I think that one of the scariest parts of being President of the Society for Developmental Biology is coming up with topics for these editorials in the Newsletter. This time, however, I want to write about an issue that has bothered me for many years: how people apply for postdoctoral positions. In my experience most people (around 99%) apply incorrectly for their postdocs, and I suspect that many people do not get the postdoc that they want because of their applications. I'd like to change that situation.

So what do the 99% do that I feel is wrong? These applicants usually send a letter or email (either is fine) saying that they are interested in doing a postdoc and like the research done in the lab. Then they include their CV and the names of three references that can be contacted. Very little thought needs to be put into such applications, and they can be (and probably are) sent to tens if not hundreds of people. I am convinced that the usual reply to such letters is, "Sorry, I don't have room for anyone else in the lab," which is really a polite way of saying, "No."

I think the application should be different, but what I have to suggest requires considerable effort. First, pick two people (or three if you are a masochist) whose work you want to be part of and read their published papers. (At this point you may decide that you not that interested in the research and can stop there.) Second, using the papers and maybe work that you have done for your graduate studies, think about the experiments you want to do. Then, write up these ideas into a two-three-page proposal that you can submit with your application.

Why is a written proposal so important? First, it shows a potential postdoc advisor how you think and what you are interested in. Second, it recognizes that your status as a postdoc is different from that as a graduate student, that you are taking charge of your career. Graduate students are learning how to be scientists; postdocs are colleagues (virtually every practicing scientist you talk to will say that their postdoc was the best part of their career and this is one of the main reasons). Third, it is a document that cannot be ignored. I don't know anyone that is not impressed that someone outside their lab has thought about their research. (By the way, you can always add to your cover letter that you have based your proposal on published material and that you would be happy to think about other projects that the potential advisor may be working on.) Your ideas will be listened to. Fourth, it means that you are well on your way to having completed an application for funding (another way to show that you are taking charge). Finally (and I have to admit that this reason shows some selfishness on my part), it is your ideas. You may not have said something that your potential sponsor hadn't thought of, but you came up with the ideas, not him or her. Because they are your ideas (and everyone loves their own ideas), you will work particularly hard to develop them once you are in the lab. Future advisors love this.

In keeping with what I have said about taking charge of your career, I would also add that the line "Here are the names and contact information for three references that can tell you about me," that appears in most applications should be changed. As it stands the line tells a future employer that he or she needs to do some work. I suggest adding, "I have asked these people to write to you directly. If you do not hear from them in the next two days, please let me know so I can prod them."

Will this work? I have suggested these steps to all the graduate students in my lab since I was a beginning assistant professor, and virtually every one got the postdoc they wanted. In two cases when graduate students needed to apply to labs in particular cities and happened to choose researchers who were about to move, both of the researchers called me up asking what they needed to do to convince my students to move with them. In one case, the researcher said, "I have never had an application like this," supporting my contention that few people apply for postdocs this way. I don't guarantee that following this advice will get you the one postdoc you really want, but I am sure that you will be listened to and in all probability interviewed. Best of luck.

Mentorship is perhaps one of the words with the most varied interpretations in the scientific community in India. One widely held notion seems to be that mentoring someone essentially means telling them what to do. This can work, but it is essentially "me" based mentorship: the senior person is saying "here's what *I* think you should do." In contrast, my own interpretation of mentoring is that one enables someone to figure out what's good for them, and builds a relationship and environment that enables them to best achieve it.

I was asked by the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance to write about how I mentored three Early Career Fellows (ECFs) who joined my lab in successive years. The ECF is an opportunity for promising postodoctoral researchers to carry out research in India, and these candidates were talented researchers who would, by the end of their fellowship, enter the job market in the Indian bioscience sector. Reflecting on the process that began when they joined my lab and applied for the ECF, I realized that my biggest contribution was basically to allow them to work towards realizing their own potential. To me, mentorship means spurring, encouraging, and supporting people to introspect; to understand their own interests, strengths, and areas for growth; to provide a sounding board for ideas they generate. In a broad sense, mentorship to me is helping people one comes in contact with to get to wherever *they* want to go. Every interaction one has could take on a mentorship angle: I have mentored students who write to me asking for JRF positions; postdocs who apply for a position and may not end up getting selected; MSc and PhD students at TIFR who may or may not be in my own lab; MSc and PhD students who are offered admission and talk with me over the phone before deciding to join TIFR or go elsewhere; faculty colleagues in and outside of TIFR, and indeed, as has been my privilege, the three Wellcome-DBT India Alliance ECFs.

I suppose this comes from my genuine interest in getting to know the individual traits of people I interact with, in particular young researchers and students about to embark on a research career. Why are they buzzed about this new term, translational research? By mechanistic approaches? By fundamental science? What is their own interpretation of these things? What do they see themselves as years down the road? This last question is one that students from our country don't usually ask themselves—it seems as though it is enough to plan the next few years. I agree that it is impossible to really "plan" the future, but if one asks them to look within themselves, then no matter how nebulous their thoughts, they do have an unstated sense of what they want to do, or at least, what they don't want to do. That's a starting point for a mentorship conversation.

For Wellcome-DBT fellows, or for anyone doing a research project for that matter, if the questions they are working on don't buzz them enough to wake up in the morning with an eagerness to find out what the day's experiments will bring, well, that's a waste of a bright mind being asked to think about something that doesn't capitalize on its unique abilities. So this then is another thing worth putting time and thought into—to develop a project in which the questions and approaches are well suited to getting the most out of the mental makeup of the individual doing the project. Two of the three ECFs in my lab had no previous background in neuroscience, but they had joined my lab because they were attracted to *something* we were doing. We spent some time fleshing out what it was they were most stimulated by, and articulated specific aims together that closely matched each of their interests.

This approach necessarily means the PI has to hold back and let the candidate gather the courage to put down their ideas on paper…then work with them, but always in a manner consistent with the individuality of the person whose project it is. That way a PI is most likely to get an idea she may not think of herself… good science comes from many different minds interacting on a project, each with its own strengths and abilities.

This approach then lays out the road map to writing the proposal and preparing for the interview. If the project "belongs" to the postdoc intellectually, they can then be legitimately expected to defend it. Not all PhD training programs give this experience, so even the best of candidates are unsettled by being placed in the "hot seat" of an interview situation for the first time. Each of the ECFs in my lab volunteered themselves to go through a mock-interview in a lab meeting setting. Lab members would sit around the "interviewee" and ask all manner of questions pertaining to the grant proposal. We would pile up questions one after the other, making the candidate jump topics, from basics to speculations. Each response the candidate made was analyzed, critiqued….thrown to other lab members to see how they might phrase it better? Each candidate said later how they had never before been pushed so far outside their comfort zone, and that they had never before felt more on top of their project at the end of it. Why did this work in terms of being a useful learning experience? Because the candidate *wanted* to experience this, *wanted* to be taken outside their comfort zone. The desire to grow came from within; all we did was to make it possible for them to feel comfortable enough to go through a pretty uncomfortable experience. Why did this eventually work in the real interview? Because the project and its defense were "owned" by the candidate, who had by then done lots of extra reading out of a genuine desire to better understand questions they felt themselves shaky on. The end result was a successful Early Career Fellow who emerged more independent after having successfully faced the interview, standing on her own two feet. One might say these candidates have been "mentored," but essentially, all we did was enable their best to emerge.

The process doesn't end with the award of the fellowship. The ECFs were instituted to seed the Indian scientific community with talented and qualified researchers. This vision needs to be matched with the individual hopes, plans, and aspirations of the ECFs themselves. In some cases, timely assistance, such as providing a JRF assistant to an ECF who is on maternity leave, can make all the difference to the smooth progress of the project. The JRF can begin a prep for the day or finish something up if the ECF needs to come in late or leave early. The JRF is basically an extension of the hands of the ECF, and also provides the ECF the experience of being a supervisor, of training someone, keeping them engaged enough in their project and encouraging them to own the bits they are doing. But more broadly the ECF is encouraged to live their life as they wish it, personal and professional needs balanced, and is treated as an equal professional colleague who doesn't "report to" their mentor as much as "shares their plans and their progress" with them. This too is a part of mentorship, and extends the theme of encouraging people to be themselves, by providing the support so that they can work out their own individual solution to a work-life balance.

I once asked a postdoc in my lab "lets discuss what you want to do in the next 5 years and 10 years, then we can figure out what we can do to facilitate your achieving that." What I meant was, that if she was aiming for a position in industry, or academia, or teaching etc., we could shape her project so that her CV could be best suited to getting the job she wanted. For example, long-haul projects that open a rich vein of exploration might be suited to someone who aims to set up her own lab. Developing experience in certain high-end techniques may suit specific industry type jobs. The stage one enters into an industry job is also critical—one should enter at the highest possible level because that's usually the biggest career jump one can make, one that internal promotions may not be able to match if one has entered industry at a lower level due to lack of adequate experience. The same postdoc later told me that she had never imagined such a conversation could be had with one's boss, least of all when it was so early in the postdoc.

This set me thinking that in fact such a conversation probably needs to be had once a year right from when the postdoc is interviewing to join your lab! So then, my own personal take on mentorship can be summarized as follows: "A mentor should develop an atmosphere of discussion, planning, collegiality, and goal-setting in their labs that encourages lab members to figure out where they what to go in life. Then, together, the mentor and mentee can fashion an individual-based springboard to help them get there."

*A version of this piece has been submitted to the Wellcome-Trust DBT India Alliance. It appears here with their permission.

C. P. Snow famously wrote sixty years ago about the need for more communication between his "two cultures"—science and art. A physical chemist and fiction writer by profession, Snow felt perturbed by the fact that his literary and scientific circles had very little to say to each other. "The separation between the two cultures has been getting deeper under our eyes;" he said, "there is now precious little communication between them, little but different kinds of incomprehension and dislike." Snow's thesis, of course, was that the stark separation between intellectual debates in the sciences and arts was damaging to each.[1]

Over half a century on, Snow's words continue to resonate. Rather than two cultures, what we have now in academia is a proliferation of circles that scarcely talk. Similar concerns about fundamental truths and the nature of reality keep, for instance, physicists and historians up at night, with essentially no direct scholarly communication between them. The reasons behind this splintering of disciplines are certainly complex, wound up with decades if not centuries of baggage. The perception between fields that one draws more funding than another can instigate long-running feuds. Jargons accrete that make fields opaque from each other and from the outside world, building walls that break down useful communication.

I would argue, however, that within the Indian education system the sharp divide between the so-called cultures of science and art starts early. We are taught that math and poetry do not overlap, and then made to choose one over the other before most have managed to learn their mistake. By the age of sixteen, secondary school education in this country shunts young minds into science, arts or commerce. I can attest to the fact that by sixteen, I was old enough at least to know that the choice was ludicrous. Why separate out psychology from chemistry? Economics from ecology? Music from math? These are not mere useful distinctions that can be broken again at the graduate level, if needed. These divisions build cognitive walls: they break off conversation in a way that stunts future growth.

About four years ago, I conspired with a fellow Biology graduate student to start a literary magazine at JNCASR. Our plan was to source poetry, prose and art from researchers at scientific institutes all over Bangalore, and perhaps beyond. This did not quite happen, of course; for practical reasons many of our submissions were from JNC itself, and in three years we only managed to publish the magazine twice. On consideration, I am not sure where we found the time to even do that much. When I was tired of analyzing data for the day, I would sink myself into copy-editing an article, or work on a short story myself. After class, we would send out emails soliciting submissions from that one student we knew had poetry hidden away. We managed to bring other students on board as we went on, but it still took months to convince the institute we were doing something worthwhile. At an institute for scientific research, where everyone goes without sleep just for their regular work, why devote time and energy and extra money to art? I learned how to rattle off reasons in my sleep.

My reason, ultimately, was fairly simple. Everyone around me – every physicist, chemist and biologist – had a secret passion or three. Often not so secret. Reams of poetry, carefully refined over the years. A musical instrument played in private, a novel written between lab experiments. Dance classes, attended with devotion despite days spent programming at a computer. Blogs updated with regular philosophical or political rants. History books, read on the sly. Colour-filled abstract paintings, eerie photographs. Everyone had something, and of course not all of it was going to win the highest prizes, but each work that we received was a unique imprint of that person's mind. Each work was a sign of creativity spilling out beyond the narrow bounds of disciplines into something a bit harder to define—a personal space of intellectual discovery. That was precious, for me. That was a gift.

Currently ongoing work by neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen and colleagues suggests that the cognitive underpinnings of creativity in successful artists and scientists may not actually be very different.[2] Andreasen's Iowa Study of Creative Genius has found thus far that both high-profile artists and scientists show similar signs of mental flexibility at the neural level. Such a study must always come with the caveat that success may be as much a function of time and luck as anything else, and that individual creativity is difficult to define. However, one quality that researchers generally accept as a component of creativity is our ability to make wide-reaching, unusual mental associations. Such flexibility of mind that allows us to cast nets of thought far and wide, but not lose the story's thread in the process, is a quantity that can, arguably, be measured through word association tests. Andreasen found that even though scientists are not typically lauded as wordsmiths, highly successful scientists and artists still showed comparably high levels of activity in the brain's association cortices during word association tests, regardless of actual profession.

A much earlier study by the same group carried similar implications that the neural basis for creativity is not highly different across the arts and sciences.[3] Here, while studying writers involved with the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop, Andreasen found that creativity tended to run in families, inter-linked with varying degrees of mental illness. As the creative urge manifested itself in different family members, however, it showed little respect for disciplinary boundaries. Whatever aspect of creative ability carried a genetic or environmental component, it was as likely to express itself within a passion for science as for the arts.

Andreasen's work holds the intriguing suggestion that creative ability itself does not distinguish between the arts and sciences. This says nothing, however, for the capacity of one individual to extend skills from one topic into another. One cannot, for instance, expect a mathematician to be able to translate her numerical gifts into proficiency as a composer, regardless of underlying comparisons one can draw between the geometry of numbers and notes. Creativity within a given discipline is a many-layered phenomenon, stemming partly from latent capacity for original thought but also from years of dedicated training. Such training can have the ultimate effect of limiting creativity, even as it provides the structural coherence required to train originality of thought into good work. "I believe that artistic and scientific work can stem from the same type of creativity, but today they are judged by different standards," says Dr. Mukund Thattai, computational biologist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. "In science, the standard is prediction and measurement, and in art the standard is more the appreciation of your peers." That aesthetic quality key to art still holds sway in mathematics, Thattai believes, but is no longer considered essential to science. Simultaneous expertise in such disparate topics has thus become challenging at a very basic, cognitive level.

Can creative expression in the arts and sciences still play off one another, however? Why do we find so many who straddle the boundary, with a good amount of joy if not always professional expertise? Thattai has been involved with bringing many music and theatre programs to NCBS, for example, as well as instigating interactions between artists and biologists on campus. "It's fun," he explains with a smile. "It's good for the soul." Dr. Amitabh Joshi, evolutionary biologist at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, goes a step further. He writes Urdu poetry in his spare time, which he feels does tap into a similar source as his biological research. "Mathematical models, like poems, are metaphorical representations of reality, abstracted and beautifully expressed," says Joshi. "To be effective, a model must sing to you and tell you a story."

My own feeling is that creative pursuits outside a researcher's day job, however tentatively explored, go beyond mere hobby. The danger we face while immersing ourselves within a topic is that our minds gradually ossify; we can think perfectly well along that one branching trajectory, but we cannot think further. Trapped within the conceptual constraints of a single narrowed discipline and even narrower research topic, we get stuck within the whirlpool our own circling thoughts. The biologist who writes poetry between her PCRs may never write like W. B. Yeats, and neither, I suspect, would Paul Simon be of much use in the lab. Pursuing alternate creative endeavours, however, stretches our minds in novel ways. Like learning a new language, it gives us a few more souls to choose from. I don't find it surprising that paradigm shifts tend to come from people at the fringes of disciplines, or those with multiple disciplinary interests. The broader we can think – the farther we can see – the more methods we have for intellectual exploration, the more creative we can be.

Further reading:

[1] Snow, C. P. "The Two Cultures." The New Statesman, 1956.

[2] Andreasen, Nancy C. "Creativity in art and science: are there two cultures?." Dialogues in clinical neuroscience 14.1 (2012): 49.

[3] Andreasen, Nancy C. The creating brain: The neuroscience of genius. Dana Press, 2005.

It has become common practice to judge a researcher's work by looking at the Impact Factor of the journals in which she/he has published papers. While this approach could give a general idea about quality of research, it leads to a variety of complications when applied to situations—including recruitment, promotions, etc.—for which it is not that suitable.

The Impact Factor is, basically, an indirect measure of quality. It indicates the average citations received by an article published in a particular journal. Needless to say, every article in a given journal does not receive citations equal to the Impact Factor of that journal. So the Impact Factor really says more about the journal than the individual papers published in it.

Citations may be a more realistic measure of the impact (or value) of an individual researcher. To evaluate the contribution made by the researcher, her/his total citation count (over her/his entire career or over the time period under evaluation) could be considered. In addition to total citation count, one can also compute citations per paper, h index, etc.

When two researchers compete for a particular fellowship or promotion, it is not uncommon for the applicant with the higher Impact Factor to be favored, even when they both have the same total citation count, implying that their papers are referred to at same frequency by their peers. One of them loses out despite having made, arguably, the same scientific impact. Similarly, in eligibility criteria for various academic benefits, we often read that only people with a total Impact Factor of 5 or 10 (or some such number) can apply. Is it not erroneous to assume that papers published in high impact journals will automatically receive more citations?

Currently, many journals are operating in open access mode, making their content openly available to a wider audience. Increased access to scientific papers is changing the way they are referred to as well as cited. Papers are increasingly cited based on their relevance and content, rather than the reputation or Impact Factor of the journals in which they are published. If this trend of open access to research was to grow stronger, we can logically assume that if a paper is not good or interesting enough, then it will not get cited, irrespective of the journal in which it has been published.

This article is not an argument against use of the Impact Factor. It is not a bad parameter, when applied with due consideration of its limitations. But it is, really, better for evaluating journals than individual researchers. Unlike Impact Factors, which are translated from a journal to the papers it contains, citations are to be earned by each individual paper on its own merit. These days it is easy to generate the citation count from Google Scholar, Scopus, and other sources. It would be for the betterment of science if policymakers/decision-making authorities replaced Impact Factor with Citation Count as the parameter of evaluating the scientific excellence of a researcher and her/his contribution. Citation Count can also be a good and reliable parameter for ranking of research institutes and universities. Let us move towards a more direct and realistic evaluation, based on a more reasonable and effective parameter.

My family and I board the Kanyakumari Express at Bangalore destined for Kochi. The 3rd AC compartment is lively, and we enjoy a late night snack and chai and exchange conversation with others in the same compartment. "So you are visiting your son in Kerala- what does he do? We are on vacation, do you have any recommendations for where to get a good thali?" We prepare the beds, organize our belongings, and fall asleep to the rumbling sounds of the train on the track. Morning comes and we enjoy the beautiful early morning views of the Western Ghats, covered in mist. The journey to Kochi was memorable, interactive; much more fun than the sterile and predictable steps of going through security, boarding a plane, and collecting luggage at the next airport.

Going through scientific training and then getting a job is a lot like this train ride. It takes a while to complete, is sometimes bumpy, and often unpredictable. But it is interesting and interactive, especially if you are open to such possibilities.

Many young scientists ask for my advice on how to succeed. How many papers should I publish as a graduate student? Should I go into a "hot" field to increase my chances of getting a job? How many hours should I work per week? Where should I publish?

While such strategic questions can be important, my best answer is: relax a bit and enjoy your journey. If you are happy with your environment and your work, there is a far greater chance of being productive. You will be willing to work harder, able to focus, and become more receptive to new opportunities or ideas.

The connection between success and happiness in one's work is not unique to science. But science requires persistence, often weathering through dry spells in which results are not forthcoming. The nature of this work necessitates that one enjoys the journey and not just the final destination (ie. a paper or a job).

There is no magic formula for enjoying your scientific journey, but I can offer some suggestions.

1) In choosing a lab as a masters student, Ph.D. student or postdoc, don't just base your decision how how famous the PI is, how many papers the lab publishes, or even just the research topic of the lab. Visit and get a sense of atmosphere of the lab. Do you think that you will be happy working there? Are the people in the lab happy with their work? Are they enthusiastic? Joining a lab sight unseen is not a good idea.

2) Work with other people (i.e. collaborate or mentor a younger student). One of the most fun aspects of science is that it is interactive and social. Interacting with others can help you troubleshoot, get results or come up with new ideas. It also is more fun to come to work if you are networked with other people and not slaving away on your own. Don't miss out on this important and enjoyable aspect of your scientific training and your job.

3) Find other things to enjoy about science beyond your own project. Enjoy listening to a seminar or reading a great paper. Think of what a privilege it is to be able to understand and appreciate the incredibly cool scientific advances that are happening at this moment in time. Relish the success of others, even if your experiments are not working at the moment.

4) Work hard because you want to uncover an answer or get an experiment to work, not because you need to be present and accountable. Take time off when you need to recharge your batteries and realize when it is time to do so.

5) Enjoy learning new things! Don't get become too narrowly focused on what you are doing. Learning a new technique or even attending a seminar in a new field can be fun. Many professions involve doing the same job over and over again, but not science.

If you are enjoying the ride, you will most likely arrive a good destination at the end.

Next month - I will discuss postdoctoral training in India.