188 M.V. Brock

Writing the Career Development Plan

One of the most fundamental errors encountered in first applications is the candidate’s assumption that the Career Development Plan is not as important to the application as the Research Plan. In fact, the exact opposite is probably closer to the truth. Since by definition, these K Awards are fundamentally “mentored” grants, time spent in pursuing education is more important than time spent in research. Accentuate the critical nature of your Career Development Plan by taking a typical approach as below:

1.Remember the primary intent for the NIH of the K Awards is to transition young faculty to research independence over a 5-year period. Explicitly state this goal early and repetitively in your plan, and show how you intend to achieve this.

2.Organize your plan into short-term, mid-term, and longterm goals. Especially focus on where you would like to be in 3–5 years and what areas you would need to develop to get there?

3.Take stock of your current academic deficiencies. Use the award as an opportunity “to customize” a program unique to your needs so that you can spend quality time in only those areas that need strengthening. Ensure that your Career Development Plan increases your exposure to your academic weaknesses. Maybe you are a MD/PhD in cell biology but have no background in biostatistics.This would be an opportunity to pursue a degree, or at least a series of courses in biostatistics. Commonly, candidates are deficient in publishing. The Career Development Plan of such candidates should emphasize grant and manuscript writing seminars/courses as well as the co-authorship with the mentor of subject matter expert reviews or book chapters.

The mentor could help to formulate a plan for manuscript writing and detail how any salient experimental results of the K Award will be published. Aim to publish as early as possible in the award period so that this could be used as proof of productivity on a subsequent R01 application that

you may want to submit before the expiration of your K

Award.

4.It is critical that your mentor‘s statement is consistent with your Career Development Plan. Review your Career Development Plan with your mentor, ask for his input and ensure that he is actively involved. Lack of communication between mentor and mentee and inconsistencies in the goals and objectives outlined separately by both are a real harbinger of a failed mentoring relationship. A poor mentoring relationship in a mentored award is simply a nonstarter.

5.Proposing to follow a course of study during the award period that ultimately results in a formal academic degree is always viewed as advantageous. Degree programs, such as Masters in Public Health or Masters in Clinical Investigation, incorporate many courses critical to the development of any young investigator, such as introductions to basic statistics, epidemiology, and bioethics.

6.A pictorial representation of your didactic plan as a figure or a table again makes the reviewer’s job easier. The table would include, for example, the course name, its objective, a time table, etc. Be very detailed and specific with a timeline of exactly when courses will be taken and completed.

7.Don’t spread courses thinly throughout the 5 years of the award. Rather compress your didactic courses early into the development plan. Try to finish as much of the course work as possible in the first 2 years. Start in the first year with epidemiology courses followed in the second year by the basic bio-statistical classes.

8.On-line didactic courses should be avoided since it is difficult for the reviewers to judge their quality, and few have any discernable long-term track record.

9.Remember that you already have spent many years in postdoctoral training to be a surgeon and now the main goal of this award is to learn new critical areas or to enhance previously neglected skills that will be critical to your final career as an academic surgeon. Thus, select

190 M.V. Brock

courses of study that would give you expertise in areas where you currently lack the appropriate background. For example, if your interest is on the impact of nutrition on cancer prevention, but you have never formally studied nutrition, select a series of graduate level courses on nutrition. In a R proposal, an applicant would more than likely supplement this lack of knowledge by relying on a consultant or colleague with that expertise. In a K Award, the expectation would be for you to have a co-mentor of your mentoring team with the subject matter expertise and for you to spend time both formally and informally learning the new subject.

10.Remember it is possible to take too many courses.

11.There is a balance that every junior surgical faculty must have between time spent clinically, in education, and in research. Preserve that balance. As a surgeon with ongoing clinical responsibilities and a need to maintain operative skills learned in training, you must be very detailed about clinical coverage while you are pursuing your award. Reviewers will ask how many cases do you plan on performing per week, how many patients will you follow in the hospital, what will be your on-call time, who will take care of your patients if there is a complication postoperatively on a nonclinical day, who will field “call-backs” from ill patients at home or manage mundane issues such as postoperative wound care? As suggested in the previous section, it is the job of a primary mentor, co-mentor, or institutional representative to discuss these special challenges of clinical coverage for practicing surgeons pursuing research with you. It is critical that the mentoring team address the topic of clinical coverage for surgeons specifically in their statements and letters. It may also be helpful to specify in terms of hours/week in class work and homework, the estimated time commitment required for each course of study.

12.In his statement, the mentor should expound on expected milestones for you to achieve for promotion (papers to be published, national presentations to be given, and so on).

In your Career Development Award, state clearly how this award will propel you toward those milestones for academic promotion.

13.If there is already a relationship established with a primary mentor and if you are co-author on a manuscript, textbook chapter, or similar publication, emphasize this in the Career Development Plan and show how you will build on this in the future. Be careful if you are still in the same laboratory that you did your postdoctoral fellowship, however, since then you must be very clear how your research will distinguish you from your primary mentor so that you can establish your independence.

The Candidate

1.Repetitively restate in your application that your goal is to be an independent researcher, emphasize that your ideas are distinct from your mentor, and that this application is a concrete proposal to make this goal of yours a reality. In general, since surgery requires much clinical responsibility that can distract time from pure scholarship, it is especially imperative that surgeons effectively communicate to the reviewers their strong and fervent desire to academic careers.

2.When you recount your narrative about your career’s evolution, make the story personal by using the first person singular tense.Again, stress your desire for pursuing scholarship and accentuate both your academic and clinical accomplishments. A distinctly surgical narrative could be, “I received excellent clinical training, but now I want to understand the scientific basis of this disease. I realized during my clinical training that I cannot excise the tumor better, and need to derive the molecular underpinning of cancer to treat the disease further. So, this is how I conceived of my goals in pursuing laboratory-oriented research.”

192 M.V. Brock

3.If you received a MD/PhD degree,is this proposed research related to that prior work? Prominently display as a critical milestone of previous success any publications, national/international presentations, or substantive preliminary data for a grant or a patent that were derived from your work.

4.Do not dismiss as unimportant, educational gaps in your career. Explain clearly what happened, why your career progression was interrupted, and how you are now moving back on track. Absences for personal reasons, such as a pregnancy or sickness, are not viewed as character failings. More damage is done by being silent in the hope that the reviewers will not notice the time taken off.

5.In the same vein, a poor publication record is not seen as a prognostic sign of future academic failure. Again, clearly explain why this happened, such as inadequate or insufficient mentoring, and then, more importantly, outline in the Career Development Plan how your dearth in publications will be overcome. For example, you can mention your intent to increase writing/publishing scientific articles after the successful completion of a formal didactic class in manuscript writing that is clearly evident in your Career Development Plan.

6.Avoid inappropriately “padding” your biosketch by listing book chapters,abstract presentations at meetings,or printed abstracts under the peer-reviewed journal publication list. Instead, list them separately under an appropriate title.

7.Feature prominently published peer-reviewed manuscripts (or those in print) with your mentor because these represent powerful preliminary data for the grant. They demonstrate to reviewers that the mentor–mentee relationship has not only been established, but also is in good working order.

8.Similarly, if you need to resubmit a grant, take the time in between grant submissions to publish at least one piece of work with your mentor. Even a small clinical case report or a short review article that only marginally relates to your proposed research would suffice. Again, the commitment of the mentor to the mentee and the demonstration of shared goals and obligations of both will be duly noted by the reviewers.