Yesterday, you were an accomplished postdoc. Today, as you open the door to your very own — very empty — lab, you've suddenly become a principal investigator. And soon, you'll become "a manager and a mentor and an advisor and a cheerleader and all these other things," said Emmitt Jolly from Case Western Reserve University during a career symposium hosted by New York University in November. As academic faculty, he added, "you're running a small business."

And, like any small business, getting your lab off the ground is the toughest part. "When I got a job, I walked into my lab and just had this big empty space," Jolly said. "For the first two weeks you're just sitting there in the lab, by yourself, with nobody. You used to have a lab where you could talk to at least one person. This is just you and a blank wall."

While the postdoc-to-PI move is nearly always taxing, young investigators can take certain steps to ease the metamorphosis. At the NYU symposium, faculty from all levels of the tenure-track totem pole offered advice for new assistant professors on how to get an independent research program going with as few disruptions as possible.

Bring it with you

Vanderbilt University's Roger Chalkley said he was "utterly clueless" when he made the move from his postdoc to an assistant professorship at the University of Iowa. When he interviewed there, Chalkley had no understanding of what a start-up package was. "So I didn't negotiate a nickel," he said. "I was told 'Here's the lab you're going to be in. It's a nice, well-equipped modern lab.'" When looking through it, however, Chalkley thought the stocked lab was hardly well equipped and anything but modern. But he "smiled sweetly" and took the offer, he said. By the time he arrived on campus, "the rest of the faculty had raided the lab and took out anything of value," he said. "I ended up with nothing, and no start-up monies."