Find Your Place on the Ladder Posted on January 20, 2009 Dr. William A. Vega talks about moving from place to place in his career as a research scientist.

Now, I happen to be a person that has moved a lot. I probably have moved more than any of my colleagues, and for me it was something that, I think, came easily because I moved a lot as a child.

And so it wasn't difficult for me to move through the rest of my life. It was more difficult for my wife to be able to do it, and she wasn't always wonderfully happy about my choices. But for me, I found it stimulating to change environments. It was very generative for me from the standpoint of new research lines that I always had an interest in and could not do in previous environments.

It also was very inspirational to be with new colleagues, I think, because you meet new people that have new types of skills that you can work with. And you begin then to develop new lines of knowledge and inquiry that simply were not evident, at least, in places that you were at before. They may have been possible, but for whatever reasons, the social networks and the points of contact with other professors didn't produce that result.

So for me, it's been very useful to move from place to place, and I've found places that I was much more productive, places where it was not particularly stimulating, or that not optimally stimulating, but nevertheless you find a way to work it out of yourself. You find new areas of yourself to explore. You just get stronger through the experience.

So for some people, I think it's better to stay in one place if they happen to be in the kind of place that supports them and allows them to move forward. Not everybody has to be trying to be in the top one percent of researchers. I mean, it's fine just to have a career of research where you're productive, you're a regular producer of work, and you have a decent publication record, et cetera. Those people produce good research, too.

So it's a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle that's extremely intense and could be very burned out if you're not really made for it. And I think managing all of the issues associated with that, your family issues, your personal anxieties around sustaining the pace, all of those kinds of things go into thinking about where you fit in the research ladder.

And there's no shame in saying, "Gee, I don't want to be one of those. I want to, I'm interested in research. I want to produce good work, but I don't feel like being one of those people that kills themselves year in and year out and enjoys doing so," because we're not all workaholics.