How do you define ‘mid-career’ in academia? Funders, governing bodies and working scientists debate a vexed question.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02780-yHi, everyone, we’re back. This is, a Nature Careers podcast. And I’m Julie Gould. We’re starting a new series all about the mid-career of a scientist’s working life. I’m calling it “the muddle of the middle”. I know it doesn’t sound appealing. But basically, it’s a stage that, as you’ll hear, has no clear beginning, a very murky middle, and no clear end.
Only those 40 years and younger are allowed to apply for their George Mercer Award. Some researchers use awards like this as a way to label themselves in the mid-career, like Jeremy Fox, a professor of ecology at the University of Calgary in Canada,I for a long time kind of harboured a sort of secret dream that maybe I’d win the Mercer Award, which is an award that the Ecological Society of America gives out as sort of their Paper of the Year Award.
“They are likely to be someone who is starting to supervise, manage or mentor doctoral students and researchers, and/or has started to show leadership in other academic or clinical domains .” No one gives you a time limit for that. And it’s very slippery for most people, particularly in the sciences. You’re asked to do a lot more of the “boots on the ground” admin work.
I’m not saying it’s easy. But when you reach out to help, it is there. I think for the mid-career researchers the problems are harder to define, you’re expected to have your shit together, and maybe you don’t. Becoming vulnerable is more difficult. At one point in her career, Salome had a few too many balls up in the air. As well as looking after a young family she was also working as a clinician, and she was building up her own research group. So did she manage to keep all the balls from crashing around her ears? No, she didn’t. Instead, she had to be a little bit clever with her timeThe important thing for me was, was balancing a full clinical load plus full and trying to develop myself as a researcher.
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