Junior Faculty Position as a Resident?

[bd4727]

This may seem like a overly ambitious question, but has anyone heard of someone negotiating with a program and medical school to start their own lab while concurrently doing a residency? Obviously the time demands during residency don't lend for much time for research, but if there was a way to do research for a year before starting the residency, and your field lent itself toward being 'away' from research but still being involved in the higher level functioning of the lab (i.e. bioinformatics), does this seem feesible? For someone who would otherwise be competative for a junior faculty spot at a mid/lower tier place directly after PhD?

Just curious if anyone has ever heard of people doing situations where they were more than 'just a resident' during their residency such that they were able to have some sort of independent research program, whatever the administration of that may be...

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[uniqenam]

A) If it's possible to be away from your lab as a junior faculty/assistant prof in bioinformatics and still be productive, then what do those people actually DO all day? I have a hard time believing you'll be able to stop in for an hour or two a week during residency and have a functioning lab that doesn't disintegrate...unless you're planning on having a multi-million dollar start-up and hiring only post-docs, which, lol.

B) Do you really want to burn a year, or two, or three of your tenure clock doing residency? I would assume this would diminish your ability to demonstrate productivity for grantsmanship purposes as well.

 

[bd4727]

Well I guess my thought is if you do one of the research pathways (like ABIM) and instead of doing all 3 years of research at the end you are able to do a 'research month' every 2nd or 3rd month or something during residency, and if you had like 1yr to get your lab running before starting the clinical residency (okay a lot of ifs), then I think it would be feasible. I mean in most labs the cycle of data production --> data analysis --> manuscript writing takes easily at least 6 mo right? So if you had a lab tech or postdoc or two, then I think it's not entirely unreasonable.

To answer your first question, I think we both know that the time a PI spends in his/her office doesn't necessarily directly correlate with lab output in most instances... Your second point is a good one.

Anyway, the obvious reply to this is that its crazy and I understand why, etc, but I am curious to hear from people who have heard of anyone doing some sort of hybird or non-traditional research residency. I ask because I recently met one person who actually set up such an agreement (neurophysiology wet lab research for his lab and is doing an extended psych residency). I am trying to find out others who may know about similar set ups or have insight.

 

[uniqenam]

I agree it's an interesting question, and something I've also mulled in my small brain, but I just think it would be really difficult to actually pull off. I wonder if this could be more feasible if you had a partnered, Brown-Goldstein type lab, which would allow you to hand off lab duties while you did residency...although that has a fairly low shot of working out, considering you would have to already have a good working relationship, be willing to move together to the same institution, etc etc.

 

[solitude]

I know MSTP grads who have negotiated extra research time during their IM residency, and two who were - somehow - able to negotiate a small startup package and a tech during their residencies. The latter went into fields that are less time-intensive clinically during residency, and that also have trouble inducing people to stay in academia because of the high salaries in PP. I wouldn't call these "junior faculty positions", but they can approximate the level of research at the "instructor" level. It is amazing what you can do with a successful PhD and a whole lot of chutzpah.*

*and, the willingness to redirect what precious free time you'll have during residency towards research. God bless these anhedonic souls.

 

[gbwillner]

Has it ever been done before? Yes. I have heard of this happening once. The resident in question was a PI who decided to go to medical school. His institution allowed him to have his own lab during residency. But note he was already a funded PI BEFORE residency. And this was like 10 years ago before the economic situation was calamity.

So in reality, can YOU do something like this? Absolutely not. From an institutional financial point of view this sort of thing is laughable. Do you know the costs incurred by your institution for start up $, space, benefits, etc., only to have you NOT be there while you see patients in the ER? Do you know how hard it is to just get protected time and space and money in the first place? Most departments right now are drowning in the red since the NIH paylines are so low their seasoned PIs are losing funding. And you're going to get this money over them? You basically have to walk in with a grant to start at Asst Prof nowadays. And you're not eligible for most significant grants until you are finishing a post-doc. It is a catch-22 as it is, but your proposal is basically impossible.

Re: instructor positions- let's be clear- these ARE junior faculty positions. You have to go to faculty meetings. You may have clinical responsibilities. The advantage of these positions is that you can get data and grant funding off the tenure clock. As solitude stated, you may get departmental funds (although really you are tied to a PI and either they pay for you or your department does). This gives you a chance to be competitive for asst. prof. positions. But these are basically glorified post-docs since, unless you really sell out and go to an institution where you have very little chance of academic success, you have to go through this route before you can land a "real" academic job (at Asst Prof level).

So in reality there is only one course for virtually all MSTPs who want a primarily research-oriented career- do research as a post-doc during and after residency (promoted to Instructor if possible), get grants, THEN you will be competitive for starting your own lab- not before.

 

[ratherbefishing]

Can you negotiate for at least the instructor position during the postdoc years of a research track residency? Is it it even worth it to do this? I saw some programs advertising that the expectation is to move their trainees into Instructor level junior faculty positions (ucla and wash u I believe)

 

[dl2dp2]

It's not impossible, and I know of examples. However, I don't necessarily think that it's advantageous from a time/money perspective. There is no "track" to speak of if you want this to happen. In almost all instances, the candidate directly negotiated with the department with some backing of various senior faculty/administrators at the institution. If you think that you are "a mid/lower tier place" sort of candidate I'm not sure how good your odds are at landing something like that, given that most likely these positions that are artificially created are usually meant for tippity top candidates who need to relocate to an undesirable area or for specific recruitment purposes.

You need to just remember how this labor market works. Junior faculties are hired by department chairs and division heads. Residents are hired by residency program directors. They don't really interact and do not necessarily have jurisdiction over each other. Your portfolio needs to be strong enough for the department chair to want to go out of his way to massage the situation so that you can get what you want, which is very unlikely unless you have something very unique to bring to the table. The things I can think of include a big grant appropriate, but very unusual for your level (i.e. Burroughs, NIH early independence, MacArthur, etc. 250k/year level), lots of prestigious papers which implies a big grant is imminent, or competing offers from comparable institutions. The third is likely the most viable, and easiest, for you. What you have to do is to solicit offers from "a mid/lower tier place" as a junior faculty with a startup. Then you take this offer and you go to the residency program director and the department head of the place you actually want to join, and then you say I know I'm wanted and I think I'm good for your place, here is why, but I want medical training, here is why. And then you cross your fingers. Most likely whether your effort is successful depends on your offer and the place you are negotiating with. If you have an offer as a junior faculty at Kansas State in bioinformatics with a 250k startup, Harvard isn't going to care and MGH will not hire you to be a "part time resident". However, if you have an offer from MIT in bioinformatics with a 500k startup, but it just so happens you are from Utah and need to go back for family reasons, and Utah is starting a center in bioinformatics, they might just bend over backwards to offer you a position to get you back.

Do you see how this works now?

As you can see, these are advanced maneuvers for exceptional candidates. You need to be extremely facile and have a degree of intellectual, scientific, career maturity and confidence that you are unlikely to have right after MD/PhD. If you think you genuinely are a good candidate for this kind of track, PM me and I can put you up to the right contact.

This may seem like a overly ambitious question, but has anyone heard of someone negotiating with a program and medical school to start their own lab while concurrently doing a residency? Obviously the time demands during residency don't lend for much time for research, but if there was a way to do research for a year before starting the residency, and your field lent itself toward being 'away' from research but still being involved in the higher level functioning of the lab (i.e. bioinformatics), does this seem feesible? For someone who would otherwise be competative for a junior faculty spot at a mid/lower tier place directly after PhD?

Just curious if anyone has ever heard of people doing situations where they were more than 'just a resident' during their residency such that they were able to have some sort of independent research program, whatever the administration of that may be...

 

[Shifty B]

I think the last couple of posts get to the heart of the matter. Even if this is something that you could do, I'm not sure that it is something that you want to do.

I am a senior resident in a specialty that is quite intellectually challenging, and it is at times difficult for me to be a good resident even when I'm pretty darn focused on being a resident. I've done a fair amount of research during my residency. It's been enough to keep me in the loop of research, but nothing groundbreaking. My clinical training, however, has been excellent, and I think that's the way to go. When you show up as junior faculty at a new institution, you are going to have some time to get your research figured out. If you're clinically weak, it's going to be a big problem if you have to make up for deficiencies that you should have gotten during your residency.

When very research-heavy applicants come to interview for residency, I encourage them to focus on their clinical training during residency. You want to be a great clinician who has a lot of research experience. Whatever research you do during your residency is a plus, but not the key point of a residency. If you find yourself balking at this, my advice is that you perhaps consider not doing a residency at all and just becoming a post-doc or instructor or whatever.

 

[mercaptovizadeh]

I agree with Shifty. I spoke to one of my LOR writers, the chairman of pediatrics and a researcher himself, about the career track prior to starting residency. He said that you should aim to publish case reports and perhaps clinical research, but that residency - especially for you - is about becoming the best clinician possible. This is because after residency, if you are working clinically just 20% of the time, you will ultimately fall behind your clinical colleagues, and therefore, to remain the most competent clinician possible, you will want to become as accomplished and adept clinically (during residency and early fellowship) as possible. You cannot be a house divided. You cannot go off scurrying to the lab to work on your CF mouse model project as soon as you can, and end up as competent as someone who after seeing their Kawasaki patient from admission to discharge reads the entries in Nelson's and another 15 papers on the disease. If you use your 6 months of elective time on research rotations, you will not have the opportunity to do electives in clinical subspecialties highly relevant to your career interest (e.g. as a future cardiologist taking electives in nephrology, hematology, endocrinology, and pulmonology).

Regarding your question, one of my fellow MD-PhDs was being courted by places like UCSF for neurosurgery but decided to stay at his home program. He apparently negotiated to have a technician paid for during his neurosurgical residency. I think that's perhaps the smartest move on his part, since he can have this tech conduct experiments in his former mentor's lab (or the lab of another PI in neurosurgery, I honestly don't know) while he's seeing patients and in the OR. Again, I doubt he would have been able to negotiate this sort of thing at UCSF or any comparable place. I also don't know if he would have been successful in getting a technician at another comparable school to the home program, or if it was his personal connections at the home program that secured things. But that always has a downside: he will be doing his residency working with the same people he was with in medical school, rather than diversifying his clinical experience.

 

[mstp4lyfe]

As you can see, these are advanced maneuvers for exceptional candidates. You need to be extremely facile and have a degree of intellectual, scientific, career maturity and confidence that you are unlikely to have right after MD/PhD. If you think you genuinely are a good candidate for this kind of track, PM me and I can put you up to the right contact.

I know this board hasn't been active for some time, but I just got some news today that is pertinent to this post.

Some background - I'm an MD/PhD student at a mid-tier university finishing up my PhD this year before heading back to med school for M3/M4. I am planning on applying to residency in Psych, and based on reading SDN I think I will be a pretty solid applicant. I had a good number of publications before I starting grad school, and I think I've had a successful PhD to go along with that. I also did well on Step 1 (mid-250s). Based on that, I planned on applying to some of the top programs, with the goal of ending up in NYC or California at a place like Columbia, Mt Sinai, Stanford, UCSF, UCLA, etc. for a Psych research-track residency.

However, I was approached this week by an attending who told me that my home Psych department (where I am getting my PhD) is prepared to offer me lab space, start-up funds, and I junior faculty title if I decide to stay at the same university for residency. This is obviously a really flattering offer, but I definitely did not have plans to stay here otherwise. I guess I'm just looking for some input from more seasoned academics on this matter. Can I (or should I even) try to leverage this offer at a more prestigious institution to set up some kind of independent research program? Or is this the best offer of this kind I can hope for?

 

[dl2dp2]

However, I was approached this week by an attending who told me that my home Psych department (where I am getting my PhD) is prepared to offer me lab space, start-up funds, and I junior faculty title if I decide to stay at the same university for residency. This is obviously a really flattering offer, but I definitely did not have plans to stay here otherwise. I guess I'm just looking for some input from more seasoned academics on this matter. Can I (or should I even) try to leverage this offer at a more prestigious institution to set up some kind of independent research program? Or is this the best offer of this kind I can hope for?

You don't have enough information yet. They are "prepared" to make an offer, but this is meaningless unless it's a written offer. It also depends a lot on what is "mid tier", how big is the startup, and what is your scientific ambition. You can't really leverage until you have solid competing offers.

I have had long conversations with several dept chairs of psychiatry in prominent departments, several on your list. The current state of psychiatry departments, due to a relatively heavy investment of NIH funding in brain research, is that you don't really have "leverage" at major departments until you have an R01. Everyone on the job market who's hunting for a decent job with a startup has an R01. That's not to say if you are truly exceptional and don't have a funding record, people might still consider you, but the sort of offers you will get are likely subpar. Isn't it ironic that blowing more money into the system actually makes the rank and files' life more difficult?

Also, without leaving your mid tier institution, you may not discover an entirely alien world operating on the coasts. For example, a non trivial number of individuals working at Stanford have relatively large private practices that are so extremely profitable with wealthy Silicon Valley residents, their grant funding and institutional support pale in comparison in terms of their total compensation. When this sort of thing happens, your career and life expectation completely change. I.e. If I tell you you can be a very successful researcher at Stanford getting paid 150k (living in a tiny house two hours away) or a somewhat more part time researcher with total compensation 350k+, what would you choose? The nature of soft money research is that until you are at a very senior level and good at playing politics, hard money is not available until mid/late career, by which time if you pick the more lucrative track you might have been completely financially independent. You basically endow a chair for yourself. These weird things are not really available in the mid tier places. On the other hand, cost of living is vastly lower outside of the nodes. Just some food for your thought.

The issue of scientific ambition is also an interesting one. The current distribution of NIH dollars is highly inequitable. Prominent departments get a lot of it, and a lot of that go into massive center grants and multi site collaborations. If you are okay with specializing in your own niche area where your current department has some strength, apply for one R01 after another and eventually living a small town grocer life, your life is better if you stay. But if you want to one day gun for the P awards, become some international leader, raise tens of millions of dollars of private/foundation money, you will probably need a better name and better network. Even people who end up directing centers at mid level places often grow up in high end departments. Not an absolute requirement, but everyone says "mentorship is key"...which if you strip the nonsense means that the game is rigged, and all is cronyism. Will you be "in" enough if you stayed where you are? Is the endless, tiring, risky and potentially ultimately fruitless hustle what you want in life? Only you can answer that question.

My suggestion is apply everywhere, open your ears, and have at least a written offer in your hand if you want to "negotiate". You may unpleasantly discover that people don't want you as much as you think they do.

 

[JETER]

I've done this - as a resident, I am also junior faculty (Asst. Prof) in my previous PhD department, and have run a small lab as PI. It all sounds great, but there is just not enough time to be a good resident and a good researcher/mentor. Perhaps its because of my residency program being perhaps more brutal than most (ortho), but there just is not enough time. So far, I have only had one student, a MS student which was more work than I thought it was going to be, a handful of papers, and an interesting story. However, there is one real benefit which I did not take full advantage of -- the ability to apply for large grants as a faculty member. Four years ago, I aspired to have an R01 before I graduated. While this was possible (despite even what people on this board have told me), it just wasn't feasible without protected time. And with a day job accounting for "80 hours" per week, the ability to be productive is just hard. Not impossible, just hard. I have basically just given up now: I finish residency this year, 1 year of fellowship, then I can start to negotiate protected time in just two years. There is just too much to lose right now. If I had a research year, or maybe a less brutal past 5 years, it might have been a different story.

 

[tr]

I know this board hasn't been active for some time, but I just got some news today that is pertinent to this post.

Some background - I'm an MD/PhD student at a mid-tier university finishing up my PhD this year before heading back to med school for M3/M4. I am planning on applying to residency in Psych, and based on reading SDN I think I will be a pretty solid applicant. I had a good number of publications before I starting grad school, and I think I've had a successful PhD to go along with that. I also did well on Step 1 (mid-250s). Based on that, I planned on applying to some of the top programs, with the goal of ending up in NYC or California at a place like Columbia, Mt Sinai, Stanford, UCSF, UCLA, etc. for a Psych research-track residency.

However, I was approached this week by an attending who told me that my home Psych department (where I am getting my PhD) is prepared to offer me lab space, start-up funds, and I junior faculty title if I decide to stay at the same university for residency. This is obviously a really flattering offer, but I definitely did not have plans to stay here otherwise. I guess I'm just looking for some input from more seasoned academics on this matter. Can I (or should I even) try to leverage this offer at a more prestigious institution to set up some kind of independent research program? Or is this the best offer of this kind I can hope for?

I don't know, I'd be inclined to jump on that. It could really get you a good head start in the game. You could certainly let PDs at other institutions you are interested in know that your home institution has made such an offer (you would want to get solid details in writing first, including protected time) but it might be a hard sell to convince a program that doesn't know you to offer this. But it might be worth staying at your home program for, depending on what other personal factors may play into your decisions about location.