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Science Education and Careers
STEM Career Guidance
Any ideas on how I can develop research interests?
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[QUOTE="Choppy, post: 5470797, member: 127425"] My first recommendation is pretty simple: read a lot. By this point in your career you're probably pretty familiar with the top journals in your field and as a postdoc you should be at a stage where you can understand most of the jargon. With an opportunity to really stretch out into your field, you need to start by making sure that you understand what's being worked on right now: what are the big problems and what are the approaches people are taking to solve them? Review articles are great for this. Attending conferences is also huge. There's no way to beat the sheer amount of new information that comes in at them. Keynote speakers will make predictions about what coming up in the future. Grad students will give talks and stand in front of posters anxious to talk about new ideas that they're bringing to the field. You can go and see current researchers talking about all those articles you've read and get the "story behind the article" so to speak. You also have look critically at your own skill set - your experience, your strengths and weaknesses. While it might be nice to completely jump ship and start in a brand new area, at some point you'll have to convince someone that they should pay you to do what you want to do. In that sense it's important to build on prior successes. You want to show grant committees that "I'm a good person to do X because I've successfully done Y and Y is related to X." [/QUOTE]
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Any ideas on how I can develop research interests?
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