Many science professionals become disillusioned a few years into their careers even when they had their careers planned out. They could not point the scraggly-all-powerful finger the way Emperor Palpatine® could and croak “things are going as I had foreseen.”

This is because careers often do not unfold as we plan, especially when most of us engage in what I’d call “Fantasy Planning.” Fantasy Planning is where we spend a few good hours drawing up a rudimentary career plan, and then many more years fantasizing about the beautiful things we will reap from our career plan. The fantasy becomes a mind-numbing drug in the face of a sometimes ugly reality.

Consider the following career plan by a scientist-in-training:
• Graduate with PhD within 4-5 years
• Get postdoc position with famous PI
• Publish papers in the holy journal trinity (Science/Nature/Cell)
• Get assistant professorship
• Fast-track to tenure, swim in the gravy of my achievements

PhDs have an especially tough challenge thinking beyond traditional “career planning” because everything about our research training is about “controlled environments.” We begin to want to control for everything, including how we seek the truth in our scientific investigation. We avoid experiments with multivariate controls to avoid confounding factors in our results. We embrace knock-out systems that give us cleaner cause-and-effect matches. By the time we graduate, some of us will have realized the traditional career path as methodically as checking off a list. Those of us who did not realize our original career plan will face the inevitable: feelings of rising panic and sinking gloom.

The first step to managing the life cycle of your scientific career is to re-frame your career plan as a nice suggestion and not what you thought it was - an edict that ensures your success. You do this by adding the phrase, “What if I don’t…” in front of every step and a question mark at the end of the phrase, for example:

• What if I don’t Graduate with PhD within 4-5 years?
• What if I don’t Get postdoc position with famous PI?
• What if I don’t Publish papers in the holy journal trinity (Science/Nature/Cell)?
• What if I don’t Get assistant professorship?
• What if I don’t Fast-track to tenure, swim in the gravy of my achievements?

You would then brainstorm possible twists and turns in your career plot.

For example:
• What if I got married and had to move across the country and knew no one?
• What if I start a family? (or if you have a family, What if something happens to someone in my family?)
• What if I get sick?
• What if I have a nervous breakdown or an accident?
• What if I find out I still like science but no longer like the research?
• What if I don’t want to split cells and run gels for the rest of my life?
• What if I decide to like money?

Next, brainstorm on potential climaxes to your own career plot-twists.

You may surprise yourself.

®Emperor Palpatine (and his finger) is a registered trademarks of LucasFilms Ltd.