February 16, 2024
Over the last few days, I've been forwarding a large number of research assistant jobs ads to our undergraduate concentrators. I'm sure they are all sick of me, and many of them probably just delete all of my emails. But occasionally some of the might find the information interesting (because many of them are for graduating seniors, advertising jobs in research around the country).
(BTW, I think there's an analogy to my emails being like "Today at Brown" - no one reads them, but every now and then, they are important)
Anyway, today, a student asked me the following question: I applied for a job in a clinical research lab, and I was offered the position, but I'm not sure whether I should take it. Unfortunately, the student didn't have time to meet at that moment, so we set a meeting for later. But, in the meantime, I figured I would write an entry on this question to offer some thoughts.
So, again, here's the situation - you are a semester 8 student. You're going to graduate. Maybe you're graduating with honors or cum laude. You applied for some jobs (because you read my emails - or more likely, went to the career center). And you got one! Congratulations! How do you evaluate it?
1) What are your goals in taking the job? Is it to learn more about the profession? Is it to eventually go to graduate school? Is it just to have a job and live in a particular area of the country? That fundamentally affects how you answer the next few questions. What do you hope to get out of the job? Is it research experience? Clinical experience? Publications? A better sense of the field? Before evaluating the job possibilities, evaluate yourself.
2) Is the PI of the laboratory a productive researcher? This is important if you want research experience and/or publications from your experience. You can use google scholar to look up the researcher, and many people have profiles, which gives metrics. But metrics are highly field dependent - for example, 1000 citations in some fields is a lot. In others it is more like 10000. But in general, if someone doesn't publish much, then they aren't that productive a researcher. It's always a good idea to organize a profile chronologically, so that you can see what they are publishing recently. Are there opportunities for you to publish? Do others who had held similar positions to the one you might accept publish with the PI, and what is the avenue to make that happen?
3) Does the lab offer good clinical experience? Are there opportunities to do post-baccalaureate therapy or assessment. If you are interested in clinical psychology, this could be really good experience. This is harder to evaluate with just the internet, so it's an important question that you can ask, either the PI or other people in the lab right now.
4) What do people who have graduated from that lab do? For example, rarely are new positions created. So, who had your job last, and what did they do? Did they go to graduate school? Did they leave research all together? Those are two extremes, but important in assessing how you will fit into the position. Try talking with as many members of the lab as possible, not just the PI or lab manager.
5) What networking options are there for you? Will you be able to go to conferences? Attend rounds (if in a hospital)? Attend talks (in a university)? How good is the PI and lab at introducing members to other people in the field?
6) What is the culture of the lab itself? Is it collaborative (in research labs, that's easy to tell - do the publications have lots of people's names on them from the lab?) Again, talking with lab members (and not just a single person, like the PI) is an important way to evaluate this.
7) Is the clinical experience or research experience in the lab what you really want to work on. This is more important for clinical work than research skills. Research skills tend to generalize. I do very little clinically-relevant research, but have put many students into clinical graduate programs. And that's because research skills in developmental psychology generalize to developmental psychopathy (and most of my students are interested in that area).
Clinical skills are a little more specialized and generalize a little less. For example, if you take a job in an ASD lab, most of the people you will meet are ASD researchers and clinicians. Some of the skills would generalize to studying (for example) bipolar disorder. But others might not.
Now, at this point, you might not know this. And that's OK. But it's important to be aware of it - so here's a good way to think about it. Will you get broad training or more narrow training? The broader the training and the broader the experiences, the more likely (a) you will be exposed to things that you are or become truly passionate about and (b) the skills you acquire will generalize to that topic.
8) Is the job pressuring you to accept? I hate this. But there's a new thing where people are offered the job and then given less than a week to accept or reject. This is not necessarily a bad sign, but you have to ask the PI why there is a rush. If there's pressure now, would that generalize to other facets of the job?
9) (least important), is the job in an area of the country that you want to live in? This is a tricky one to think about, usually because students in semester 8 haven't lived in many parts of the country. My two cents is this: Many parts of the country are nice! But, you do want to think about urban/rural differences (if you have only ever lived in highly urban environments, moving to a job at the University of South Dakota will be an adjustment).
OK, that's a lot (and probably an incomplete list). But here goes: Congratulations. You got a job! That's awesome. Celebrate. But also talk to the people you might be working with, and (even better) people who have been in that lab or that environment, to get a sense of some of these questions, and this will help you evaluate. It's incredibly rare that turning down a position is a good idea. But if you are in a position to evaluate multiple offers or even if your "spidey-sense" is tingling about some possible red-flags, these are hopefully some good places to start in thinking about whether taking the job you are offered will get you to where you want to go. Again, the most important thing here is to evaluate yourself - evaluate where you want to be after you take the position, and whether the position is going to help or hinder you from achieving that goal.
This is also one of those things that benefits talking to multiple people. If you can talk with a research advisor at Brown (or your concentration advisor), that's a good first step. The DUS Open Hours are listed at the top page of this blog, so I'm available as well.