B*****t
发帖数: 820 | 1 Living in a Soft Money World
April 2, 2012
By
Felicia B. LeClere
~with apologies to Madonna
"You do know that this position is funded entirely on soft money, right?"
This can be an unsettling to hear early in a research career. "Soft money"
is a polite euphemism for funding that comes from a source outside a
university or research institute and must be pursued regularly and with
vigor. The "soft" part means the money can be both uncertain and impermanent
, neither of which are adjectives one would like to attach to a job or
career. Yet, a large fraction of the research faculty and staff members of
American universities and research institutions live every day in this "soft
money" world. Those in medical schools, engineering, and the basic sciences
are all too familiar with how fleeting and fragile funding sources can be.
Congressional budget battles become personal when a large fraction of your
research portfolio is funded by federal sources. Foundation funding
priorities are also seldom sustained for the long haul.
It is a difficult environment, but as people continue to commit to the
challenge of scientific research with Ph.D. in hand, a soft money start is
quite likely. Postdoctoral appointments, research staff, and non-tenure-line
faculty positions are as common among new scientists as adjunct teaching
positions are to those with English or history Ph.D.s. While this route may
seem less fraught than teaching five courses at five different universities,
it still holds both substantial challenges and consequences.
What is it like when as a newly minted academic, your career is built fully
around this uncertainty, and "going back to teaching" when the money runs
dry is not an option? Both good and bad things happen. The bad things are
familiar to most of us. Funding fashions can wreak havoc on a research
agenda. A federal preoccupation with obesity, for example, can be replaced
by bioterrorism, by causes of childhood autism, and by anything else that
catches the government's scientific fancy. As a junior researcher, it is
difficult to stay focused on your favorite topic when the money goes
elsewhere. As a result, you run the risk of having your C.V. paint you as
scattered at the very point in your career when it should show single-minded
focus.
In addition to doing many things for the money, you are also always looking
for money. To underwrite your salary and those in your research group, more
of your time is spent writing proposals than doing research. This can be
quite demoralizing, given that the success rate in recent years on most
grants and contracts hovers in the 1 to 5 percent range. Early career
success in the grant and contract world is even harder, so all that writing
may feel like it gets you exactly nowhere. Finally, in environments where
the research money is carefully tracked, billable hours are not just for
lawyers anymore. Finding quiet time to read recent research or to even let
your mind wander is difficult at best. At its worst, living in a soft money
world, can turn you into a frantic, clock-watching, unproductive dilettante.
At its best and managed intelligently, life in the soft money world can
create two equally productive alternative career paths. First, if you are
both lucky and careful, a soft money start can provide you with a clean path
to a tenured research career in a prestigious university. Soft money
positions are almost always defined by working for someone. You might be
recruited as a postdoctoral student, project manager, or research scientist.
The principal investigator may have your career interests at heart or, more
likely, is in desperate need of your labor. Choose your "someone" wisely and
remember that your career is your own to navigate. It is quite easy to
serve the immediate needs of the project like managing the money, hiring and
supervising staff, and keeping the day to day research operations flowing
smoothly. You will be adored by project staff and the PI will view you as
his or her "right-hand" person. The rewards are visceral and immediate but
the consequences can be long-lasting.
Unless you are superhuman, doing first-rate research and an array of
administrative tasks will become almost impossible. To navigate a path out
of soft money, you must find ways to avoid the mundane and steer away from
the tasks that aren’t directly relevant to your research career. It sounds
counterintuitive to underachieve at what you were hired to do but I can
guarantee that the PI of any grant, to say nothing of your own aspirations,
will be much better-served by two published articles at year’s end than an
efficiently run project.
If you are unable to resist the immediacy of the rewards or the love of your
coworkers, which I admittedly could never do, there are many alternatives
opened by starting a career this way. The demands of research projects of
short duration funded with real dollars forces even the PI to learn to
budget, manage staff, and navigate bureaucracy. These are skills that
actually have street value beyond the very narrow confines of academic
research. The lack of permanence also encourages a diversification of
skills and experiences that allow lateral movement and makes your
employability more certain. You are also forced to work effectively in
groups. Grants and contracts that are large enough to support full time
salaries and attract additional funding usually underwrite complex projects
with many players who must work together. You have to both figure out how to
get what you need from others and produce things other people need in a
timely fashion.
This is hard to do in research which, by definition, requires a great deal
of creative chaos and intellectual conflict to be successful. Graduate
school narrows your focus and hardens your boundaries; work within the soft
money world undoes this socialization and gives you the credentials to move
beyond academia or within the world of academic research management. An
efficiently run project will propel you on a different course, which you may
not have initially intended, but may in the end suit you as it has me.
Madonna may have actually had it wrong in the end. Beginning in a material
world does not require you to become a material girl. You just need an
intelligent and thoughtful plan, or, as in my case, a willingness to accept
and shape what comes next. Either way, the specter of a position funded
solely by "soft money" loses its power to frighten.
BIO
Felicia B. LeClere is a principal research scientist in the Public Health
Department of NORC at the University of Chicago, where she works as research
coordinator on multiple projects, including the National Immunization
Survey and the National Children's Study. |
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