Selling Yourself (No, Not THAT)

Medical and scientific degrees give a surprising range of career options. My own path courses through academia, but careers in a variety of businesses present other options.

Jobs outside of the ivory tower, and sometimes within it, require different documentation than a faculty position.

A number of documents summarize careers, including our qualifications, experience, and fit with various positions. For faculty, the gold standard is the curriculum vitae followed closely by the NIH biosketch. The business world relies more on resumes and shorter documents that must be focused to the desired position.The curriculum vitae or CV is an all-inclusive document. Most institutions of higher learning have a preferred format. Anything can be included on this document; if in doubt, list it. This is one time when less is not more! Your CV should be ready to print at all times. Also, include the print date on your CV so outdated copies can be readily identified. Do not obfuscate on this document; if required, separate peer-reviewed and invited papers and presentation, and make sure your status on grants is clear. Use standard fonts, minimal color, and no pictures. Any of these items may limit scannability of your document!

The NIH biosketch is a bit less complete than the CV, but far more manageable for grant applications or speaker introductions. The format changed recently, adding a  “personal statement” block (ridiculed here) that lets an investigator focus their biosketch on a specific proposal. Keep this document ready-to-go as well, other than customizing the statement section. Be sure and download the latest form and instructions from nih.gov; you never know when those crazy federal employees will change things up again!

An executive summary supplements a traditional CV. This brief, 1 or 2 page synopsis document, provides a snap-shot of stuff tailored to your current career objective. The summary is always printed in portrait format. Following contact information, the objective statement is a brief (2-3 lines) description of what you wish to do, your top strengths, skills, or talents, and a summary of results that can be expected if you join an organization. Qualifications follow in a short paragraph or a few bullet points. This section in why you can do what you say you will do. The achievements statement is a priority list, tailored for the position you seek, of accomplishments that illustrate your objectives and qualifications. This section should be constructive strategically, not exhaustively  (your CV will do that). Use action words and quantify results when possible:

• Bad: Profits appeared to improve after my actions.
• Good: My actions increased profits 25% over 12 months.

The final document, the prospectus, also supplements a traditional CV. This instrument is very focused and limited to a single page printed in landscape format. Contact information and objective statement are similar to those of the executive summary. A profile section is similar to the qualifications statement of the executive summary. The difference is the final section, areas of expertise, which highlights skills, accomplishments, and personal characteristics applicable to the desired position.

Example of an Executive Summary:

Example of a Prospectus:

Providing summary documents appropriate to your job search can highlight relevant accomplishments. Their inclusion may help your new boss find that critical factor that gets you hired.

Photo courtesy of PhotoXpress. Other materials created by Pascale H. Lane, MD.

First Quarter Grades Are In

At the end of December I made my blogolutions. I gave myself an A for following them at the end of January. Have I kept up my grade average?

• January 19 posts
• February 23 posts
• March 19 posts

Grand total: 61 posts in 14 weeks for an average of 4.4 posts per week.

My goal was 3 to 5 posts each week.

I have exceeded my expectations about serious, sciencey blogging, with multiple posts each month on biomedical science or other healthcare issues.

I have earned a  nice bottle of zinfandel, I believe.

Image courtesy of PhotoXpress.

More On Personal Branding and Platform

Once again, my daily email from Pink Magazine proved timely and informative. Today’s topic, personal branding, fits well with all the talk about platform development in last week’s workshop.

One informative link was to an online identity calculator. This short query uses a Google search of your name to determine your digital distinctness.

It helps to be “Pascale Lane” and not “Jane Doe.” It also helps to be online actively managing what people associate with you. Owning your own domain, blogging, and other digital interactions will help increase your digital brand immensely. Most importantly, you can move your brand in the direction you desire rather than passively allowing others to determine your image.

In this day and age, when a Google search about you may make or break a job search, overlooking your online brand would be short-sided. I encourage everyone to use the link and determine their online identity score.

Think it doesn’t matter? Better think again.

Increasing Sensations of Incompetence

I am learning to write creative nonfiction.

I have this book idea. I finally “gave” myself this conference to try and get my act together and WRITE THE DAMN BOOK!

Among this group of mostly middle-aged healthcare workers, I am way ahead of the online media curve. I have a blog (no link because you’re reading it right now). I am on FaceBook. I am on LinkedIn. I even Tweet!

The first day of the conference discussed preparing the book proposal and pitching it. I felt smug then because I had began developing “platform” with my traditional and social media work (see Thursday’s post).

Yesterday we talked about actual writing. Michael Palmer presented his insights from the beginning and growth of his writing career.

This morning focuses on public relations for budding authors. And I feel so far behind. I just now registered my domain name. I just signed up for HARO (help a reporter out). I have bought my Flip videocamera, but have yet to upload to my YouTube Channel (no link because THERE IS NOTHING THERE YET). So much to do… and I haven’t yet factored in the book proposal! Or actually writing THE DAMN BOOK! Or my day jobs.

Sigh!

The good news is I have a lot of new blog fodder. And I have to write; I don’t know why. It is part of who I am. So hang on- it may be a bumpy ride, but it won’t be boring. At least not every day…

Building a Platform

When I hear the word platform, something like these Madden Girl beauties comes to mind.

So why was I listening to “Platform: What It Is and Why You Need One” in a writers workshop this morning? Would hot shoes and a taller appearance make publishers like me better? If so, then my decision to bring a single pair of low wedges might bring me down, and  not merely in physical stature!

Turns out that one’s platform consists of professional credentials, media work, and other writing; the stuff that lifts you above the waves of others out there, sort of like an oil platform in the ocean (once I came up with the analogy I had to use it).

Turns out that blogging, podcasting, twittering, facebooking, and other social media help build that platform.

Now when my husband asks me if I’m screwing around on the computer/Blackberry/iPod again, I can honestly tell him no; I’m building my platform!

Trip Time

Tomorrow I leave the homestead in the heartland for a workshop in Boston.

I have wanted to attend one of these writing courses since I first saw the brochure. I am finally making it happen. Maybe, just maybe, I will write my book one of these days.

So tonight I will pack 3 days worth of clothing in a carry-on bag. And I know my readers are asking, “What will you pack?”

• 2 pairs of dress trousers in wrinkle-resistant blends
• 3 tops
• 1 jacket
• Undies and accessories and other necessities
• PJs

I will wear my best pair of jeans with another top and jacket; the jeans will make the trip home as well. I have a pair of neutral metallic 1.5” wedges, that will serve me well through airports and along city streets, as well as complimenting every outfit in the suitcase.

The usual electronic devices want to come along for the ride: BlackBerry, Netbook, iPod, and Kindle.

It is time to do those things I love, travel and write.

I am so glad I gave myself this trip!

Blogolutions = SUCCESS!

On December 30 I blogged a summary of my output for 2009 and made blogolutions for 2010. We are now 4 weeks into the year, so I thought it was time to assess my progress:

1. Three to five posts each week, with an average of 15 per month.

Today is post 18 for January, or 4.5 posts/week. I deserve a cookie!

2.  At least once each month I will address something of substance from the world of biomedical science.

So looking at my 17 posts before today, 4 deal firmly with biomedical topics and 6 with scientific communication. Another cookie for me!

3.  I will continue to FWDAOTI as I see fit.

I classify 3 of my posts in this category. You know, I don’t really want this many cookies. Maybe glasses of wine instead?

4.  If I want to write about something , I will, because this blog is for me.

Thus the posts dealing with shoes. And the video of Laser Cats 5, the funniest SNL Short in a long, long time…

So far I am 4 for 4, making these my most successful resolutions ever. I wonder why I can’t do this with the weight loss and exercise resolutions?

The past week has been sparse because of patient care duties. I have some new ideas to explore next week when my schedule eases up a bit.

Photo courtesy of PhotoXpress.

Year in Review

I first blogged in August 2008. I posted again in September and then called it a year. I wrote a bit more in 2009- today is post #137:

Things started slowly, but in March I discovered ScienceBlogs. Suddenly I had things to say. Sure, some of it was personal. Some of it was pure wackaloonacy. Some of it was practical, like wardrobe advice for traveling to scientific meetings. Some of it was bitchy.

Not enough of it was biomedical.

After my self-study, I am setting some goals for 2010:

1. Three to five posts each week, with an average of 15 per month.
2. At least once each month I will address something of substance from the world of biomedical science.
3. I will continue to FWDAOTI as I see fit.
4. If I want to write about something , I will, because this blog is for me.

Happy New Year!

Dear Elsevier

I am writing a grant application. This morning I found a reference I need. You published it. Even though it is 6 years old, you want $34 for the reprint.

Fine, I need it. I will pony up this amount.

It has been long enough since I registered with “your fine service” that I cannot remember my password. Your automatons were kind enough to reset it to a string of letters and numbers chosen at random.

Now your site still will not let me log in. I’m using the email to which you just sent the reset password. The password was copied directly from the email, and I made sure there was no punctuation to mess things up.

When I try to register as a new customer, I cannot. I am given my username (my email address) and told to login. Your site then tells me that my username and/or password is “not recognized.” Even though your computer just sent them to me.

Maybe I can live without this paper. 

What I really really want to do right now is find my gleaming blade and confront whoever (1)decided to charge for downloads forever and (2)designed your clearly fucked-up online download system. Of course, you’re only hurting yourselves. And I did just save $34 of the university’s money.

Happy Holidays, Elsevier!

Photo courtesy of PhotoXpress.

How Much Can You Cram In a 12-Page Limit?

The gold standard for funding of biomedical research in the US, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), changes it forms in 2010.

Formerly 25 page applications will be shortened to 12, supposedly to make grant preparation and review kinder and friendlier. Makes NIH seem all warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it?

Yesterday, a blogger over at The Scientist raised concerns about the new format.

According to Robert Kalb, a University of Pennsylvania neurologist who is also the chair of the NIH's cellular and molecular biology of neurodegeneration study section, the changes may favor senior scientist:

"it frees the experienced investigator to not provide as much feasibility and preliminary data because they can just cite their previous publications."
This, Kalb told The Scientist, means that applicants with robust publication histories, proven track records of scientific accomplishment, and more experience writing tersely about their research may have the edge over their younger, less experienced counterparts.

First, senior investigators do not always write well. I have reviewed plenty of proposals from “giants in the field” that were unholy messes of grammatical and contextual errors. Often there would be something good in the application- these are successful investigators- but poor communication skills made it excruciating to sift out. The contention that senior investigators are more likely to have published work with their techniques and data they can reference has more validity; however, a junior investigator without a paper citing most of the techniques in their proposal  is very unlikely to get a fundable score anyway. Even for programs that do not require preliminary data, lack of a publication record often “reduced enthusiasm” for the proposal.

As The Scientist blog, posted by Bob Grant, also points out:

The NIH has made efforts to make the peer-review process easier on young scientists, recently announcing guidelines that more generously rank applications submitted by younger investigators

My interest in this topic is, of course, selfish; I hope to submit a proposal in January 2010. I spent the past 2 days at an NIH-sponsored conference, gathering background applicable to my proposal. The changes provoke anxiety; I’m a “big-picture'” person, and reviewers have never felt my proposals include enough detail about experimental minutiae. Where am I going to write that stuff now? I guess I will just learn to deal with it, same as everyone else in my world.

Photo courtesy of PhotoXpress.

This post got delayed a day because my internet connection at Washington National Airport refused to let it upload; then we barely got home because of blizzard conditions in Omaha.

Valuing The Written Word

I recently attended an interesting lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Medical Colleges in Boston. Harold E. Varmus, MD, gave the Robert G. Petersdorf Lecture, entitled Publication Practices and Academic Values. The talk addressed the increasing pressure to publish in glamour journals, both for funding and academic advancement. Dr. Varmus pointed out that many of his most significant works appeared in “lesser” journals that served the appropriate audience for the science. Discussions after the formal talk centered on judging academic achievement on that standard.

How did some scientific journals acquire biblical reputations?

Some have been around a long, long time. I have not found anyone who can remember a time when The New England Journal of Medicine was not the premier clinical research carrier.

How do we determine a journal’s worth? At the present time, the index of choice is the Impact Factor (IF). There is an excellent description of IF and its calculation on Wikipedia:

The impact factor, often abbreviated IF, is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to articles published in science and social science journals. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field, with journals with higher impact factors deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. The impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now part of Thomson Reuters. Impact factors are calculated yearly for those journals that are indexed in Thomson Reuter's Journal Citation Reports.

Academics, especially scientists, love an objective numerical datapoint. During the 20 years or so that I have participated in these endeavors [has it really been that long?], the IF has risen dramatically in importance because it seems so objective. However, like all numbers, the IF can be gamed, and its validity has been questioned:

The impact factor refers to the average number of citations per paper, but this is not a normal distribution. It is rather a Bradford distribution, as predicted by theory. Being an arithmetic mean, the impact factor therefore is not a valid representation of this distribution and unfit for citation evaluation.^[6]

Most journals try to improve IF by providing more review articles. Reviews receive more citations than original research, thus improving the IF. Other manipulations may also inflate IF:

Journals may change the fraction of "citable items" compared to front-matter in the denominator of the IF equation. Which types of articles are considered "citable" is largely a matter of negotiation between journals and Thomson Scientific. As a result of such negotiations, impact factor variations of more than 300% have been observed.^[12] For instance, editorials in a journal are not considered to be citable items and therefore do not enter into the denominator of the impact factor. However, citations to such items will still enter into the numerator, thereby inflating the impact factor. In addition, if such items cite other articles (often even from the same journal), those citations will be counted and will increase the citation count for the cited journal. This effect is hard to evaluate, for the distinction between editorial comment and short original articles is not always obvious. "Letters to the editor" might refer to either class.

 

Several methods, not necessarily with nefarious intent, exist for a journal to cite articles in the same journal which will increase the journal's impact factor.^[13]

 

In 2007 a specialist journal with an impact factor of 0.66 published an editorial that cited all its articles from 2005 to 2006 in a protest against the absurd use of the impact factor.^[14] The large number of citations meant that the impact factor for that journal increased to 1.44. As a result of the increase, the journal was not included in the 2008 Journal Citation Report. ^[15]

The Wiki lists a number of alternatives to IF; however, complexity plagues them. PageRank algorithms (such as used by Google) cannot be explained in a simple equation. Increasing complexity may improve validity, but it zaps intuitive understanding.

Dr. Varmus plead for an end to IF insanity. He also works on open access, and has been a a major proponent of freely available online science. In 2006, Chris Surridge of Public Library of Science (PLoS) blogged on the IF and its irrelevancy to PLoS following an editorial in PLoS Medicine. In the Petersdorf lecture, Varmus bragged about reported the IF for PLoS Medicine (amusing but irrelevant, I guess).

So what is the answer? Clearly, the IF can be too easily manipulated. Other alternatives should be considered. Or, perhaps, we need to get over the idea of ranking stuff. Ranking journals and schools (that pesky US News and World Report thing) results in game-playing. We all know which ones are elite. The IF works about as well right now as the Bowl Championship Series algorithm does for college football.

In this internet-connected, computerized age, any paper in a peer-reviewed, indexed journal can readily be retrieved by interested parties. “Elite” journals increase early exposure, but those who need to see the work can easily retrieve it without personal subscriptions or press releases. Today, more than ever, the content should be the point.

Photo courtesy of PhotoXpress.

Sometimes You Have To Vent

On needs surveys, our faculty at University of Nebraska Medical Center consistently requested help developing writing skills. Given that the peer-reviewed paper is the coin of the realm, you might think that all training programs would include this skill. You would be wrong.

Research degrees include lots of writing (although more of a sink-or-swim approach is the rule), but your average medical school faculty member has not had to write anything more technical than a patient discharge summary.

A few years back some of us on the faculty development committee put together a workshop on manuscripts. Nearly 100 faculty participated, and they wanted more. The next workshop attracted nearly the same number of participants. We had a successful program on our hands.

The problem with success is that you are asked to repeat it, and the message here was pretty basic- write a lot. Keep writing. Get people to critique your writing. Never give up. Keep writing. Write some more.

Sometimes a message needs a different messenger. For our next effort, an expert will deliver the keynote. Paul Silvia, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology and author of How to Write a Lot. His research interests include motivation and goal setting, making him a perfect expert on faculty writing.

Before the workshop commences in 2010, I loaded up his book in the Kindle Reader in my iPod and used some airport time to read it (yes, I am reading the book before the speaker comes). The information is nothing new; its delivery includes enough humor to make it a quick read with a lighter feel than the usual writing manual.

So far, I have only found one portion I take exception to:

Sometimes, rejections are unfair, mean, and poorly reasoned. Sometimes you can tell that the editor or reviewers didn’t read your paper carefully. Resist the urge to complain to the editor. I have heard of people writing the editor an angry letter that denounced the reviewers as lazy incompetents. Those letters never work, probably because the editor is often friends with one or more of the reviewers. Some people recommend writing this embittered letter but not mailing it. That’s even more irrational—why waste your scheduled writing time with fruitless venting? Spend your time revising your paper instead. The world is unfair (p<0.001), so take what you can from the reviews, revise your paper, and send it somewhere else.

In general, this is great advice. You never want to send “that letter.” You should always make some revisions after a review, even if it just clarifies points the first reviewers missed. After all, they may be tapped to review the next version by the next journal editor. I know people who, upon receiving a request to review a completely unrevised manuscript for another journal, have submitted the content of all reviews from the first journal (so that pesky author can’t figure out which initial reviewer is repeating) and merely added “please revise as above.” Ouch.

No, my beef concerns not wasting time writing “that letter.” Sometimes authors get hung up and need to vent. If an hour or so putting these negative thoughts on paper (including your assumptions about the parentage of the reviewers and the quality of their eyesight) gets you over the hump and back to work, I say it is time well spent. [Of course, I usually just go shoe shopping as my stress-buster, but we all have our personal vices.]

If you need some help with your writing, or a book to recommend to your students, How to Write a Lot will likely fit your needs. I suspect Dr. Silvia will provide a motivating, mirthful workshop for us next spring.