Career-Development Timeline for MD Trainees (Year 2)

Continuous Priorities Year 1 Year 2 Year 3

  • Have explicit conversations with your scholarly mentor at the outset regarding eventual funding. This will help you focus your thinking and will clarify expectations for both you and your mentor.
  • Identify grant opportunities / Applying for Grants to apply for to fund your research.

Grants & Funding

ASH has created a Grants Clearinghouse of funding opportunities available to trainees and helpful tips for navigating the universe of funding sources. The Grants & Funding section on the Training Page of the ASH web site contains resources on trainee grant opportunities.

Note that the AACR, ASCO, and CALGB sponsor trainee grants with deadlines in the fall of your second year. Keep track of these and other grant opportunities throughout your second year. The AACR runs a grant writing course each spring for those who do not have such a course at their own institutions. Also look for the Hematology Grants Workshop for trainees and young faculty at the ASH annual meeting. Although self-funding is not a requirement for most programs, and grants won’t increase your salary, obtaining research grants early will help to establish your track record as an academician. Learning how to write grants early on may also allow you to identify particular areas of grant writing that you may need additional training on.

  • Consider a small secondary project if your primary project will take over a year to complete. It may lead to an abstract, poster, manuscript, etc.
    • Writing a review article or book chapter that will enhance your knowledge of your field may be useful, but these publications are usually not peer-reviewed. Since they may not be regarded as highly as peer-reviewed publications, you may want to limit such projects.
    • Preparing clinical protocols or research proposals may strengthen your protocol writing skills early on. The best thing of course is that hopefully by the time you are done with your training you are more comfortable in protocol writing and possibly conduct it on your own either in your home institution or in another facility.
  • Or consider alternatives to review articles or book chapters. A way to get a start in the arena of producing the more appealing genre of "original research," may be to do the following:
    • Write up the results of an already-established data base or abstract that might have been left unfinished by another trainee.
    • Write up an interesting case report or case series.
    • Compose the proposal for a short and feasible pilot study that may lead constructively into a larger prospective study proposal or grant application in the future. Demonstrate consistency in interests and a preliminary reputation in the field of relevance to bolster the legitimacy of larger research plans in the area. Your mentor may, in fact, be interested in having a number of pilot questions answered for his/her grants too!
  • Begin to research job opportunities in the spring. Search job banks, and have the division chief help by keeping his/her ears open. Keep your CV up to date; write a cover letter.
  • Take advantage of presentations at meetings that discuss job searching/interviews. They are very helpful in terms of knowing how to negotiate incentives, fringe benefits, etc.
  • Attend the Career Development Lunch at the ASH Annual Meeting.
  • Trainees seeking an academic research career frequently benefit from an extra year of research training. Discuss this with your mentor and program director.
  • Meet with your program director at least every six months regarding the quality of your mentoring and research experience.
  • Search for a subspecialty fellowship training program. Trainees seeking further specialized clinical skills development, with an opportunity to incorporate protected research time, may search for a subspecialty fellowship training program, (BMT, thrombosis, vascular medicine, transfusion medicine) rather than a non-specific year of research training, especially if the certainty of funding is questionable, or if there may be more to gain in expanding employment opportunities by developing an expertise or obtaining additional credentials. Be open-minded; some fellowship opportunities may lie in other departments, such as pathology, or exist geographically far away from home. Use the FREIDA/AMA Web site or direct online searches for fellowship terms to find institutions with available programs.

Continuous Priorities Year 1  Year 2  Year 3

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