How Did You Get That Job? Featuring: Dr. Kinzig

(Garth): Welcome, my name is Garth A Fowler and I'm the Associate Executive Director of APA's Office of Graduate and Postgraduate Education and Training. And I'm going to be your host today for our latest installment of, "How Did You Get That Job?" The APA's webinar series where we interview individuals with psychology degrees and ask them about their career path, their job, and how they got there.

For those of you who have been with us before you know the spiel; our webinar is short and focused, it only lasts 30 minutes. In the beginning we're going to ask our guest to tell us briefly about her current job, what a day in the life is like, and then what skills, abilities, and competencies she uses. Then we're going to switch and we're going to take time to learn how she got here, what the path would be like for someone interested in breaking into the career like hers, and then ask some questions.

During the webinar you can submit a question by using the questions box located in the webinar control panel. And as time goes by, or excuse me, as time permits at the very end I'll also select some of these questions for our guest. So let's get started! Today our guest is Dr. Kimberly Kinzig. She's an instructor and researcher at Purdue University. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in behavioral neuroscience and I am so excited, actually, to have Kim here. Because she was one of the very first people I ever met when I went to graduate school so we went to the same graduate program. So Kim, thank you very much for taking the time to be here today!

(Dr. Kinzig): Hi Garth, thank you for having me.

(Garth): No problem. It's been a while right? You were saying like 20 years since we've seen each other!

(Dr. Kinzig): It goes quickly.

(Garth): And we're still not technically seeing one another so I don't know how this helps with that but..

(Dr. Kinzig): This is a start. This a good start.

(Garth): All right, well let's get into it. So your title is Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences. I think people probably know, they think they might know a lot about your job, but tell me what does that mean specifically? And what is it you do on a day to day basis?

(Dr. Kinzig): Okay, so I started as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2005 and I'm in a division of our psychology program called behavioral neuroscience. So we have several different areas that we fall into. I was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2011 and I guess there are really three arms to what we do as faculty at Purdue. There's discovery; so that's the research part of it. There's learning; which is the teaching component. And engagement; which is a variety of tasks including service to the department, service to the university, and service to the community.

As for a day to day, it varies a lot, which is probably one of the things that I love most about my job. On a day to day basis during the academic year my times mainly split between research and teaching. And that depends on how many and what courses I'm teaching in any given semester. That changes over time. Usually we teach two and one; so two courses in one semester and one course in the next semester, but that can vary depending on needs. I spend a fair amount of time preparing and refining lectures, and course material. And because for upper level courses we cover a lot of current research and read current literature to supplement textbook material. Which I think is really important as you get more advanced in a psychology degree.

So on a teaching day I spend a couple of hours before class working on class material. Then a little bit of time in the classroom and then in the afternoon I typically work on research which can include a variety of things. I spend a lot of time working on grant proposals because my research program is expensive and it requires external funding in order to run at the best level. That requires a lot of time reviewing relevant literature, going through data we have, and working on putting together what we hope are fundable proposals.

And then sprinkled into that our committee meetings and such, and I serve on a lot of different committees one of which is Purdue's Animal Care and Youth Committee. I serve on our Departmental Graduate Committee. Then all of us serve on, well most of us serve on several committees for graduate students for doing their PhD's.

( Garth): So it sounds like you're like you said very very different a lot of things that you're juggling on a day to day basis. So there's probably not a typical day it depends on what type of year or things like that?

( Dr. Kinzig): Yeah. I would say there is no typical day, which is a good thing. Yeah I like it.

( Garth): So for your career and I think particularly for the type of background. Which people can see you talked a little bit in your bio that, you know, identify. You and I went to a behavioral neuroscience program in the psychology department, so you identify as neuroscience. But what about other people doing similar research or work? Do they always have the same title? Where do you find people who are doing research? Are all your colleagues academics? Or do you have people who are working in business? Or what about this job of being a professional research, where can when do this? Just where are the other places?

( Dr. Kinzig): So most of my colleagues are researchers in similar institutions. If you just, neuroscience is kind of interesting. If you look just at Purdue where the neuroscientists are: you find us in psychology, you find us in biology, you find us in medicine; we're kind of spread out. And we have a couple of different programs that kind of unite us based on interests that we have. We just started Purdue's Integrative Neuroscience Center, which kind of draws people together in this institution. As far as other people with this kind of career, there's you know, some people take the non- academic route and go into industry. Where they're working at places like pharmaceutical companies and you know those types of jobs, and what you do in those jobs can vary. Some of them are very much like what we do in terms of running our labs and conducting research, just take the teaching part out of it. And some are very different where the research is much more kind of directed by the company rather than by the individual.

( Garth): Excellent! So let's talk a little bit then about the skills, abilities, and competencies that you need to be a success. And the first question we always ask is you know, what are those? What are the skill sets? What's the knowledge? What kind of competencies do you need to have that you use in your job in order to be successful?

( Dr. Kinzig): So I would say most of the work that I do is focused on teaching and research. So to teach in behavioral neuroscience I teach both an introductory behavioral neuroscience course which is challenging in that it requires a really broad understanding of the area. For example, in the intro to behavioral neuroscience course we cover everything: from the historical roots of behavioral neuroscience to what a neuron is, how neurons communicate, to the basic anatomy of the central nervous system, and then move into things like how the CNS mediates complex behaviors like learning and memory, reproductive behaviors and disease. So it's, you know, kind of a broad knowledge of a brain and behavior. More specialized knowledge is required for upper level courses. Like my hormones and behavior course, in which we cover basic endocrinology and hormonal influences on development, and several behaviors for which hormones play a major role.

So it's not just in humans either we look at other species, and kind of how understanding what happens in other species can inform us of how humans behave. So as far as research goes that's something that you kind of learn along the way in graduate school with conducting the research that will lead to your dissertation, and learning how to be an effective writer, how to effectively put proposals together to try to get funding, because funding is a big part of the thing that we do. And to be able to kind of communicate your research in scientific journals is important.

( Garth): So what are some of the things, maybe just this would be an interesting time to talk about what were some of the things, that you did that you do now that that you learned as a graduate student or as a post-doc? How did your training prepare you for what it is you do now?

( Dr. Kinzig): Okay! So as a graduate student I think in the beginning a lot of us take several courses and we try to gain some different lab skills. A lot of people when they go into graduate school for behavioral neuroscience they've already got a little bit of lab experience, but really it's a time in grad school to learn how to do a lot of different techniques. From behavioral techniques to molecular techniques and hone those skills, and be able to use them to address questions that you have. So, you know, when you're reading the literature in your given field or you know what your lab is specializing, kind of finding holes in the literature and being able to develop hypotheses to address those holes. And then you have to be able to design the right kinds of experiments to answer those questions. So that's kind of an ongoing process; a little bit of trial and error, and requires some guidance as you go through graduate school. And then also learning how to write in grad school is important. Writing for science is very different from writing for other disciplines. So you know the way that you learn to write for an English paper, for example, is very different from how you would write a scientific article. So those are things and also grant writing. You have to start learning how to write grants early on. That's a critical component.

( Garth): Right! So let's talk, I feel like a lot of people especially graduate students and post-docs like they kind of feel like they know what it takes to be a faculty member, or a tenure-track faculty member at a big research you know oriented university. Or even at that one where there's a more balance between research and teaching. But I'd like to ask you what were some of the things that you find you had to do once you got into this job that you weren't prepared for? What did the training not teach you about being a faculty member or being a primary investigator in a research project? That when you got there you were like "oh my" I have to learn to do this on my own.

( Dr. Kinzig): Yeah, I could probably make a pretty good list of that one. So you learn how to do research in grad school and you learn how to do that even better as a post-doc, and you learn how to write, and those sorts of things. But when you get to your own lab, suddenly you've got a budget to manage. Suddenly you realize that all the things you kind of used just because they were there when you're a grad student actually cost a lot of money. So don't throw that away. Learning how to manage a budget was something that I had to learn pretty quickly. So you know tenure-track assistant professors or any assistant professor you come in with a startup package to get you going and to kind of sustain you until hopefully you get external funding. Then once you do get external funding, those budgets are you, know you, have to manage those as well. And try to do the best and most work you can do with, you know, limited funds. So there's the budget part.

Another thing that was newer for me was managing people. So I came from a fairly large lab. You probably remember the lab I was in in Seattle. But large lab, lots of grad students, lots of post-docs. It was on a medical campus so we had very few undergraduates in the lab that I ended up getting my PhD. And it was kind of the same for my post-doc I was at Hopkins, the medical campus. But at Purdue we worked with a lot of undergraduates, so I find myself you know kind of working with undergraduates in the lab to make sure they're getting what they need which is one side of it, but then also kind of making sure everything gels between the undergraduates, and the graduate students, and the technicians is something that you're suddenly in charge of. Right?

( Garth): Right!

(Dr. Kinzig): So those are probably the two biggest things that that I had to learn. Also when I was a graduate student, I only had to TA as a teaching assistant for one quarter out of the entire time. And when I started at Purdue my first teaching assignment was to teach the undergraduate introductory introduction to psychology course. So that was, yeah you learn pretty quickly how, you know, you're in front of a class of 200 undergraduates staring at you. And you have to talk to them for 150 minutes a week, so that was a quick learning there. ( Garth): So basically, just before we move onto the next question, to summarize; what you really had to develop competency in was that budgeting and managing money from the research perspective. Learning how to manage people and their relationships, and understanding that you're their boss in the lab. And then the third one, which seems kind of strange, but I hear this all the time from faculty is for teaching. Even though that's what we think a professor does really that's probably the least amount of preparation that we get, is for teaching.

So all right! So we'll probably come in, we have questions rolling in that talk more about that. So we can talk more about some of the skill sets that you had to learn about, but we'll move on. So give us a brief history of how you got here. How did you get into this career? How did your position progress? And remember, they do have the bios, it doesn't have to be lengthy, but, you know, just kind of hit the highlights of those transitions and how you made those transitions.

( Dr. Kinzig): Okay. So the brief version of my history leading to my current position is that I was an undergrad at Florida State, and I was doing research in psychology for credit in a sensation and perception lab. That led me to realizing that doing research was something that I really loved. I think maybe before that I didn't really I hadn't really thought about career a career in research. I was just kind of trying to find my way when I was younger.

And so research kind of became the thing that I wanted to do. I was really interested in the interplay between psychology and biology particularly related to obesity and eating disorders. So from there I was accepted to University of Washington psychology PhD program, and within the physiological psychology area with you. But I ended up just getting my masters there and moving on to University of Cincinnati because my advisors moved and moving back to the Midwest worked for me for personal reasons.

I went on to my post-doc at Johns Hopkins where I was able to focus on research and to develop my own interests more. From there about a year and a half into my post-doc there was a job opportunity at Purdue. Which fortunately I got and then I get from tenure-track assistant professor to tenured associate professor. Got my research program going, I got funded from NIH, dug into teaching undergrads and graduate students, and you kind of now it's kind of you know maintaining and building on that foundation.

( Garth): Excellent. So you know I think people again are going to kind of know, but let's make sure that we cover the topics. If people really interested in finding more jobs like yours, you know, how do they go about do this? Where are the places that they should be looking? And I don't know if it just has to be neuroscience and, you know, motivated behaviors like you're doing. Like how does one learn about all these broad opportunities to do research and be a faculty member, and teach, and all those things?

( Dr. Kinzig): I think a lot of it is just the experiences that you have in graduate school. So, you know, clearly you have to go to graduate school and get a PhD to get this, you know have this, kind of career. And making connections in graduate school, making connections as early on as possible is important. Because with the way technology is kind of exploding and the things that people can do to answer questions in a different way than we've ever been able to do before you're never going to have all those tools in your personal toolbox. So finding people who can help enhance your research and, you know, working on collaborative projects, and building these relationships that are going to help, you know, improve your science and improve your likelihood for success in the career is really important. I don't think you can ever start too early. So finding the meetings where you can talk to people and where you can learn more about how other people's careers have developed, and how their research has grown over the years is really important.

( Garth): So kind of taking that opportunity to network to engage with people. I loved how you said early like you can't do all the interesting questions on your own anymore. So you're going to have to work with someone who might bring a new technique and that can help you find more about an opportunity, or a job, or somewhere like that.

( Dr.. Kinzig): Right, yeah!

( Garth): So what's your, you know, advice to...let's move on then to the last one before we get to the open questions. But what would you like to pass on to individuals that are interested in learning more about being a professor? Either at a large, you know, research dominated R1 school or an R2, or liberal arts. Anything you might talk about the idea of being a professor, and being a psychology professor, and being a part of that community? Any advice or thoughts you'd like to pass on to people who are looking at that?

( Dr. Kinzig): I think that probably the most important thing is to do solid research. Ask important questions. You know most of us have to do a post-doc, it used to be that you would do a post-doc for maybe two or three years, but those are the lengths of those has increased because they're limited job opportunities for faculty. There are a lot of PhDs and you know the number of PhDs has outpaced the number of faculty positions that are available. So I think you know the post-doctoral period is really important for establishing, you know, kind of a record of that you're a productive person, and that, you know, that's where you show that you're a good scientist.

And that you're going to have probably, you know, the indications are that you're going to be successful as a faculty member. I think even for people that go into more liberal arts colleges where they're you know teaching a lot more than I do, for example, they still have the solid records of, you know, graduate research and post-doctoral research. And that's kind of the foundation for being able to teach in your specified field. So yeah, establishing that strong record early on is important.

( Garth): So becoming a subject matter expert?

( Dr. Kinzig): Yes! Yes!

( Garth): Excellent!

( Dr. Kinzig): A concise way to put it. ( Garth): That's why I'm here. Perfect. So let's go on. We've had some questions roll in. One of one of the ones I like in particular because I get asked this a lot too given the field of research in the training you and I had, but what is it about psychology that interests you? Why of all the options to study neuroscience and the biological perspective, or biochemical. What made you stick and stay with psychology and stay in a psychology department when you were looking for a faculty job?

( Dr. Kinzig): So I guess the easy answer is; I was always interested in psychology and trying to kind of understand people. If you look around, most of us are going to interact with people who have psychological problems at some point in our lives and it's interesting to me to understand how that happens. And so I've always been interested in understanding how the mind works and what influences the way that people ultimately behave, and interact with one another. I was also really interested in biology, you know, from pretty early on.

And so as I got more into the different areas of psychology as an undergrad; the marriage of psychology and biology, what we now know as neuroscience, back then it was called physiological psychology or bio psychology, or psycho biology, or you know there are different ways to call it, but neuroscience. And so, you know, really a biological basis for understanding behavior is what interests me. So what we're able to do in behavioral neuroscience is so interesting and important for understanding human behavior,. And we can get at these biological processes that underlie behavior to try to understand, you know, normal functioning as well as abnormal functioning, and ultimately you know down the road be able to help people.

( Garth): Right. Right. So I like what your answer is because I say the same thing that "we are the experts in behavior". And I'm still always interested in behavior even though I took a ,like you, a very different part to understanding it. I really wanted to know the brain, psychology is unified in its understanding of being behavior. So some of the other questions. I like this one that came in if, you know, I think you may have mentioned this earlier that we don't always get training on how to write a grant. So if it wasn't part of our specific graduate training, where did you learn how to write grant proposals? Was it a trial and error? Was there resources that were provided to you say at Purdue when you got there on the whole grant writing praxis? Where did you learn more about that given how important it is in what you do?

( Dr. Kinzig): So I missed probably the first couple sentences of what you said, sorry it cut out.

( Garth): Oh, no worries. You were breaking up too. So the question really is, where did you learn how to do the grant writing? Was it something that you just got as a graduate student through trial and error or were there resources and opportunities as you were moving into this position, and as you were continuing into your post-doc to really learn I call it "the art of grant writing"? It's not something we get a lot of very specific training in graduate school. So how did you manage that?

( Dr. Kinzig): It really is an art isn't it? I read the grants that my advisers were submitting. That was my first real introduction to it. A lot of grad programs now have grant writing workshops and in our graduate program has several places where you can go get help on how to write grants. Even faculty, they have several workshops for faculty. The other place that I learned a lot about writing grants was that once I got my NIH grant I was asked to review grants for NIH.

Which is very eye-opening you're sitting in the room with 30 other reviewers going through, you know, I think the last time I was on study section we reviewed 60 grants in a day and a half. And so reading a lot of grants and kind of being exposed to even if it's a mock grant review panel, and understanding how other people perceive what you're trying to tell. You know so you have to be able to make your research exciting to the people that are reading it and realize that you know people that are reading it are going to be really smart, really good scientists, but they may not be you know experts in exactly what you're trying to convey. So the more exposure you have to reading grants and understanding how they're perceived is really helpful.

( Garth): Yeah I think you're right. Reading grants and reviewing was probably one of the best ways to learn. Because you learn exactly like you said; what works in terms of communicating how your vision is and people can really see it. So very good, thank you very much for sharing that. So one of the questions I got which I find very interesting and it starts off, and maybe even have to be this specific, but it says why exactly did you go to Purdue? But then they follow up with what I think is the more interesting question because there are lots of places that one can be a "professor" right? There's small liberal arts colleges, there's community colleges. So what made you choose the type of institution that Purdue is over say a liberal arts college or more of an R2 college? Where they might be balancing more, you know, the teaching and research. Because liberal arts we think of as like strictly the undergraduate research teaching. What motivated you to do this one?

( Dr. Kinzig): Okay so a big draw for me for an institution like Purdue is that research is really my passion. And if I could spend a lot of my time on research I probably would, but what I've learned since being here is that I really love teaching as well. And so, you know, kind of finding that balances is a little bit of a challenge, but it's worth it. So Purdue, being research and teaching means that I'm not all on soft money. Whereas a lot of my peers who are doing they have faculty positions in medical schools, their salary is largely dependent on getting grants. And getting grants is more and more challenging all the time with budget cuts and, you know, the way that biomedical research has been viewed in recent years.

And so, you know, I've got teaching and I've got ,you know, at least that part of my salary is covered. So that was important to me. The reason I didn't look at more teaching institutions is because I hadn't had much experience with teaching. I have colleagues that are in those positions and sometimes I look at them with a little bit of envy. They do get to, you know, they teach a lot a lot more than I do, but they also have small schools and they're able to do research without kind of the big big pressure of bringing in lots of money to be able to support their research programs.

( Garth): Right. I think it's important to know for people who are attending that one could be at like at a medical school or be like a biomedical research center that's not a school like the Sulk Institute or all those research centers. Where that's all that their entire salary is dependent upon the grants. So if you're not bringing in a grant, but here you have ways to, and then the diversity of your job represents that. So excellent! Well we have more questions but unfortunately we are out of time. So first of all, I want to thank you Kim for joining us today and it was great to talk to you again after so many years!

( Dr. Kinzig): Yeah, you're very welcome., This was fun!

( Garth): So for those of you who are listening, the APA offers many resources for helping you your career. First let me mention the Individual Development Plan or IDP for short. This is a resource that helps you map out your career pathways if you want to be a researcher at a big University like Dr. Kinzig, or you want to be teaching at a small school. The IDP is a tool to help you. APA's five-step process will guide you through the IDP which is: self assessment, career exploration, and goal-setting. And then it will help you customize your own plan of action so that you can get the best job for you. In particular, you should look at the Explore Careers Module where we have a video on doing informational interviews. In this webinar, in all the webinars is actually an informational interview and you can use this format to do your own personal interview of other people who have jobs that you might find interesting.

If you're ready to start your job search or want to just explore job postings please check out the APA's online career center: PsycCareers. The address is like psyccareers.com and it's on the screen in front of you. If you're looking for more career related information overall then please check out APA PsycIQ micro site. We are in the process of developing a lot of articles and booklets, and webinars just like this to help you promote your careers. And you can find that at psyciq.apa.

As soon as this webinar has ended we will send you a short survey. It appears on the screen. I really do want you to take the time to complete the survey and give us feedback. So we know how we're doing and we can improve for our next set of webinars. And with that, I'm going to say this is our last webinar for 2017. We're going to take a month off and wrap up on 2017.And we're going to review what we've done over the past year and look at ways to improve, and bring you new webinars. So please keep a check on your email.

We'll look for you in January of 2018, and until then have a great day!