Social networks are everywhere. Personally I like Facebook to keep track of old friends and add new ones. These friends are mostly of nonscientific background. Until recently I had never realized the importance of social networks in science. When you do your PhD and perhaps some postdoc projects here and there, it is hard to think about what it takes to become a successful scientist other than doing brilliant science. Although scientific skills are undoubtedly important, I believe that one of the key ingredients which can make or break a scientific career is a good network of friends.

I’m at a conference and I have noticed something that I have seen before: the top scientists are surprisingly nice. Now I wasn’t quite completely sure if this was true but at least some of my friends thought the same thing. Here’s is what happened. I’m at a conference that is a bit outside of my normal field, so I do not know most people but I certainly saw a lot of famous names of people who have published major papers in the field. I would muster my courage and just walk up to these famous people and say something pleasant to break the ice. Their reply typically is very courteous and you can see their eyes flitter to your conference badge immediately followed by a question like “where is Strathclyde?” Typically, you end up talking very pleasantly about science. In different situations I have found that top scientist tend to reply to your emails quickly, are happy to send you reprints (quickly), are happy to tell you about what they are doing.

Let’s take a (not so) hypothetical situation: assume you hold some kind of responsibility in your group. You might the the principal investigator, a researcher or even just an experienced post-doc; the important part is that you are somehow responsible (morally if not practically) for people hierarchically below you.

Let’s also assume that a new PhD student (or, as a limiting case, a fresh post-doc) enter your group. The path he/she took to reach your group can vary enormously from country to country so let’s skip it. The main point is that you don’t really know this person but you have some good reason to believe he/she will do good.

The first few months are there to allow your new PhD student to get used to the new place, the new subject, the new “way of doing things” and so on. After some time passed you expect him/her to become productive. After all he/she is no more a undergrad student and is reasonable that, given some guidance, he/she will start conducting an experiment (or at least a part of it). After all the very reason you took in a new PhD student is because you need people working.

Last week, my wife accused me of being rude. Not so much to her – although it’s quite possible that I am, she’s probably got used to it by now – but to others. This sort of happened because our son, Guus, is going to nursery school soon and we were interviewed by the head of the nursery school. She extolled the virtues of their bulletproof entrance door, which (according to her) had become a necessity since Dunblane. In case you don’t remember, “Dunblane” refers to a town in Scotland where in 1996 a mad man entered a school and shot dead several kids. Terrible obviously. However, I couldn’t help myself and started arguing that this was silly and that surely because this happened once in Britain, this was extremely unlikely to happen again, let alone at the particular nursery school that my child was about to attend. Her answer: “Belgium”. Clearly referring to another more recent occasion where a child was hurt. At this point, I decided to give up, judging that further discussion of probabilities or, say, Bayes theorem or shot noise wouldn’t really go over very well.

In an ideal world you finish high school having a very clear idea on what you want to do in your life. Then you opt for the very best university in that field, you graduate with very high grades and then you apply for a PhD in a fantastic group in a different university (in a different country). By the time you finish your PhD you accumulated a decent amount of (nicely cited) publications and people in your scientific community start to know about you. At this point you apply for a post-doc somewhere else (once again a fantastic group in a different country) and start your unstoppable run to the top.

Today I want to discuss some of the arguments that should play a role in the decision for students to send  out an application to a particular principal investigator in a particular institute in, very often, a foreign country.

Mobility
How mobile should a junior scientist be? I know some very successful scientists that went to high school, college and university in the same city. And even became professor at that university, with as their research theme a continuous iteration of their PhD thesis. But I think they form a minority.

Leaving your own university, or even your country
The majority of junior scientists struggle. Should they leave their country? And if so, at what level of their education? Leaving one’s country is usually either done to get a PhD abroad, or to get first a master abroad and then a PhD abroad. But even if staying in the same country the question arises whether or not one should continue to go for a PhD in the same group where the master degree was acquired.

As a student in a traditional condensed matter physics group, I was taught for many years that for every conference you visit, you write an article for the proceedings. In my experience it was mainly seen as a gesture to the organizers and to the community. Several times I have responded to the request of organizations like SPIE to contribute a 10-page article to a conference. In later years I was surprised to find out that this attitude toward proceedings is not shared among all researchers. So what is the role of conference proceedings in the present scientific system, should we write them, are they a waste of time, or are they perhaps worse than that?

Why proceedings may be useful
Conference proceedings have fulfilled several useful functions in the past. A conference volume provided a sense of community; by contributing one is acknowledged as an active member of the field. Conference volumes were distributed among the community in hardcopy, in which case they provided reference material for workers in the field. Thus it was an effective way of addressing the relevant people. Proceedings were a way of getting one’s work known in the community before major results were published in a peer reviewed paper. Finally, proceedings can be used to provide background information or to present data which would otherwise not be published elsewhere.

Writing grant proposals is a fact of live for every group leader. This writing can be quite time consuming. Your chance of success depends on a number of factors. The factor I want to discuss here is the originality and the detail of the proposal .

New idea
Pursuing a new idea is what makes the life of a scientist fascinating and challenging. But also demanding. Just continuing one’s research on old ideas is much easier. But a new idea is very difficult to come by.  Continuation of old stuff is much easier. Grant organizations want new ideas. Supporting continuation is in our society never appreciated. ( Unless it is Scottish whisky.)  So even when you are just going to do the same research you have to package it in the form of a new idea.

So here we are. Made it, got through the rat race, and found a safe haven in a Physics Department in a different country. They even offer state-of-the-art lab space and a small startup package (not sufficient to do anything substantial in photonics). So where to begin? Here is a brief description of my first steps as a university lecturer, which has little to do with science as I knew it.

1. Know the right people

Being in a new institute in a new country without any equipment, my first strategy is to get known and make friends among institute directors and clean room managers. It is amazing how friendly most people are toward new academics. The well-trained scientific paranoia however stirs in the back of my head. What do they want of me, why are they giving me free access to clean rooms and laser equipment, who do I have to put on my papers later on? For now I forget this voice in the back of my head and hope for the best, as there is nothing to loose and a lot to gain.

I used to go to the library. Every couple of weeks or so I would go and check the journals, browse through their tables of content (TOCs), and flip through the pages. You would find odd articles in areas there weren’t quite your own. Slowly over time journals got bigger and were published more frequently. Then they started emailing TOCs out, which seemed like a pretty good improvement as you could just read them on your computer. Gradually, I started to run out of time: the TOCs were just too long and there were too many of them. Virtual journals (such as the Virtual Journal of Ultrafast Science) offered some hope but they don’t cover all journals such as Elsevier journals, so you would still end up having to read a bunch of emailed TOCs.

For a couple of years, I tried an RSS reader. A free reader, such as NetNewsWire for the Mac or FeedDemon for Windows (http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/) can collect RSS feeds containing TOCs from you chosen journal. FeedDemon has to possibility of searching through your feeds. That worked pretty well until I switched to a Mac and found that NetNewsWire couldn’t search through feeds. By the time the TOCs were simply to huge to read them “raw”.