In January 2023, I resigned from my position at the Department of Cell & Developmental Biology at the University of Würzburg. Here are some of the things that I think I should have done differently when I moved there in 2015 to start my junior research group.

Where did it go wrong? Like most things, it’s hard to see the direction things are heading in at the time but once you step back a bit the general trajectory gets clearer. When I arrived in Würzburg in 2015 I was excited and had ambitions of becoming a tenured professor one day. Eight years later, I’m wondering why I lasted as long as I did, and why I didn’t resign earlier. 

In any case, here are a few of the things that, with hindsight, I think might be useful to others setting out in the same direction. 

1. Have a Plan B from day one. 
Like many academics, I was always frightened at the idea of leaving academia because I didn’t have a career Plan B in place. Even though getting to the point of starting your own group might feel as though you’ve passed through the eye of the needle, it often means a permanent position is still far from guaranteed (and what’s on the table at the end may not be that desirable anyway). So while you should expect the best (tenure), you should also plan for the worst (exit). 

So even if you are 95% sure that academia is where you want to go, you will still need a plan B and it’s worth having that fleshed out in advance. Knowing what you will do if things don’t work out will also make you feel much more secure, because the lab’s prospects won’t seem like a life-or-death situation. My group nearly folded in 2017 and the experience of applying and interviewing for positions outside of academia then made me realise that I was employable and had options. This made it much easier to walk away from things became unsustainable in 2022.

2. Know where your red lines are.
When I joined the Department in 2015, I was told that there would be space on the payroll in 2-2.5 years, so although I would initially have to raise 100% of my own salary this wouldn’t be for long. Unfortunately this didn’t work out, and in 2017 it became clear that I would need to keep on raising raising 100% of my own salary – something I continued to do until both my salary and research funding were discontinued by the German Research Foundation at the end of 2021. 

It might be difficult to get guarantees from your Department in writing, and even if these are not kept you might not feel able to speak up. Nonetheless, you should be very clear in your own head about what your red lines are, and be prepared to take action when they get crossed. At the very least, you can start revising your expectations of how things are going to go and if need be, start planning your departure well in advance. 

If promises are not kept, this is a signal that your needs are not being put first. Looking back, the need to continue raising all of my own salary after that first 3-year period was where my fate was sealed – I was never able to kick on and grow the group, which was powered exclusively by undergraduate labour for its duration. 

3. Have some kind of advisory committee.
I was not in a tenure-track position, and thus there was no panel overseeing my career development. Even if you’re not on a tenure-track position, I think it’s worth lobbying hard to get some kind of committee together (as is standard for PhD students nowadays) so that there is some body with nominal oversight of your progress. Committees can often be rubber-stamping bodies, but if you’re lucky you will have people who will feel responsible for you. At the very least, they can ensure that you’re in no illusion about your rate of progress.

Internationals can be very vulnerable in this respect, because we don’t necessarily have the personal networks and understanding of the academic system that domestic scientists will – and people may be assuming that we know how the system works when in fact we don’t. Again, looking back, it’s clear that from 2018 onwards I was in big trouble but there was nobody around to deliver the hard truths. 

4. Get financial support.
A junior research group is basically a small business, and the number one reason why any small business fails is that it runs out of cash. It has nothing to do with the quality of the product, or the reputation of the team. Salaries dictate finances. Consumables and facility costs are cheap, but people are expensive and will be your number one expense.

Of course, things are tight everywhere nowadays but it’s a no-brainer that if you invest in people they’re more likely to do well. At the institutional level, giving someone an opportunity is very different from helping them to succeed, and in today’s climate, that means financial support. There are also wide variations from country to country in how many sources of third-party funds are available, and when these are limited (as in Germany) then departmental support becomes very important.

In my case, the department indicated before my arrival that it could not provide me with any financial support whatsoever, and that stance never changed in 8 years (I asked repeatedly if I could have one PhD student, but unfortunately there were never funds available). I didn’t realise until much later that success – establishing a flourishing independent research programme –  in these conditions was practically impossible. 

5. Don’t do risky research.
Research these days is in thrall to the idea of “risk”, but if I’m being cynical then I’d say that “high risk” usually means “expensive” – the risk is to the funders, not the scientists. Genuinely risky research – something that means your career might be over if it doesn’t work out – is rightly rare, and should be avoided. Don’t get too caught up with the idea of making some unique Nobel prize-winning contribution in your first 5 years – just focus on steady productivity, and put out small, high-quality papers on a topic at or close to the scientific mainstream that people will be interested in. This is where Peter Medawar’s “Advice to a young scientist” is to be heeded: “It is not enough that a problem should be “interesting” – almost any problem is interesting if it is studied in sufficient depth.”

I went catastrophically wrong in this respect, and ended up committing almost all my research time on a very “interesting” problem that was only of interest to a very small number of people in a small research community. This topic should have been my second avenue of research and not my primary one, and I would have been better off focusing on something that would have captured the attention of a larger body of people.

6. Have good collaborators.
Collaborations are very difficult to get right, but when they work they’re worth their weight in gold. It helps get your name on more papers and will ideally mean that you broaden the range of techniques that you can bring to bear on your research topics. If your collaborators are senior figures in the community, their reputations will also assist the perception of your work. I did collaborate with people during my group’s time, but probably not enough.

7. Identify hostiles.
Not having my postdoc mentor on my papers appeared to have a dramatic impact on the tone of the peer review I received. Every time I submitted something, there would generally be 1-2 good reviews and 1 toxic one, and the toxic ones always carried more weight with editors and funding panels. It is an unfortunate truth that people can simultaneously be good scientists but also not to be trusted to review other people’s work scientifically. Regrettably, you also can’t rely on people – even friends – to give you honest opinions to your face, and the psychological damage that can be caused by hostile or rude (anonymous) reviews is immense.

Obviously you don’t want to get paranoid about things, but it’s worth asking around to learn what reviewers are excluded by other people working in your area. If you find that a lot of people are excluding the same person, that can be a good hint that they are not to be relied upon to give constructive and unbiased criticism.

8. Don’t be ashamed to walk away.
Only 1% of PhDs ever become tenured professors, and it’s self-evident that many more than 1% of PhDs are good scientists and group leaders. There are very many reasons why things might not work out, and few of them will be scientific. Unfortunately it’s very clear that in a lot of places, the way academia is right now is very different from how we think it should be, and conditions can be brutal for those either side of the tenure line. If so, it’s ok to walk away.

There’s too many people competing for too few positions, which is producing some unhelpful incentives and a lot of mental health damage. Put simply: academics simply do not paid enough to get put through so much stress. We’re all smart, hard-working, very capable people who do not need to be putting ourselves through hell in pursuit of a vision that may well be a mirage.

As such, you definitely need to ensure that you know what kind of success you’re aiming for in academia and whether you’re being given the tools to do it. I have no regrets about running a group, even within the extremely reduced conditions I faced, but I now realise that it was never likely to work out and as such, this was the right time to leave.

Is this all “Poor me poor me”? I realise it might come across that way, but this is absolutely not an attempt to say it wasn’t my fault that things didn’t work out. I worked as hard as I could and I did my absolute best, but I think I could have been a bit more streetwise and should have taken the time to step back and look at the big picture more often. The 8 points above are things I wish I could have impressed on myself at a much earlier stage.

This posting is a complement to my earlier “Setting up shop” one, which was a set of recommendations for new group leaders that I compiled from discussions with various friends who have been much more successful than me. Check that out for some other ideas on the same theme.

Anything I forget? Let me know. And if you’re just starting out – I hope this helps!