As he is turning in his tenure package, blogger Prof-like Substance looks over the good and the bad of the previous few years at the Spandrel Shop.
Among the good are the people in the lab as well as getting the hang of grant writing. "[G]etting on panels helped and being short-memoried when it came to failure was fairly critical," Prof-like notes.
He also notes that he lucked out in joining a good department with a supportive administration as "[i]t's not always ease to figure out in an interview whether you're walking into a good situation or a sharknado."
Then among the bad are, in part because of his focus on writing grants, not getting enough the lab's publication record to where he wanted. Also, he notes he started the lab from scratch. "The dumbest thing I did was finish everything from my postdoc and start my lab with projects that had to be built from the ground up," Prof-like says. "Ultimately you want original projects, but walking away from my postdoc without a starter project was a critically dumb thing to do. "