PostdocTransformation show for scienctists leaping into business
Get to know companies which hire people with a doctor title!
Episode 0034 Shownotes
Dr. Cindy Leiton is a hispanic in the US, and she shares her incredible journey transforming from a high achieving postdoc to a flourishing biotech professional. With a career in program management, she shares the importance of self-reflection outreach and using platforms like LinkedIn to propel your career. Watch out for her rich insights on the current landscape of the biotech industry and some invaluable career advise for minorities in science.
We share actionable tips for your PostdocTransformation.
Subscribe to our weekly show on your favorite podcast platforms: Why? Postdoc scientists & PhD students / candidates will learn the basics for their career transition from research into business & industries AND will get to know a company that hires early career scientists!
Eleonore:
Welcome to the Postdoc Transformation Show, Dr. Cindy Leiton. I'm honored to have you on my show because seldomly I approach a person that I found on LinkedIn right away to be a guest on my show. But I feel that you are a gem, a mentoring gem for all my PostdocTransformers. So, I think we are in for a treat, let's dive right in.
[00:02:12] Transition from academia to biotech
Eleonore:
Why did you leap into business to join a biotech pharmaceutical company after you were thriving as a program manager and research assistant professor at Stony Brook Medicine, New York, US.
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
Thank you so much for having me, Eleonore. It's such a pleasure to be here and to reach this wide audience of many people that are looking to transition from academia to other places or even trying to figure out what their next steps are in their career.
[00:02:41] Challenges and Misconceptions in Career Transition
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
So, I think that's a great question because I think it gets at the real heart of how hard it is to look at this abyss that a lot of people encounter, which is, what do I do after I finish my training? And the reason why I call it an abyss is because there's so much uncertainty. There's a lot of myths and there's a lot of misconceptions also.
And a lot of people think that if they were to leave academia. That somehow that makes them a traitor and that they sold out to go somewhere else just for money. But the reality is and the way that I started to see it as I became a little more mature in my training was that I was here to train. I was there to produce good science.
I was there to pick up skills. And it was really early in my career. I was still really young. I didn't have any other experience other than my, you know, PhD and postdoc training. And so about the time that I became a senior postdoc, and I guess I should add one more note before I talk about the leap I had been the poster child on my campus for someone who would be a professor one day. So, that whole concept of feeling like a traitor and feeling like shame of like, oh, I'm leaving and I shouldn't be. Right. I can tell you that I felt that a hundred percent and that actually delayed me from leaving for a long time because I just felt like all this fun thing that I got was for people who wanted to be professors.
And I'm on the poster board down the hallway for this fellowship and I'm being featured and, you know, so it, it definitely initially came with a lot of guilt and it was definitely hard to talk to my advisor, to anyone else about me thinking that maybe professoriate was no longer an option for me. And the way that I came to realize that was that as I became more and more senior in the lab. I started to realize that I spent a lot less time at the bench, and I spent a lot more time thinking broadly about the concepts that we were studying, about where would they be applicable, who cares about them, what's their value in health and what's their value to anyone else outside of our tiny little 15 people lab. And as we started thinking about that, I wrote many grants. I participated in helping to write many manuscripts. I led multiple collaborations for my own projects as well as for others in the lab. Because I was the most senior postdoc, people really relied on me to help them communicate their science and to add that, that value to their communication whenever they went to a conference, whenever they were going to, you know, present to someone at the university or, or externally. So as I started doing more and more of that, I started to feel like a consultant a little bit. I just didn't know what that was at the time. I just knew that like people love pulling me in to help them out, to show them how to do it, to talk through them. A little bit of a strategy for like, first you should say this, then after you've said that it makes sense to say the next thing.
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Dr. Cindy Leiton:
And so I found myself in the last two, three years of my postdoc really doing a lot of that. And I realized that the moments that I watched other professors around me just sit in their office and write grants or go to conferences, but then that's really like a lot of what they did and they didn't spend, as much time with their students. It left me a little bit dismayed. I also felt that when I was in the lab that I was wearing all the hats. I had to be the business manager. I had to be the scientist. I had to be the X, the Y, the this and the that, and the, the marketer, the, you know, had to wear too many hats. And I thought, man, there has to be a way to do this more efficiently because you can't rely on this postdoc who doesn't know a whole lot and doesn't have an MBA and doesn't have like, this world, world experience to do a lot of this stuff.
So, I do have to say though, I had a very positive academic experience. I do not come from, you know, labs that, you know, left me in isolation to figure it out on my own. I had extremely good mentors. I had, you know, to their, to their own experience, they mentored me as they could, right? Because they themselves didn't have, non-academic experience per se. But the mentorship that I did receive led, led me to become a really good. Scientists that could see beyond just the science into the value of what it would be for other audiences. And I think that having those early skills was really helpful. So as I started to have this self-discovery that maybe academia wasn't for me, I then entered that abyss that I was just talking about.
It was just this big giant hole. Like if it's not academia, then what is it? What is out there? And how do you define that? And, and it just felt very overwhelming. I went through a two year process where I interviewed many people. I started with the alumni at my university. I started then to expand based on their recommendations of other people I should talk to, people I found on LinkedIn, people that other people recommended throughout the university.
The career center was also a big stakeholder in that as well.
Why job searching without a strategy yielded little progress
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
And so over that two year period. I was doing what most people do, which is I submitted applications online and just waited for responses. And then of course, rarely did I get a response, and if I did, it was a pre-screen call that I didn't even know how to handle.
And so most of the time it went nowhere. That was about the first six months of that two year period. And after that, I started to, within that six month period, I started to realize that not only was I doing my job search process wrong by doing it kind of like cold, right, I was pursuing cold opportunities.
And that doesn't mean it doesn't work for other people, but for me it certainly wasn't work or working or going anywhere productive. So what I found that was productive was that all these informational interviews that I was having with other people who were in other roles was actually really productive because it was helping me define what. Other roles are, you know, I talk to Biostatisticians, I talk to people in marketing, I talk to people who handle commercialization. I talk to consultants, I talk to clinical research scientists, et cetera. And through all those conversations, I started to realize like, oh, that sounds hard, but not in a, not in a way that seems attractive to me. Or other roles would sound like, oh, there's pieces of that that are really interesting, but I feel like I need more education and that's not something I wanna invest in at the moment. I want something that I can, you know, transfer into pretty quickly. So, so on and so forth. I kept doing that exploration.
After that six month period, I kind of did a reevaluation and I basically reached out to some of my mentors, some within the university who were academics themselves and some outside. And I kind of created a little circle of mentors and I said, listen, I need help. I feel like for six months I've just been floating and doing whatever without a strategy.
What do you want to be, when you are grown up?
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
And I've made a little bit of progress, but not a whole lot. And I still don't have it fully defined. What am I supposed to be seeking when I do job searches? 'cause I'm just applying to what I see. But that's not, it doesn't have a focus. So, a lot of the advice that I got was, Cindy, you have to refine further.
What do you wanna be when you grow up? You have to kinda ask yourself that question a little more deeply. And so in doing that, I started to realize that what I loved, I, I just took a really far step back from the pressure of like, what do I wanna be when I grew up? And I just asked myself, what do I love about science? What do I do really well, but also what do I really enjoy? And I consistently came back to realize that I loved bringing people together. Into the same room that would otherwise never would have spoken to each other. And that, that had tremendous value because I'm the one who saw the genius in why they should talk. And that magic, that aha moment came from being in the lab and being the person that was bringing these collaborations together. And being one of those innovators that was thinking with my PIs right alongside them, listen for this grant. We wanna put together this idea. We don't know this. We don't know that we don't know the other, but we know people that know that stuff.
And if we could work together and build this really great team, we can do it. And so it wasn't those opportunities that I had to build those collaborations that I started to realize just how much I love that. And it became almost like, like that big dopamine hit of like, oh my gosh, we have to do this again. And so I think from there, I, I started after doing all that evaluation, I started thinking. I love writing proposals to people that add value to their own work, where we are going to be synergistic. I love identifying strategies for how we're going to put together a, a very cool scientific program that's gonna have tremendous value. I love thinking about the value itself. I love thinking about what innovation is and how we're gonna bring about a new medicine or a new therapy or something new to patients. And so once I started to think of all of that, it was more, I had to go back out there and ask around what is the role that does that?
[00:13:59] The role of a program manager in biotech
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
And it turns out that there's many, but many of the people that I spoke to kept kind of coming back to this. This thought of program management sits in a place where you can touch all these different expertise and at the end of the day, you have to deliver something integrated. An integrated plan. To management or to an organization. And that program manager also has to help that same team that they organized to execute on it. And so I think through the number of times that I set writing grants and that I set like thinking of the funding component, I started to feel also that academia was a little bit limited for me because it would take me forever to raise just a couple million dollars. Whereas if I would be part of an organization that had a team that took care of that, whereas I was able to focus on the science that would enable me to do so much more. So, I think adding all that up is how I started to realize it's my time to really make that leap.
Eleonore:
Wow, there were so many things that I noted down mentally because I think that. For program management. It really is this hub and spoke that you were talking about in the sense that you need to know the right people who can then work on their projects, but you manage the projects and sort of like make sure that whatever the program management goals were of the company would be also achieved.
And I think that self-reflection that you brought to the table after having those information interviews is also an insight that you have to have made for yourself. Right? Nobody could tell you, your mentors that you mentioned were able to show you a way but not walk you through that because you had to walk through the model, and to feel the abyss, so that you were able to
feel the pain and move away from that, but also acknowledge and appreciate what you enjoyed in science.
[00:17:28] Leveraging LinkedIn for job search
Eleonore:
From the position of the early career scientists that are listening now to this episode, Cindy, how did you do the leap?
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
It's interesting that you asked, so just a few months ago, I was invited by the NYU team that put together a conference called the What Can You Be With a PhD? And what I did in that conference is I relayed how to use LinkedIn. I'm not getting paid to talk about LinkedIn or anything like that.
I'm not sponsored by them to say any of this. It's just from personal experience that I found that it's such a great platform to use to grow your network as a professional. And what I did was I really exploited it in a way, right? I, I really took the time to curate my profile and I really took the time to understand. That there was tremendous value for just the point of recruiters finding me. I wanted to be found. Why? Because at the end of the day, you as a scientist have to spend a lot of time in the lab, and that wasn't going away for me. Right. Even though I wasn't necessarily at the bench, I was still conducting a lot of the business in the lab. And so I still had to spend easily every day, anywhere from eight to 10 hours in the lab doing stuff, either in meetings or meeting with my management or meeting with collaborators or organizing people. I still was teaching at the bench. So, you know, there were a lot of things that I still had to carry out.
So, I just didn't feel like I had such a big bandwidth to just be consistently networking all the time and finding the recruiters with the opportunities. But I knew that this system was made for them to find you. So, therefore, I have to be a good bait. I have to put the bait out there and what is the bait? I have to put good keywords on my profile so that they find me in their search. So this seminar that I did a couple of months ago was focused on like, how do you do that? And the reason I shared it was because from personal experience. So, to continue the quick story, so after, as I said, I spent two years in this process.
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So, what happened in the last year? In the last year, one of my mentors invited me to become a reviewer at a review panel for grants in the government. And a lot of what they, what was going on there was watching him be the program manager for that. But the funny thing is, as I explained to him like, I wanna do big science, I wanna do this, I wanna do that. He never said to me, well, you should become a program manager. He just let me see it and absorb it and see if that's what I would identify myself with.
So, I think to your point that you said earlier, they just gave me the opportunity to kind of grow into it, right? So, I think from that experience I started to realize, here's this great network of people that are attending this session. Here's this great, room that has recruiters who are hiring in different places.
Some people were hiring in academia, some people were hiring in industry, some people were hiring in private companies and et cetera. So, I just remember thinking, how else would I have been found if I hadn't been given the opportunity to be in this room? And how often are academics just simply not invited to be there because they don't really have a name for themselves yet. They're all too early in their career. So, I remember thinking, the only way to do it and for us to get our name out there, is to go back to LinkedIn and talk about ourselves in a way that lets people know what's the value of what we do. So, I think most roads came coming back to LinkedIn, but I also knew it was so important to nurture the relationships outside of LinkedIn.
So, I almost found it to be like a symbiotic system. It was like a good place to be online, to have a presence, to be involved, but it was also just as important to cultivate and seek out the relationships outside. So, I kept interviewing people, as I mentioned, but really in that last year. I started to identify myself more and more as a program manager by way of doing some of those shadowing experiences, by participating as a reviewer, by asking Can I be involved in this?
Can I come with you to that? And I became a little more assertive. I started asking both of my PIs, can you bring me to the meeting where we're gonna talk about X? Because, you know, I put together the slide deck for that, and I really wanna know what happens at the table. And that was actually also a big moment for me because I think that let them know that I was ready to hang out with the big guns.
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Show assertiveness and leadership
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
And so I think there's also so much to be said about how you can start to show leadership and start to show that assertiveness, that you're willing to be the leader and to be held accountable for some of the big decision making if you ask, and you do have to ask humbly, but you have to ask knowing that you have value to bring to the table.
I didn't ask for every opportunity, but I asked for key opportunities whenever we were gonna go to talk to the cancer center director. That's probably important, right? Like they're gonna have a big stake at the table of decision making for all kinds of things that impact me.
Dr. Cindy Leiton:: It was little things like that I did. I also, in that last year, participated in various courses outside of the university. One was focused on biotech, one was focused on the business of science. One was focused on commercialization, another was focused on consulting. And so what that allowed me to do, like I said, was to exactly find and meet people that would put me in the room with opportunity. And the only way to do that was I had to go to them, to these conferences or to these interactions so that they would meet me, so that they would see that I'm well spoken, I have questions, I have talent, I have things to offer, right? And so it was through a lot of those interactions that I started also simultaneously to get more confident in myself. I started to realize like, oh, I can see myself doing that. I can see myself leading a team. I can see myself. You know, so long story short, a lot of those interactions led me to realize that it made sense for program management for me, because I loved to be in charge enough to lead a project forward. But I didn't wanna be alone. I wanted to be very collaborative. I wanted to work with other colleagues who have very different expertise, but that would be willing to work with me and for us to make something better together.
[00:24:47] The interview process and making the leap
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
And so what ended ended up happening and how I actually moved into industry was at the beginning of 2020, as we all know, the pandemic started to hit the world. And in that time, because I had taken the time to curate my profile, there were many recruiters still looking, to reach out to me and ask, especially at the time, there was a biotech started booming right? Because of all these different things that were going on with the vaccinations and all this. There was so much going on at the time. I still wrote grants, I still wrote manuscripts. I still participated in meetings, but then it gave me also time to interview, believe it or not, for positions.
So, one day, a Regeneron recruiter found me on LinkedIn, reached out and said, Cindy, you look like this really interested candidate. I can't see exactly what you're looking for, but I can tell that there's a couple of things that might be up your league. Would you be willing to have a quick chat and just kind of tell me a little more of what you're looking for? And that conversation opened up the doors for me to interview with the development program management team at Regeneron. Because it became obvious that there was so much alignment between what I was looking to accomplish as a scientist in the big picture. And what's interesting is that in that discussion with that recruiter, that's what the conversation was about.
It wasn't about a a specific role, it was about me. She wanted to know, what do you wanna do? What drives you? And I don't think I would've been ready to be that clear in that meeting with her had I not done all that personal work prior to that. All that self-exploration, all the time that I spent like asking questions and interviewing people and talking to them, it took a long time.
But when she asked me those questions, I remember just within a few sentences, it was so clear and so honest and so simple. That it carried the conversation through and she said, you know, I, I think you'd be great with this team. And it was such a, it was such an interesting interaction because like I said, it would not have happened had the clarity not been there.
A job interview is a tango
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
So, I interviewed, and went through several rounds of interview for a couple of months also throughout that pandemic. And then, by the end of the year, I was able to accept the offer when it came through. One more thing I will add is that part of that preparation that I was talking about, it made me very smart and very prepared to be part of the interview process from the perspective that we tend to think of the interview process as I need to say all the right answers so that they will like me and instead I went into it thinking, well, yeah, that's true, but I also need to ask them questions to make sure that they're going to be the right match for me. I wanna make sure when I say that I wanna lead a project with great colleagues in a great place and produce great science, that those colleagues are actually gonna be a good match for me as well.
In other words, I was saying I'm not gonna put myself outta the equation. I'm very much part of the equation and therefore I need to ask questions to ascertain that that's actually going to be true, right? And so I think by the time the offer came through, I was very prepared to say yes, and I felt very certain that I was doing the right decision. And one last quick thing I'll mention is that I had interviewed at many other places, many different big pharma places, and I found that, you know, those opportunities weren't in alignment with me. So, I was able to say no to things that everyone else would probably say. Like, are you crazy? But I also, I also felt like if my answer is not a a 100% yes, then I shouldn't take it because I'm not desperate.
I'm not out there like I have to go now. No, I wanna go to a place where I wanna be successful. But I had also done the work to identify for myself what would make me successful and what would make them successful with me as part of their team. That interview process is something also that I love to talk about with people because once they understand that it's a mutual agreement, it really changes and it depressurizes it for them and they realize like, oh, I actually have to do a whole 50% of other homework that I hadn't thought about.
Eleonore:
Absolutely. I can only underline what you just said, it takes two to tango. If you don't dance with the partner, then the whole dance looks awful. There are dances where both can lead. So, this is a dance that where both need to lead and ask the right questions so that both parties know they made the right decision when they offer or accept the offer.
So, thank you for encouraging early career scientists to do their homework first, to know what they wanna be asking for and to have the confidence to also ask these questions because no one else will do that for them. How can you decide if you don't ask the right questions and have no answers?
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
Precisely.
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[00:29:58] Outlook for biotech and pharmaceutical industry
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
What I will say is this, science is science. Facts are facts. And what I know about technology today is that it is continuing to evolve at an incredible speed. Today, we're not talking about only small molecule inhibitors today. We're not even talking only about biologics such as antibody technology. Today we're talking about cell-based therapy, RNA based based therapy. All kinds of other DNA technology, even bacteria, viruses, all kinds of other things. And we're leveraging that to create really novel technologies that just never existed before. And so from a job seekers perspective, my advice for people is, be strategic about how you sell the skillset that you have for any position. Because there's tremendous value about being a scientist because of all your analytical skills and thinking, et cetera. But your familiarity with mechanisms, your familiarity of how cells and systems and organs do what they do is so important.
Because what I have found is that I did all of my training in neuroscience and oncology, and right now I work in inflammation and immunology, so okay. I didn't train in those areas, but certainly I encountered some of the mechanisms that drive inflammation and some of the immunological concepts as part of neuroscience and oncology's actually central to those fields to understand that.
All of my skills, all of my knowledge, all of my understanding of those, you know, concepts translated greatly when I moved over to working in a different field. And one of the things also that's really important to note is that no matter where you are in pharma or in biotech, there's going to be a need for scientists to be adaptable because scientists are never going to stay stuck in a rutt doing the same thing over and over again unless you don't want science to advance.
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Dr. Cindy Leiton:
If you're an active learner and you are curious and you are someone that likes to seek the truth, industry and biotech is a great place to be because their priority is to innovate. And so if you want to be part of organizations that want to push science forward and create new things, that's actually where you belong. Not to say that there is an innovation in other places, but from my experience, you know. That's what we're doing. We're pushing the boundary on science and we're trying to create completely novel things that didn't exist before. So, it's really interesting what you can do as a scientist. Yes, coronavirus was a time where biotech had this big boom and we're seeing a lot of things come out of that great and not so great. But I think regardless, being a scientist right now is a great opportunity because you have something that other people don't, which is just really strong understanding of whatever your expertise is. And it is translatable in many ways to projects out there that are ongoing.
Eleonore:
Thank you so much, Cindy, for this assessment of the current situation in biotech and letting us know where you see innovation taking place in the job market in certain industries, and the pharmaceutical and the biotech companies trail blazing innovation because it's inherently in their nature.
So, when you, as a job seeker align your own values in the sense that you want to be a scientist at the forefront and developing things that haven't been done before or haven't been existing before, then you need to sort of like find the horse that will take you to that place. And biotech can be one of those horses if you bring the skills to the table.
And that is part of your homework, that you understand what you bring to the table that is valuable for the companies.
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[00:36:48] The Role of a project management professional
Eleonore:
I see that you are a project management professional. Can you tell us the main differences, similarities between research or higher education business projects and programs?
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
So, being a project management professional means that you can look at any project, any program and break it down into how are we going to do this? And is it tied to a larger strategy? Usually programs are embedded as part of a portfolio. So, let's say in a biotech company, there is a portfolio for immunology, which is, for example, what I work on ? Which means that there's several programs embedded within that portfolio. And sometimes there may be program managers that, manage the entire portfolio because there's maybe only one or two programs. Or it could be that there are multiple program managers each assigned to either one or two or multiple of the programs, but there might be multiple program managers tied to many aspects of a portfolio.
So from a role perspective, I think for an interview question, that's a, that's something that's interesting to ask. You know, how is your team organized by program, by project, by portfolio, et cetera. I would definitely say that that's gonna provide you a lot of insight as to how are you gonna work and how are you gonna support what, what you do in your job. A program manager in particular, what we do is we're constantly kind of interacting between the team that is driving the program strategy and senior management, which is setting the strategy with us. So it's our job as the team, as the experts in the field, as the people who are working on this program and know it inside out to propose, different avenues or different projects. And then I'll have an interaction with management to understand whether that fits in with their vision, their understanding of where they want the company to go.
And the value that's gonna be added to the business where the project manager sits or the program manager sits, is we have to be attuned to everyone. And we have to be attuned to what that business vision is to make our team and our project and our program as aligned to that vision as possible. And if we find that externally, there's just different things going on in biotech that disagree with that vision, we have to make an evaluation to understand it.
Whether we are actually gonna be bold enough to come back and tell management something completely different. And we have to make a really good case for that. So as you can see, having a scientific background, especially coming from PhD and postdoc training, we do this all the time, right? This is what we are trained to do.
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Dr. Cindy Leiton:
We are trained to have evidence based justifications for anything we do. And that's why I believe that as a program manager, you actually don't need to have a PhD or a postdoc or any certification at all to be a program manager. What's actually most helpful is to just get started. You need to have experience managing projects. And so how did I position myself as a program manager? Well, as I was talking about earlier, as I became more and more senior in my postdoc, and eventually I got promoted into non-tenure track research assistant professor, I had a lot of projects with multiple students, multiple collaborators.
I had collaborators in-house at the same institution. I had collaborators externally. I had different po I, I was playing kind of like poker a little bit where like, okay, this collaborator is gonna do this, but if I tell them too much, then they're going to not wanna do the right. So, there was a lot of strategy behind a lot of the projects that we were doing. All those skills, they became equally transferable to now where I am, where now I'm managing an even bigger team with a lot more at stake and way bigger budget and interacting with senior management directly. And so how did I proposition myself? I just simply said, I was very honest when I was in my interview process and I, as I started talking to the hiring managers and I started to explore those avenues, I said, listen, I do a lot of this management type of stuff. I don't have industry experience, so I think I need to go to a place where it's not expected that I will hit the ground running and know exactly what to do on a development program because I don't know how it works there. So, I need to be guided a bit in the beginning. I don't know how long that will take.
I feel like that would be up to you to decide as the mentor, the supervisor. But I can tell you that I'm a really good learner because of all these reasons, and I had it like really clear and laid out. And so that's how I position myself and that's why I tell people there's tremendous value in what you do in the lab that you can position.
And do you need certification to be a PM? Not really. All that it does is it provides sort of a framework for you to understand what are the main pieces of a project that you need to manage, you need a budget, you need a plan, you need a communications plan, you need a stakeholder list. You need things for projects to move forward. But is it necessary to have certification when you start out? No. In fact, I just finished my PMP certification just a couple of months ago this year, and I've already been three years at Regeneron. So, it's helpful to have, it's not necessary. And I think coming from a scientific background, you already manage so many projects that you can speak to, if that's a career track that you would wanna go to.
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[00:43:08] Dr. Cindy Leiton's future plans and career progression
Eleonore:
Okay, Cindy, now you've talked a lot about program management, as opposed to project management and what you have done in the past three years.
What are your future plans now? What are the big guns that you know wanna be playing with?
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
Yeah. I think that as a program manager, once you start understanding what the role is, it gets a little clearer. What are some of the different ways you can take your career? And that really keeps me motivated because that means that I can work on a plethora of different types of projects and I feel confident knowing that as a scientist, no matter what type of project, I would be able to learn and I would be able to interact with the people and move it forward. That being said, I'm still relatively junior only being in this role for about three years. So, there's a long way to become more senior. But I also feel that I've reached a point in my career where I'm taking it project by project, program by program. I think it's more important to be part of an organization and part of a team and have management that's gonna give you opportunity to grow. And that at different points in your career is going to be defined a little different.
You know, for those of us who are women and we wanna start a family, there might be times where we might not want super aggressive, highly ambitious projects because we might want to be able to balance our life a little bit with other things that are going on, like having children or when they're younger versus older, et cetera. And there might be other times in our career that we just feel so bold and we're like, you know what? I wanna go for it. And I want that opportunity. I wanna make sure that I assert myself and I ask for that. Right? And that's fine, depending on where you are. There needs to be alignment between your needs and your wants with that of whoever your management are and the rest of the team. And so I think for me, at this particular point in my life, I feel like I'm in a really good place. It's really nicely balanced. I have a lot of time to pursue my hobbies, but I also have a lot of time to grow in the career and the activities that I'm doing. As I continue moving forward as a program manager, what really drives me is the ability to participate in drug development.
That's what I always find myself coming back to. That's why I pursued my PhD. That's why I did my postdoc training. That's why I came to this particular company, right? I wanted to be part of drug development in such a way that I have my own contribution along with many others. And I think as long as I'd be able to do that, I would probably be really happy knowing that I'm participating in something that brings something to a patient. And so you can see that even if in a program management role, let's say I changed my mind in a couple years from now and maybe I wanna do something else, that's okay, because I think the main goal and the main driver would still be there.
And I think sometimes we think of ourselves as academics, I trained for this, therefore I'm only gonna do this. And that one way mentality sometimes can hurt you because the reality is that you can pursue whatever you want at any given point in time, right? You just need to get experience. And so, I like to be open-minded, and I like to know that and have that personal reflection that I talked about ?
I learned that during that two year process, that it's so important to be in alignment with yourself first before anything else. Once you're clear, the barriers are going to be decreased, right? Because you're going to be clear on what is it that you wanna approach. And I'm sure that there's ways to get there.
Eleonore:
Thank you, Cindy, for your outlook. And it resonates so much with me because I always say to my PostdocTransformers, invest into your doctorate according to your vision of life. And that implies that you know what your vision of life is.
You must make time to think about that, especially during the PhD. Otherwise you'll have this abyss what you were talking about. And this journey to yourself could have been done already during the PhD at grad school.
But you are not just a scientist, instead you are so much more than that.
And you already shared that you are a mom and I wanna highlight that you are highly engaged as a volunteer for your local and Hispanic community. I didn't hear it, but you are Hispanic and you are also inspiring students at high school, university, but also young professionals and you serve as a mentor and coach.
[00:48:08] Advice for early career scientists
Eleonore:
So, from your diverse experience, what advice can you share for our PostdocTransformers from various disciplines and often underrepresented.
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
I think that's a great question. I have to say that it's a bit of a loaded question too, 'cause I feel like there's so much I can say on the subject, but I'll keep my answer brief and I'll say a few simple things, which are the following. I think as a minority in science, the difficulties come sometimes, or the way that I encountered them was: academically, I was sometimes not always as good as like everyone else. And so what really hurt me early on was the self comparison. I thought that if I wasn't as good as everyone else, that therefore I probably don't belong here in science. And if I had continued that path in actually believing that, it would've been probably the worst limiting belief that I would've ever decided to proceed with.
And that probably would've led me to never be where I am today. And so what did I do? How did I manage it? How did I challenge it? I surrounded myself with nothing but positive support. And thankfully at my university where I did my training, there was a center called the Center for Inclusive Education who really propped me up at multiple points, either with funding or with mentorship, or with resources to go to a conference or with a laptop.
The amount of support that I got was incredible. And I understand that maybe not everyone has this level of support, but I also feel like there were times where even the center couldn't provide some of the things I needed, which were sometimes I just needed someone to review this paper for me or this thing that I was putting together.
And I just needed advice. I tend to be the kind of person that suffers in silence. And I identified that early on in my training too. And so I started to realize like, if I don't go and ask for help when I need it, even if it seems embarrassing to ask for help, I'm just never gonna move forward. It's gonna be worse. And so I started to realize minorities a lot of times we're first generation. We sometimes they'll speak the language fully or we don't speak it as well 'cause it's not as native to us. Or even if we grew up here, and the language is native to us, we might encounter all kinds of other difficulties.
Maybe we grew up in a neighborhood that didn't provide as best educational opportunities. Maybe we don't have this long, beautiful resume or CV like the rest of our other colleagues do. You should never hold yourself back because you would be comparing an apple to an orange. You are your own story. You are your own person, and you have so much tremendous value to bring to the table.
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
And if you were accepted into these graduate programs, these postdoc opportunities, that means that there's something about you that they saw. And maybe the potential in itself should be convincing enough for you to believe that you're gonna advance right. But now you've been tasked with the responsibility to make that work for you. So now it's on you. You can't wait for other people to come and find you and tell you, oh, here's the opportunity. You know what? On many occasions, that's great if it happens, but that's not usually how it goes. And as I mentioned earlier, I was the one who went to my postdoc advisors and said, Hey, you're gonna go meet with the cancer center director.
Can you take me there? Can I come with you? Here's what I would like to listen into. I put together the deck. Maybe I should come with you in case there's questions about X, Y, Z, which you're a little less familiar with, right? I mean, I, I also put it in ways that was like complimentary to them as opposed to like, you versus I, you know, you versus I will always hurt us in terms of inclusion, in terms of ideas, in terms of collaboration, right?
And so my message is always find how you can collaborate with people. And as minorities, I couldn't say enough about how important that is. We have to collaborate with people. We can't do it alone. And a lot of times you're gonna find that you're way more successful if you partner with someone who thinks maybe a little different than you, but they have a similar driving goal 'cause then you have something in common. So, as I said, I have a lot to say on the topic, but I'll keep it brief by just saying those few little nuggets, you know, don't suffer in silence. Don't be too afraid to ask for help. And be bold ask for opportunity. Go seek it out. They exist. Those opportunities are out there, but they won't come to you necessarily if you don't ask.
Eleonore:
Don't ask, don't get. That's a great message.
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Eleonore:
And I think what is also remarkable looking at your offer is that you have also an offer for freshers and also for leaders thinking, what's the next step in my career? So with [00:27:00] these words, I would love to end this. And is there anything that you wanna share before we sign off?
[00:52:37] Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Eleonore:
And actually I should just drop mic because what else can I say? I can only have one question to you, Cindy. Would you be game to come back and reiterate what you have, just sort of like teased out at the end of this episode and have a deep dive into what else you want to share?
Dr. Cindy Leiton:
More than happy to. I think we can talk about so much more. And you know, I have a LinkedIn profile for a reason I wanna be found. Right. Um, and I also think that I've had the opportunity on LinkedIn to talk to so many people that have helped me, but also now I'm beginning to talk more and more to other people who I help. And I think to your point, right, I'm Hispanic, I'm female, I I'm a stepmom. You know, there's a lot of hats that I wear in my personal life too, that there's so much to talk about. And career is not just everything. It's one major component of your life. But don't forget that there's so much more to you that makes you unique and special, and you can bring some of those talents right back into your career.
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