Failing Forward: What I Wish I’d Known About Building a Research Career with Sarah Seaton

I think another concept that we should at least acknowledge here is that there's two complementary ways to think about advancement in your career.

One can be goal-minded.

Am I meeting the goals that I set before myself? One year, five year, ten year goals.

You can appraise your success in your career.

Are you meeting those goals? Another way to think about this is being more process oriented.

Like each day, am I going to work, working for things that I find meaningful? And am I working hard? Am I investing in improving the people around me? And that process type goal, I think is a little bit harder to measure.

But intuitively, to me, it might be a bit more important.

You know, whether a paper gets published, you know, whether, you know, your intervention in the pediatric ICU works for the one patient in front of you.

Sometimes that, you know, that all or none type result doesn't reflect the intensity and the hard work put into, you know, developing, you know, your individual skills or your career.

And I think we need to be sensitive to that process-minded goal as well.

That definitely resonates with me more as an individual is actually it's more about the process.

What I want to do is bring about meaningful change for critically ill children.

And I will try my best to find whatever route that I can bring that goal about.

I want to work with good people and I want to leave the... working day a little bit better than when I started it or leave the world a better place to use a phrase, you know, than when I entered it.

So, you know, and if those changes can be small and meaningful and often it's not about getting the five million pound grant, it's about helping a PhD student get through their first year exam.

I'm feeling confident at the end of it.

And I will consider that to be as successful a day as the day when I get the grant, because all successes, in my opinion, should be valued equally.

I don't like this whole, you know, idea of something being small and something being big.

I remember at the start of my career when I had my first ever paper accepted, like how excited I was.

I was just like absolutely so proud of myself and so delighted with myself.

And I still remember that now.

And I try so hard, you know, particularly when I know it's a member of my team's first paper, but any paper, you know, all those things need to be celebrated irrespective whether it's number one or number 600.

I don't have 600 papers.

But I think sometimes we can really easily in academia and research, we can sometimes become a little bit jaded and lose sight of the fact that actually some of those little wins are actually the big wins.

And they really matter to people, particularly early on in their career.