原文信息：Bela Z. Schmidt. What 50 principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure. Nature 567, 273-275 (2019).

作为一个青年研究人员，每个人都梦想有着属于自己的实验室和实验团队。但是仅仅只有少数成功的科学家能够实现这个目标，大部分科研人员都在大浪淘沙的过程中，逐渐地消失。这篇文章2019年发表在了Nature Careers期刊上，文章的作者做了23年博士后，至今还未获得终生研究的岗位，他自诩为科研职业生涯的失败者。于是他采访了50位首席研究员（PI），总结了他们“成功”的经验。这些过来人的经验值得思考和实践，即使你现在还在读硕士和博士，它都是有益的。

（以下内容为中英文对照，是人工翻译，请放心阅读）

Getting a tenure-track academic research post is like winning a raffle — it happens for some, but the chance of success for any one individual is low, because the number of ticket holders far exceeds the number of prizes. It is fair to tell you here and now that I did not make it to the tenure track.

获得终身学术研究职位就像抽奖中奖一样--有些人可以中奖，但任何一个人的中奖概率都很低，因为持票人的数量远远超过奖品的数量。在这里，我可以公平地告诉大家，我没能进入终身教职的行列。

But I was curious about why I didn’t, and I learnt from interviewing more than 50 principal investigators (PIs) that my mindset might well have presented obstacles. I’m not claiming to know the formula for how to get tenured (if I had that, I would have used it for myself). Instead, I would like to offer the advice I’ve gathered.

但我很好奇为什么我没有成功，而且我在与50多位首席研究员（PI）的访谈中了解到，我的心态很可能造成了障碍。我并不是说我知道如何获得终身教职的公式（如果我知道的话，我自己也会用的）。相反，我想提供我收集到的建议。

At the beginning of my career, I did not think that I’d encounter any obstacles securing tenure. I had a great mentor for my PhD programme in structural biochemistry, which I completed in 1995, and another excellent one for my first postdoc position. They gave me achievable goals, taught me the joy of discovery, lifted me up when I lost hope. Most of all, they looked out for me — they cared about my career, introduced me to other leaders in the field and helped me to get ahead. But I became complacent: I started to believe that if I did a good job by my supervisor and solved the research questions placed in front of me, my career would take care of itself.

在我的职业生涯之初，我并不认为自己在获得终身教职方面会遇到任何障碍。在我1995年完成的结构生物化学博士课程中，我有一位出色的导师，而在我的第一个博士后职位上，我又有了另一位出色的导师。他们给了我可以实现的目标，教会我发现的乐趣，在我失去希望时给我力量。最重要的是，他们为我着想--他们关心我的职业生涯，把我介绍给该领域的其他领军人物，帮助我取得进步。但我开始自满：我开始相信，只要我做好我的导师的工作，解决摆在我面前的研究问题，我的事业就会自行解决。

I was wrong, of course.

当然，我错了。

I went from postdoc to postdoc, four in all, working on research questions that interested me and that were relevant to human disease. I worked hard — I had a great time doing experiments and producing data, and I felt relevant and useful to society. But time goes by quickly. I became “too expensive” to stay in academia as a postdoc. A PI can hire a person half my age for less money if I don’t come with my own fellowship, and I had been a postdoc for so long (23 years, all told) that I was no longer eligible for many fellowships.

我从一个博士后到另一个博士后，一共做了四个博士后，研究我感兴趣的、与人类疾病相关的问题。我努力工作--我很享受做实验、出数据的时光，我觉得自己与社会息息相关，对社会有用。但时间过得很快。我在学术界做博士后变得"太贵"了。如果我没有自己的奖学金，PI可以花更少的钱雇一个年龄只有我一半的人，而且我做博士后的时间太长了（总共23 年），以至于我不再有资格获得许多奖学金。

I did try to get on the tenure track. At the age of 41, after working in several postdoctoral positions over the course of 12 years, I started applying for tenure-track and other permanent positions. At this point, I had 19 peer-reviewed publications, including 5 as first author; 2 book chapters; and 10 published meeting abstracts. Perhaps it was not a hugely impressive record, but I was hoping it would be enough.

我确实尝试过进入终身职位。41岁那年，我在12年的时间里经历了多个博士后职位，之后我开始申请终身职位和其他长期职位。此时，我已发表了19篇经同行评审的论文，其中5篇为第一作者；2篇书籍章节；10篇已发表的会议摘要。也许这并不是一个令人印象深刻的记录，但我希望这已经足够了。

In the next 3 years, I sent out more than 100 applications to academic institutions, to the private sector and to government agencies (predominantly in the United States, where I was living at the time).

在接下来的3年里，我向学术机构、私营部门和政府机构（主要是在美国，我当时居住的地方）发送了100多份申请。

I applied for 57 academic tenure-track positions at first-tier research universities, second-tier teaching colleges and two-year ‘community’ colleges (which do not confer four-year degrees). Four institutions offered me a phone or in-person interview. I think I could have secured a position in Hungary, but I was not ready to move to another continent, and the university wanted me to start immediately.

我申请了一流研究型大学、二流教学学院和两年制"社区"学院（不授予四年制学位）的57个学术终身职位。有四所院校给了我电话或面谈的机会。我想我本可以在匈牙利获得一个职位，但我还没准备好搬到另一个大陆，而且大学希望我立即开始工作。

Between 2007 and 2009, I also applied for 22 positions in the biotechnology–pharmaceutical sector and for 25 positions at government organizations, including various institutes and agencies connected with the US National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Defense, US National Laboratories. I received no offers, not even an interview.

在2007年至2009年期间，我还申请了生物技术制药行业的22个职位，以及政府组织的25个职位，包括与美国国立卫生研究院，美国国防部，美国国家实验室相关的各种研究所和机构。我没有收到任何邀请，甚至没有面试。

Then I moved back to Europe to start a new family, and I took another postdoc. Finally, I lost interest in becoming a PI. I had a brief but pleasant engagement at a biotechnology company (brief, because it was in the wrong country for me), and then became an innovation manager at a university. This position turned out to be a poor fit for me, so I left after 2.5 years. These days, I am spending my time collecting more PI interviews, taking data-science courses and writing job applications. I hope to publish the results of my interviews as a book on mentoring.

后来我搬回欧洲组建了新的家庭，又做了一个博士后。最后，我对成为一名PI失去了兴趣。我曾在一家生物技术公司短暂而愉快地工作过（短暂，因为它对我来说是在一个错误的国家），然后成为一所大学的创新经理。这个职位并不适合我，所以两年半后我就离开了。如今，我把时间花在了收集更多的PI面试信息、学习数据科学课程和撰写求职申请上。我希望把我的访谈结果写成一本关于指导的书出版。

Hard work 努力工作

Over the years, I have attended many seminars and workshops on career development. At such events, the takeaway is usually that you need to work hard and network to get ahead. I was doing both. After a while, I gave up on my dream of becoming a PI, but I didn’t understand why others succeeded at something I hadn’t. It seemed to me that I was as smart as they were and worked as hard as they did. I could not ascribe my failure to get on the tenure track to just bad luck. I was a researcher, after all, and I wanted to understand my failings.

多年来，我参加过许多有关职业发展的研讨会和讲习班。在这些活动中，我得到的启示通常是，要想出人头地，就必须努力工作和建立关系网。我在这两方面都做得很好。过了一段时间，我放弃了成为一名PI的梦想，但我不明白为什么别人成功了，而我却没有。在我看来，我和他们一样聪明，和他们一样努力。我不能把自己未能进入终身教职轨道归咎于运气不好。毕竟，我是一名研究人员，我想了解自己的失败之处。

Around this time, I learnt a few things about cognitive psychology — for one, that emulating my successful colleagues’ ways of thinking might be a helpful step towards achieving the overall goals that they had managed to reach. So, I decided to interview tenured or tenure-track PIs who were leading their own laboratories to find out more about their thought processes.

大约在这个时候，我学到了一些关于认知心理学的知识--其中之一就是，效仿我成功同事的思维方式，可能会有助于实现他们已经成功达到的总体目标。因此，我决定采访那些领导自己实验室的终身或终生首席研究员，以了解他们的思维过程。

Many of the 50 PIs I interviewed mentioned being lucky — being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people. Of course, “be lucky” is not a very useful piece of advice. But some of their advice might help you to recognize and take advantage of your luck. I chose the tips that stuck in my mind because I knew I had not followed them. I hope that they might be useful for you, regardless of the sector you work in. Use them like a catalogue of chess moves: none of these tips will guarantee that you win the game, but they might help you to avoid some pitfalls along the way.

在我采访的50位首席调查员中，许多人都提到了自己的运气--在正确的时间出现在正确的地点，认识正确的人。当然，"运气好 "并不是一个非常有用的建议。但他们的一些建议可能会帮助你认识到自己的运气并加以利用。我选择了让我记忆犹新的建议，因为我知道我没有遵循这些建议。我希望这些建议对你有用，无论你在哪个部门工作。就像使用棋谱一样使用它们：这些建议虽然不能保证你赢得比赛，但它们可能会帮助你避开前进道路上的一些陷阱。

Accept your data. According to one PI, success depends more on the people doing a project than on the topic of study; some people make their project work no matter what the topic is. Others block their own way to success because they require too much evidence. I, for one, have always been excessively critical of my own data. Although I am a meticulous experimenter, whenever my results seemed to confirm my hypothesis, I was afraid to accept them because I knew I was biased (it’s funny, I know). I was spending too much time looking for alternative explanations instead of accepting that I was on the right track and moving on to the next step. We have all heard about the reproducibility crisis — and I am not advocating the reckless publication of unverified data, or recommending being so careful that you end up publishing nothing — but there is a difference between being reckless and shooting yourself in the foot.

接受属于你的数据。根据一位首席研究员的说法，项目成功与否更多取决于做项目的人，而不是研究课题；有些人无论课题是什么，都能把项目做好。另一些人则因为要求太多证据而阻碍了自己的成功之路。就我而言，我总是对自己的数据过分挑剔。虽然我是一个一丝不苟的实验者，但每当我的结果似乎证实了我的假设时，我都不敢接受，因为我知道我有偏见（这很有趣，我知道）。我花了太多的时间去寻找其他的解释，而不是接受我走在正确的道路上，然后继续下一步。我们都听说过可重复性危机--我并不主张鲁莽地发表未经验证的数据，也不建议小心谨慎到最终什么都不发表--但鲁莽行事和自取灭亡是不同的。

Own your project. Another PI told me that the best researchers take ownership of their projects. Or, as he put it, the best researchers do not ask for permission to do something, they just tell their PI what they have done. Another PI echoed this thought when she told me that postdocs should work on important questions, instead of sticking to the questions put in front of them. I have been guilty of violating this advice, too — I stumbled once on a huge effect of a group of enzymes on the favourite protein of our lab. I even managed to persuade myself that the effect was not an artefact. My supervisor acknowledged that the size of the effect was remarkable, but pursuing a new direction did not fit in with the lab’s plans — and I let it go. I worked on continuing projects and dropped this exciting new avenue. Had I insisted, I think he would have come around — few PIs will say no to a promising publication.

拥有自己的项目。另一位首席研究员告诉我，最优秀的研究人员都能掌控自己的项目。或者，正如他所说的那样，最好的研究人员不会请求允许他们做某事，他们只会告诉他们的首席研究员他们做了什么。另一位首席研究员也有同感，她告诉我，博士后应该研究重要的问题，而不是拘泥于摆在他们面前的问题。我也曾违反过这一建议--有一次，我偶然发现一组酶对我们实验室最喜欢的蛋白质有巨大影响。我甚至设法说服自己，这种影响不是人为的。我的导师承认这种效应的规模非常显著，但追求新的方向并不符合实验室的计划--于是我就放弃了。我继续做项目，放弃了这个令人兴奋的新方向。如果我坚持，我想他会回心转意的--很少有首席研究员会拒绝有前途的论文发表。

View yourself in your desired role. When I asked another interviewee how long he had been a PI, he said, “I have always been a PI — in somebody else’s lab.” Others have voiced similar sentiments; they always treated their supervisors as future colleagues, not as their superiors, establishing a relationship of two equal scientists working towards common goals.

以理想的角色看待自己。当我问另一位受访者担任PI 多久时，他说："我一直都是 PI - 在别人的实验室里"。其他一些人也表达了类似的观点；他们总是把上司当作未来的同事，而不是上级，建立起两个平等的科学家为共同目标而努力的关系。

Ward off despair. When your results seem to contradict your PI’s hypothesis, you might fall into despair (I did), but this is not good for productivity. It might help to know what one PI told me — “students should know that PIs are wrong 90% of the time”. You must generate your own motivation in science and work out how to pick yourself up, because nobody else will do it for you. Working on questions that are important to you and taking ownership of your project will help you to keep your motivation level high.

远离绝望。当你的结果似乎与你的首席研究员的假设相矛盾时，你可能会陷入绝望（我就是这样），但这不利于提高工作效率。一位PI 告诉我："学生应该知道，PI 90% 的时间都是错的。你必须在科学上产生自己的动力，想办法让自己振作起来，因为没有人会替你做到这一点。研究对你来说很重要的问题并掌握项目的主导权将有助于你保持高昂的动力。

Maximize your time. Several PIs emphasized the importance of keeping your eye on timelines. “In science,” as one of them put it, “you have to be productive in a short time.” I know I have messed this up, too. When I started my last project, the two years of my brand-new fellowship seemed to stretch out ahead of me like the ocean. But they went by much more quickly than I thought they would. You should always keep your eye on the calendar and make sure that you will have publishable results when your fellowship is ending. Funding is tight worldwide for both research grants and postdoctoral fellowships, and it is far from certain that a lab will keep postdocs on board to give them time to complete and publish their projects. (I still have the data from that last project and am hoping to publish them eventually.)

最大限度地利用时间。几位首席研究员强调了时间安排的重要性。"正如其中一位所说，"在科学领域，你必须在短时间内取得成果"。我知道我在这方面也做得一团糟。当我开始我的上一个项目时，我全新的奖学金的两年似乎就像大海一样在我面前延伸。但这两年过得比我想象的要快得多。您应该时刻关注日程表，确保您在奖学金结束时有可发表的成果。全世界的研究基金和博士后奖学金都很紧张，实验室是否会留住博士后，让他们有时间完成和发表项目，这一点很难确定。(我还保留着上一个项目的数据，希望最终能够发表）。

Outline your goals. In line with this, other PIs told me that they always had a plan for the next step in their career. When they started their PhDs, they were already thinking about where they would do their postdocs. When they started their postdocs, they already knew where they would apply for assistant professorships. Of course, their plans changed over the years — but they always had a plan to work towards.

概述你的目标。与此相呼应的是，其他首席研究员告诉我，他们总是对自己职业生涯的下一步有计划。当他们开始攻读博士学位时，他们已经在考虑在哪里做博士后。当他们开始做博士后时，他们已经知道要去哪里申请助理教授职位。当然，这些年来他们的计划有所改变，但他们始终有一个为之奋斗的计划。

Trust your intuition. Most of the PIs I interviewed told me that they made quick decisions with their ‘gut’. I had been doing quite the opposite. I always felt that being a scientist meant making well-informed decisions and, if you couldn’t come to a decision, collecting more information. But most PIs acknowledged that they made decisions — from everyday minor choices to more major decisions involving the direction of a study — knowing that they would find out only later if they had made the right choices. Instead of working on one or two well-thought-out projects, some PIs start ten half-baked ones. Even the most carefully planned projects can fail, and the chances are that you will learn more from an experiment that you conducted in one day than you would from three days of only thinking about it.

相信自己的直觉。我采访过的大多数首席研究员都告诉我，他们会凭"直觉"迅速做出决定。而我却恰恰相反。我一直认为，作为一名科学家，必须在充分了解情况的前提下做出决定，如果无法做出决定，就收集更多信息。但大多数首席研究员都承认，他们所做的决定--从日常的次要选择到涉及研究方向的更重大决定--都是在不能确定自己的选择是否正确的情况下做出的。有些首席研究员不是在一两个深思熟虑的项目上工作，而是开始十个半生不熟的项目。即使是最精心策划的项目也有可能失败，而你有可能从一天的实验中学到的东西比你三天的思考学到的东西还要多。

Finish. There is lot of truth to the maxim “finished is better than perfect”. If you do not publish something that you have worked on, you have wasted your time and your supervisor’s time and money (guilty there, too). It is as if you had never done the work, as far as everybody else is concerned. If you can’t prove your hypothesis because there is not enough time to do all the required experiments, it is better to prove and publish only part of it, rather than trying to go for the complete story and ending up with an unfinished, unsubmitted manuscript (I have a couple of those).These few pieces of advice stuck with me — I hope they will be useful to you.

完成。“完成胜于完美”这句格言有很多道理。如果你不发表自己的成果，你就浪费了自己的时间，也浪费了上司的时间和金钱（也有罪）。在其他人看来，就好像你从来没有做过这项工作一样。如果你因为没有足够的时间做所有必要的实验而无法证明你的假设，那么最好只证明并发表其中的一部分，而不是试图去做一个完整的故事，最后只得到一份未完成、未提交的手稿（我就有几份这样的手稿）。