Life After…

Abstract

Your approach to this period in your life will depend entirely on how successful your time in research has been and therefore how you feel about it. If you have not got any results, had no money, or suffered through either a lack of supervision or conflict with your supervisor, it would require the rosiest of rose tinted spectacles to believe that you have had a positive research experience. If things have been better than this, then you may well be considering your options. You may well feel that you have done your time, gained as much as you can from research, and be preparing to move on to develop other areas – this is the case for the vast majority of people. Alternatively, you may wish to try to continue with research. There is now a more formalized career structure for achieving this – there are the academic training numbers and it is envisioned that this will offer a dedicated career path for those wishing to pursue an academic career. At the time of writing, relatively few have been appointed and it remains to be seen how this process will work in the long term. If you are only able to use your (nominal) academic half day to do research, you are likely to find that this is insufficient to do any hands on work and therefore to sustain your previous progress. Even if you discuss this with your training committee, they may feel that you have been appointed first and foremost as a specialist registrar and that this should be your primary commitment. In addition, funding opportunities to maintain your research interest may also be few and far between, particularly if your subject area is not currently “in vogue,” such as molecular biology or oncological heroism, and hence does not easily attract funding.