027: Career Advice, With Brady Holmer

This is a totally different type of episode. Brady Holmer, a first-year exercise science PhD student, interviews me for career advice. In this episode you can find the following: 11:50 Brady's background in exercise science research; 16:52 Where Brady is now; 18:28 Flow-mediated dilation as a measure of blood vessel function in diabetes and smoking cessation, and the influence of exercise and Vitamin E; 23:00 Brady's expert opinion on whether my CrossFit workout is classified as interval training when I stop to catch my breath; 27:52 Caffeine's effect on exercise physiology and physical performancel; 32:15 How Brady decided to interview one person in his field per month; 33:35 How I discovered Tim Ferris during his work on the 4-Hour Body; 41:10 Brady's selection of interviewees; 42:57 What Brady learned from his first interview; 45:00 Brady's career plan; 45:40 Setting up a research trajectory across doctoral work and postdoctoral work for long-term success in academia; 49:00 Leaving academia for self-employment, autonomy in and out of academia; 53:10 Academia offers massive autonomy within a specific framework, but the framework is more restrictive than it seems: you can color however you want within the lines, providing you can get funding for the crayons you want, but you don't control the lines; 1:03:35 How to increase productivity during teaching and research; 1:08:48 Automation and leverage in academia; 1:16:48 You have to take time out of productivity now to maximize your productivity in the future; you can't optimize for both at the same time, and you need to be willing to go backwards in maximize your ability to get ahead; 1:23:25 How I decided to get into research; 1: 28:48 How to find ideas for research and project; 1:31:35 How my background in history helps me in science; 1:35:53 Brady's path to choosing his thesis topic; 1:39:10 How to make contact with influential people; 1:45:00 Advice to people thinking about a health career but unsure about graduate school and research; 1:51:15 The face of employment is changing: Uber, Instacart, the rise of the kind-of-employee-kind-of-solopreneur, and the normalization of the side hustle.

Access the show notes, transcript, and comments here:

https://chrismasterjohnphd.substack.com/p/027-career-decisions-a-conversation

Chris Masterjohn, PhD, is the Founder and Scientific Director of the mitochondria test Mitome.