the significant contributors to co-author this work and reupload the working paper as a preprint with a new, extended list of authors. Invitation will be determined on the basis of: (1) constructive comments / additions to the manuscript and (2) being active and helpful to other members of the Google group. This material will be subsequently submitted for peer review.

You can find all the details about the project, together with the Code of Conduct and the rules for establishing authorship, on the Google group. We hope to meet you soon and chat about careers together!