Complete Cleft Care & Choosing Your Own Adventure

[Dr. Gopi Shah]
For somebody who’s starting out, like they're finishing their residency or they’re within the first two to five years of their career, how would they actually get into translational research? How do you develop a research team?

[Dr. Steven Goudy]
I think there are a couple components. Number one, you need a little bit of training or exposure. It can be formally or informally, just so you understand what it is that you're doing and why you are doing it. You have to have mentorship. Mentorship is so important and some of my successes and failures have been tied to having good mentorship or not having good mentorship. If you don't have good mentorship and you don't have somebody who's going to fight for you and knock down the walls that you're approaching, then you're not going to make it. There are lots of ways that you can find your path, but if you really want to go into a field where you're going to spend months and months writing a grant that only has a 5-10% chance of getting funded, you have to love rejection and have good mentorship. This means having somebody patting you on the back and pushing you up the hill over and over. It's almost like Don Quixote attacking windmills. Having said that, I wrote 18 R01 grants just to get one.

Not to be super wonky, but if you do a Birkman personality assessment, you can learn more about yourself. I finally realized that scientific curiosity actually is relaxing to me and that's why I gravitated to it. If you do a self assessment, whatever that is, and you find out that you're set on doing something that stresses you out, you need to think about that.