Take Courses in Advanced Methods Posted on January 20, 2009 Hortensia Amaro (bio) advises early career researchers to embrace difficult coursework.

Try and take every course possible in advanced data methods and analysis. And then get, try and find opportunities for actually having that role in projects where you're conducting data analysis because that really situates you in a really good position to be able to co-author papers and to really think through issues and to gain more skills that will really end up being very important later on in your career for opening other doors.

When I was in graduate school I had a professor who was in the school of medicine and offered me the opportunity to work on one of her projects as a data analyst. And it was a study of barriers that women experience in accessing alcoholism treatment, and there were samples, it was largely a sample of white women, but also there was a sample of African-American women and Latina women.

I later went on to become the director of the project and so had opportunities to write papers and chapters with her, and that really ended up laying the groundwork for jobs that I got later when I went to Boston University and the school of medicine to lead a research project on women's drug use during pregnancy.

And I was not the PI of that first study, but I had a very important role as the study manager. And so I was able to integrate a lot of variables in the study that were of interest to me that had to do with women's experience with violence, mental health indicators, violence in relationships, et cetera. And so that allowed me then to start publishing in the areas that I was really interested in.

And so I think a lesson that I'd take back from that for students is that sometimes your first project is going to be one where you're the PI, but if you're working with a team that affords you opportunities to integrate your ideas and your research questions, and that's a great opportunity to take advantage of. And from there then you can generate your own research questions, which I did, and then wrote grants and went on to continue my own work around issues of addiction and women.