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A decade or so after earning a PhD is a pivotal stage in a person’s academic career. The urgency of establishing your career has faded — you are probably no longer scrambling to secure your first grant or write your first independent paper, and you might be tenured — however, you are not yet a senior academic. You occupy a middle space that is rarely discussed.
The scientific system leans on mid-career researchers heavily, but this time period can feel surprisingly precarious: expectations rise, responsibilities multiply and maintaining a clear research direction becomes difficult.
I am a palaeoclimate scientist at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. My research seeks to understand how changes in ocean circulation and carbon cycling have shaped Earth’s climate in the past, using a multidisciplinary approach that combines marine fieldwork, laboratory geochemistry, plankton biology and model–data integration.
Saying ‘no’ in science isn’t enough
In the first few years after I completed my PhD in 2015, when I was taking part in postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the Arctic University, my default response when asked to do something was ‘yes’. I said yes to collaborations and to sitting on committees, peer reviewing papers, supervising students and doing other forms of unpaid academic service.
This approach was successful, even if it meant working late into the evening to keep up. It built my network, increased the visibility of my work and advanced my CV in ways that helped me to secure fellowships, grants and eventually a tenured position.
After acquiring enough funding to establish my own laboratory and research group in 2021, the number of opportunities that I received increased rapidly. I was offered new collaborations, some because of genuine scientific alignment, and others simply because I was now ‘in the right career stage’ to attract the necessary funding or to manage the appropriate team. The number of administrative tasks that I was responsible for accumulated. I became the main mentor for several PhD students and postdocs. I took on leadership roles in large-scale initiatives. My habit of saying yes continued, and I was a magnet for further responsibilities.
Step up to leadership for mid-career growth
Individually, each task seemed reasonable; collectively, they filled every corner of my schedule. My days were busy and productive, but my research direction became increasingly fragmented. Instead of driving a unified research agenda that would advance my field, I found myself pulled in many directions, responding to immediate demands rather than pursuing long-term growth.
In the past two years or so, I began to sense that I was entering a period of academic maintenance rather than growth. I felt that I was experiencing an ‘accidental drift’ — slow deviation from a research path not by intention, but by accretion.
And ultimately, this might not be sustainable. Staying busy can keep a lab functioning, but it leaves little space for the focused thinking and long-term planning that allow a research programme to flourish.
This, I have learnt, is one of the defining features of the mid-career stage: opportunities and responsibilities grow at the same time, often faster than our ability to integrate them meaningfully. This realization prompted me to reflect on how to navigate these competing demands.
Balancing commitments while redefining direction
To navigate mid-career challenges, I have developed a set of guiding principles to help me evaluate new commitments and get better at saying no:
• Is this responsibility aligned with my long-term identity as a researcher?
• Is this the right time for this project?
• Does it serve my students and collaborators well?
• Does this opportunity harmonize with my group’s scientific direction or create a distraction?
• Does this commitment or collaboration align with my long-term goals?
• Will this project produce the kind of research outputs that reflect the scientist that I want to become?
These questions did not reduce my workload, but they changed how I approached it. I began to realize that publications and other research outputs not only record my past research interests, but also reflect the areas that I want my research programme to move towards.
