Commentary: Routh Early Career Award: Confessions of an Early Career Psychologist

Katie A. Devine

doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/JPEPSY/JSV082

Commentary: Routh Early Career Award: Confessions of an Early Career Psychologist

Research output: Contribution to journal › Comment/debate › peer-review

Original language	American English
Pages (from-to)	1014-1016
Number of pages	3
Journal	Journal of pediatric psychology
Volume	40
Issue number	10
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1093/JPEPSY/JSV082
State	Published - Nov 1 2015

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Pediatrics, Perinatology, and Child Health
Developmental and Educational Psychology

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https://doi.org/10.1093/JPEPSY/JSV082

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@article{e1035ba025c54be1bc8591159d332bf1,

title = "Commentary: Routh Early Career Award: Confessions of an Early Career Psychologist",

author = "Devine, {Katie A.}",

note = "Funding Information: This work was supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health (K07CA174728 and P30CA072720). The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Funding Information: Confession 1: It takes time to find a niche. Although I knew I wanted to be a pediatric psychologist and help kids and families cope better with chronic illnesses, I started graduate school with an open mind about what pediatric populations and issues I wanted to address. I was drawn to Dr. Ron Blount{\textquoteright}s lab at the University of Georgia because of his expertise in pediatric pain. As a graduate student, Ron encouraged me to pursue diverse clinical and research opportunities in pediatric psychology. Through clinical experience, I found a passion for working with adolescent solid organ transplant recipients and received the 2007 Routh Student Research Grant to complete my dissertation focusing on health-related quality of life and adherence in this population. I developed strong collaborations with Ron and his other students and continue to publish with them. After graduate school, I pursued a 2-year postdoctoral research fellowship at Loyola University Chicago under the mentorship of Grayson Holmbeck, PhD. By working with a new population of youth with spina bifida, I learned an enormous amount about the intersection of developmental psychology and pediatric psychology. It was also my first opportunity for focused writing time. Under the guidance of a prolific mentor, I learned a lot about the writing and publishing process, and even got my first first-author publication in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology (JPP; Devine, Wasserman, Gershenson, Holmbeck, & Essner, 2011). This experience piqued my interest in working with adolescent and young adult (AYA) patients, and helped me better incorporate a developmental perspective into my research. Funding Information: Confession 2: I struggle with deciding when to say “yes” and when to say “no.” When I started my first tenure-track position at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, I was eager to say “yes” to any requests, such as new collaborations, journal reviews, committee service, and so on. However, multiple mentors cautioned me to say yes only when the request was in line with my career trajectory and I could follow through with the task. Figuring this out was easier during my training, as training programs were short and had predefined goals, with the ultimate goal of preparing for an academic job to initiate my program of research as a principal investigator (PI). Now that I have my first independent academic job, my primary focus is on developing a program of research that can contribute meaningfully to the field. In light of how long it can take to obtain funding for projects, I find that I need to be thinking of activities that will set me up for a successful grant 2 or more years from now. For the first time, I also have a team of students/mentees working for me and I need to manage their work and ensure funds for employees. For research tasks, I rely heavily on electronic organization systems where I and other team members can track progress on tasks and share documents. Although I am currently in year 2 of a 5-year career development award, I have also applied for multiple small pilot funds for second areas of research outside my career development project. After multiple failures, persistence paid off, and I am now funded by a Rutgers Cancer Institute Cancer Prevention and Control Pilot Award to develop a self-management skills intervention for AYA survivors of childhood cancer. Of course, grant writing took time from other tasks, so I had to say “no” to several interesting projects and journal reviews so I could focus on the grant. My mentor OJ Sahler once introduced me to another colleague by saying, “I like working with Katie because she does what she says she will do.” I try to live up to that.",

year = "2015",

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doi = "https://doi.org/10.1093/JPEPSY/JSV082",

language = "American English",

volume = "40",

pages = "1014--1016",

journal = "Journal of pediatric psychology",

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publisher = "Oxford University Press",

number = "10",

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N1 - Funding Information: This work was supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health (K07CA174728 and P30CA072720). The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Funding Information: Confession 1: It takes time to find a niche. Although I knew I wanted to be a pediatric psychologist and help kids and families cope better with chronic illnesses, I started graduate school with an open mind about what pediatric populations and issues I wanted to address. I was drawn to Dr. Ron Blount’s lab at the University of Georgia because of his expertise in pediatric pain. As a graduate student, Ron encouraged me to pursue diverse clinical and research opportunities in pediatric psychology. Through clinical experience, I found a passion for working with adolescent solid organ transplant recipients and received the 2007 Routh Student Research Grant to complete my dissertation focusing on health-related quality of life and adherence in this population. I developed strong collaborations with Ron and his other students and continue to publish with them. After graduate school, I pursued a 2-year postdoctoral research fellowship at Loyola University Chicago under the mentorship of Grayson Holmbeck, PhD. By working with a new population of youth with spina bifida, I learned an enormous amount about the intersection of developmental psychology and pediatric psychology. It was also my first opportunity for focused writing time. Under the guidance of a prolific mentor, I learned a lot about the writing and publishing process, and even got my first first-author publication in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology (JPP; Devine, Wasserman, Gershenson, Holmbeck, & Essner, 2011). This experience piqued my interest in working with adolescent and young adult (AYA) patients, and helped me better incorporate a developmental perspective into my research. Funding Information: Confession 2: I struggle with deciding when to say “yes” and when to say “no.” When I started my first tenure-track position at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, I was eager to say “yes” to any requests, such as new collaborations, journal reviews, committee service, and so on. However, multiple mentors cautioned me to say yes only when the request was in line with my career trajectory and I could follow through with the task. Figuring this out was easier during my training, as training programs were short and had predefined goals, with the ultimate goal of preparing for an academic job to initiate my program of research as a principal investigator (PI). Now that I have my first independent academic job, my primary focus is on developing a program of research that can contribute meaningfully to the field. In light of how long it can take to obtain funding for projects, I find that I need to be thinking of activities that will set me up for a successful grant 2 or more years from now. For the first time, I also have a team of students/mentees working for me and I need to manage their work and ensure funds for employees. For research tasks, I rely heavily on electronic organization systems where I and other team members can track progress on tasks and share documents. Although I am currently in year 2 of a 5-year career development award, I have also applied for multiple small pilot funds for second areas of research outside my career development project. After multiple failures, persistence paid off, and I am now funded by a Rutgers Cancer Institute Cancer Prevention and Control Pilot Award to develop a self-management skills intervention for AYA survivors of childhood cancer. Of course, grant writing took time from other tasks, so I had to say “no” to several interesting projects and journal reviews so I could focus on the grant. My mentor OJ Sahler once introduced me to another colleague by saying, “I like working with Katie because she does what she says she will do.” I try to live up to that.

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Commentary: Routh Early Career Award: Confessions of an Early Career Psychologist

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