1. Notes about career development
Mark Seidenberg
CUHK May 2017
5/17/17
Seidenberg notes for career development session

2. Seidenberg notes for career development session
Topic 1: Building your research identity
You need a research identity
Research area
Types of methods, quantitative or computational expertise
Theoretical orientation
Area can be framed differently for particular job application.
Developmental, cognitive, reading, psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience
Not an ethical problem. Different ways of looking at same thing.
You need an identity even though more and more research is done in teams with complementary types of expertise
Distinguishing yourself from your advisor(s) eventually.
Seek awards. Get people to nominate you.
5/17/17
Seidenberg notes for career development session

3. Seidenberg notes for career development session
Topic 2: conducting research
Do a lot of research
If you are conducting studies that have a long gestation time, do some ”side” work that doesn’t.
Quantity vs. quality? Both. Starting out, you need to create a track record.
The study isn’t over until the article is published.
Hazard: you finish a study, you’ve gotten the answer to your question. You’re already interested in a new question.
You have to finish what you’ve done.
Do not wait. When you start something else, it’s hard to go back.
3. Don’t wait for perfection.
You’re making a significant contribution, not providing the definitive answer.
If your study is good, it will RAISE new questions, issues. Ironically.
4. Don’t be afraid to be wrong
Almost everything will turn out to be wrong at some level.
Knowledge progresses that way.
5/17/17
Seidenberg notes for career development session

4. Seidenberg notes for career development session
3. Time-sharing
You must do many things in parallel
collecting data
writing
reading
writing grants, teaching, sitting on committees, mentoring, etc.
2. Strategies for publishing
?? Standards, practices may be changing
May vary by department, area, country
You should not have to wait a long time for reviews.
Journals with long delays are doing a bad job: avoid.
The editors/reviewers are not always right. Try someplace else.
About book chapters: maintain a high bar. Don’t say yes to many. With few exceptions, they are not widely read.
5/17/17
Seidenberg notes for career development session

5. Seidenberg notes for career development session
Topic 4: the relation between your work and previous work
Your relation to previous research and researchers:
Standing on the shoulders of giants
Standing on the faces of giants.
If you’re good, you establish yourself by doing outstanding work. It builds on other people’s work.
It does not require being aggressively negative about previous work.
Some people make a name for themselves by attacking the work of established people.
But those are short-term gains. You have to be able to do serious reserarch yourself.
Science is adversarial—but about ideas, not people.
Be kind. Golden rule. People are doing the best they can, aren’t perfect.
5/17/17
Seidenberg notes for career development session

6. Seidenberg notes for career development session
Topic 5: take a broad view of job possibilitis
There are jobs outside of academia.
You need to think about them.
Valuable skills:
Quantitative—data handling. Advanced statistics for large data sets. Meta analysis.
Computational—programming but also being able to manipulate large data sets
Basic programming: Python, matlab
Data acquisition:
Eye tracking, ERPs, neuroimaging, whatever comes next.
5/17/17
Seidenberg notes for career development session