Interview with POWER Ambassador Dr. Sharon Vaughn

In February 2019, members of the POWER Steering Committee met with Sharon Vaugh, Ph.D. We had a thoughtful conversation about research, writing, and how to say “no” sometimes.
 
What is your advice for developing as a writer? 

• Prioritize daily writing – 30 minutes minimum, but 60-90 minutes is better. Treat this meeting as if it was with a dean or someone important, so you truly protect that writing time and aren’t tempted to cancel it. Would you cancel an appointment with your dean? Put these times in your calendar.

 

• Early in your career, you must prioritize publishing in the peer-reviewed journals that have the highest impact. For the most part, your daily writing routine should be focused on producing manuscripts. Unless your institution has a requirement for funded grant proposals, it is manuscripts published in high quality journals that will secure your position.

 

• You will also want to focus on writing grants, but keep this focus constrained. Look at the calendar and note grant deadlines. Focus on grant writing for the 30-40 days before the deadline. Do not let grant-writing take over your writing life. If you spend too much time letting the grants take over your daily writing, you will lose focus and energy on manuscript writing.

 

• Consider setting big goals for which journals and fields you want to most influence early in your career; this will increase your influence early on. For instance, my goal was to publish one manuscript per year in Journal of Educational Psychology. Whereas later in your career, you can develop more diversity in the audiences that you are writing for. Don’t hide your excellent work by publishing it in a low impact journal.

 

• I write on more than one paper at a time, but I only lead one paper at a time because I really need to keep my head in that paper. In this way, I can be very responsible for what I am leading, but support others. I make sure that junior people are not waiting on me because they need these papers for promotion and tenure.

 
What are your tips for successful grant writing?

• You should go for low hanging fruit in terms of university grant opportunities or other accessible grants if they meet your needs. But in the first three years, you might want to consider writing grants for larger funding agencies such as IES and NIH because this experience is important for you to understand how your ideas are thought of in the field. Make sure you have an experienced mentor who can help you by reviewing the proposal prior to submission and possibly be the co-investigator for the project.

 

• It’s also important to keep grant writing in perspective. The reasons for external funding are: 1) if you want buyout for your courses; 2) consistent summer salary; 3) fund graduate students; and/or 4) if your job is yoked to it. Good work can also be done without external funding.

 
How do you envision a focused program of research?

• I would admit that I splintered off a good bit in my early work. I feel like when I was dabbling in multiple fields, I was not as productive. When I put together a set of studies that were related and could occur over about 5 years, then I was much more productive. I put a five-year plan together and I talked about it.

 
How do you recommend young researchers find a more senior mentor?

• I think this is really tricky and for several reasons. One thing I have observed is that the most senior people are often the best to work with because they know who they are and so mentoring others is a desirable and exciting activity. Early in your career as you are trying to establish your own line of research, you are still “treading water” in some ways, so it is hard to be as generous with your time as you might like to be.

 

• Yoking with a very productive associate professor who is interested in working with you can also be very helpful. These types of people can show you the ropes and it can be mutually beneficial.

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• Don’t be relegated to your own institution to look for mentors. I don’t think we should think of our university walls as the boundaries for where you can find good mentors. I have examples of colleagues at other universities that are excellent collaborators who initially reached out to me as a mentor.

 

• Also, start when selecting a mentor or research partner with something small before going into a longer-term project to see if the collaboration is beneficial. For example, start with doing a conference presentation or a short-term research project. 

 

• I tell people all the time “Don’t work with people just because you like them.” You have to have high confidence about the quality of their work and their reliability in doing their work. You have to be able to trust them more than thinking about whether you want to see them on Saturday night.

 

• Also, if you as the junior researcher are willing to do more of the heavy-lifting work, it will be a much better sell for senior scholars to work with you (e.g., the role of senior scholars to consult on the design, intervention, and measures and junior researchers manage the implementation).

 
Can you talk about work-life balance and how you’ve thought about that across your career?

• I deliberately limit how much I will work each week. When I have reached my limit, I “clock out.” So that makes me much more deliberate about making sure that I come to work and work hard during my designated work hours. I bring my lunch and don’t goof off at work. I very rarely work after 6pm.

 

• Get your calendar set up so you have blocked time to write, then email, then calls, or meetings. That way you stay focused and do what you’re supposed to do at that time. That way when it is time to go home, you can leave.

 

• How do you manage anxieties about our type of work – this can be anything from decision making, promotion, tenure, manuscript rejections, etc. There are so many opportunities to be anxious in this type of work. I don’t know the formula to eliminate anxiety, but I do know that ruminating about things is not helpful. These anxieties are real because we often do not have clarity in this business.  But you have to live with these ambiguities because they are part of the nature of this work. Acknowledge those feelings – they are real – but then you have to set the fears aside and trust that you know some things about your work that you should focus on. Hard as it is, it is not useful to have your anxieties push you around.  They really are the bigger enemy than the thing you actually fear.

 
How do you assess what opportunities to “yes” versus “no” to?

• Say “Let me think about that. Let me get back to you”. In most cases, what you need to do is wait to decide – explain that you need to think about it or check on something. If you wait 24 hours, you can visualize yourself doing the work. This will help you make a much more clear decision.

 

• I am working on saying “no” more. We often say “yes” to too much because we are in a helping profession.  But we need to remember that we don’t have greater obligation to do things compared with those who are in other professions. You wouldn’t ask your neighbor who is a lawyer to write your will for free.  We need to respect our own time and teach others to respect it as well.

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• When you say no, keep it very simple, such as “I have other obligations now that require my time.”  If you provide too much information, you either hurt someone’s feelings or open a window for someone to provide a counter argument.

 
Many thanks to Sharon for sharing her advice and time with us; we are especially grateful for her honesty about managing anxieties and decision-making. 

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