Navigating Academia: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Path Forward

Sam Sam

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Hello! As a fellow academic, I wanted to share my own experiences in academia with PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and associate researchers. I want you to know that the struggles you face are not uncommon.  The situation you are enduring happens more often than not. I want to put my side of the story out there. This is how change may start, right? I am not someone particularly special, just another early-stage academic who is trying to pave their way towards a successful career as a scientist.

I want to say that I have always been deeply passionate about research, since I was very little. That passion was building up thanks to amazing professors over the years. It is so important to have the proper encouragement and counseling to help you understand your possibilities and see them for yourself. This passion was materializing towards Neuroscience and more specifically neurodegenerative diseases. I think I was lucky enough to taste different cultures from different countries that highly enriched my personal and professional experience. I find it highly necessary to work in different countries, where different methods, points of view, ideas do nothing but improve your skills and more importantly your scientific criteria.

My PhD provided me with the awareness about how challenging research could be, besides the obvious. You can struggle with science, most of the time, that’s how it is. It is like life itself, sometimes you must be resilient to move forward. But I also learned that with your dedication and passion guided by good mentorship, you will get rewarded by contributing to science through your investigation, and that feeling is incredible.

The next step to excel in my career was to come to the United States, cradle of ever-evolving modern science and research, and bottomless funding. But it was not United States, it was New York. That was big. Here I would understand how academia works in this country.