Exploring the identity development of the budding neuroscientist at postgraduate level: a mixed-method study with perspectives from alumni and academics | BMC Medical Education

From the quantitative analysis, senior academics scored the highest self-efficacy, whereas alumni reported the highest score on the Professional Identity Scale. Although most participants were pleased to belong to the profession, there was a stronger sense of shared characteristics in the alumni than in junior academics, who had a weaker sense of belonging than senior academics. From the qualitative part of the study, it emerged that the identity of each group had been shaped by mentors they met during their learning journey. Alumni and junior academics linked their own identity to personal development and pragmatical skills learnt, valued networking and voiced the importance of learning by doing. Academics recognised PhD and/or postdoc training as a defining moment in their identity development. However, senior academics put less emphasis on networking but recognised the importance of non-research-related skills (i.e., leadership skills) and having the ability to look at the bigger picture.

Identity development at the alumni’s stage

Alumni’s higher self-efficacy compared to junior academics was surprising, but this might be linked to the skills-related and personal growth during the master’s. For several alumni, the MSc experience made them more resilient and proactive. This aligns well with reports showing that self-efficacy and resilience are linked: self-efficacy (and self-care) partially mediates the relationship between attachment security and resilience [11]. Their professional identity seems to be more defined than junior academics: alumni scored a higher sense of sharing characteristics than junior academics, despite having fewer ties with colleagues, given their early career stage: their identity has been consolidated by the MSc. Still, it has not yet been put into an existential crisis by the difficulties of the PhD. Only a few started their doctorate at the interview, and the PhD represents a crisis step for many young scientists. It has been defined as the PhD identity crisis, both experimentally [12] and writing-wise [13], by which the students ‘come to know their subject and their scholarly selves’ ([14], p 863).

Identity development at the academics’ stage

As ‘higher education is a turbulent sector’ ([15], p 998), the initial transitions into the academic appointments of junior academics represent a stage with ‘considerable consequences for career development and willingness to remain within’ the profession ([15], p 998). Junior academics reported lower self-efficacy compared to alumni. On the one side, they still have to grow to reach the top level and are aware of the difficulties of starting a laboratory. Concerns, including the limited availability of tenure jobs [16] and the difficulty of securing funding for research [17] have been reported, and the situation might be further exasperated by the COVID-19 pandemic [18, 19]. On the other side, they are more confident than alumni and senior academics in performing effectively on different tasks. They displayed a weaker sense of belonging but, as analysed in the semi-structured interviews, they value the scientific community and feel they belong. They are willing to explore the benefits of interactions within the neuroscientific community (both in large and small niches), from networking to establishing new collaborations. They are keen on looking for new opportunities, networking and collaborations even in sub-fields away from their day-to-day research topics. In their reflections, the term collaboration appeared more often than competition. This aligns well with Holley (2018): ‘Throughout this transition, early-career scholars ideally find a place within their respective scientific communities and strengthen the foundation for their career’ ([20], p 109).

In contrast to junior academics, senior academics’ professional identity seems more defined: they are aware of their progress and feel recognised. It is impossible to establish if the higher self-efficacy (compared to junior academics) was the driving force pushing them to the top or if they have high self-efficacy because of their appointment. Whatever the cause, upon reaching the top academic rank, they tend to follow research updates from their neuroscience niche, where they are leaders. Despite being culturally interested in the latest neuroscientific findings, they do not feel they belong to neuroscientific communities away from their tribe.

Hands-on activities to nurture becoming and belonging

Working in teams during the master’s made the alumni feel part of a real, authentic community. They recognised the importance of teamwork as a proxy of what working in the scientific community might look like (with pros and cons), despite not liking all the working styles they came across. This aligns well with studies describing how students and early career researchers in STEM appreciate being exposed to collaborative research practices and for the ‘application of knowledge in real-world, complex situations’ ([20], p 107; [21, 22]). In a community of practice, ‘novices and experts work together (…) to learn and connect STEM content and skills’ ([23], p 2). However, this exposure should be sustained over time: limited ‘research-intensive phase prior to normal academic employment’ ([24], p 387) and lack of time for research may hinder the transition.

Alumni and academics highlighted the importance of learning by doing. Active learning reportedly increases students’ performance in STEM [25], showed benefits across educational levels [26] and in many disciplines, including neurology [27] and psychiatry [28]. It narrows achievement gaps for underrepresented students and can promote equity in higher education [29, 30], maximises their learning online [31], increases students’ satisfaction with individual and group activities [32]. Active learning promotes belonging and becoming [33], which are at the core of students’ retention measures [34, 35].

Mentoring and role models

Despite not using warm keywords in the interviews, the participants mentioned role model and mentor. Although the two words define different figures, mentor often recurred in the interviews. Mentorship is positively associated with the scientific successes of mentees in STEM [36, 37] and with ‘favorable behavioral, attitudinal, health-related, relational, motivational, and career outcomes’, each with a small effect size ([38], p 254). The key factors behind successful mentoring relationships are under-researched in neuroscience. One of the most influential papers was published only in 2018; still, the analysis of the database, which featured almost nineteen thousand researchers in STEM (and an emphasis on neuroscience), focused on the postdoc, as it was found that ‘postdoctoral mentors were more instrumental to trainees’ success compared to graduate mentors’ ([37], p 4840). They were primarily instrumental thanks to ‘intellectual synthesis between their graduate and postdoctoral mentors’ ([37], p 4840) and that mentees and mentors had slightly different expertise [37].

Professional identity development in other professions

As explained in the previous paragraphs, neuroscience has a distinct professional identity. However, there might be lessons to learn while comparing identity development across professions. For example, while analysing the experiences contributing to the professional identity development of medical school students, Kay et al., 2018 identified ‘clinical experiences in the preclinical years’, ‘exposure to the business of medicine’ and ‘to physicians in clinical practice’ [39]. In many ways, this overlaps with the request to be further exposed to research works via projects and interaction with principal investigators voiced by neuroscience alumni and junior academics in this study. Another piece of research surveying third- and fourth-year students at a different US medical school demonstrated that experiential learning and interaction with colleagues, patients, mentors, and role models were the key factors in shaping their own professional identity development [40]. Reflecting on these experiences can play an important role in medicine [41] and health professions too, and this can be achieved by asking students ‘to consider how their perceptions of a profession are shaped over time’ and ‘how interacting with current practitioners and mentors shapes their values, beliefs, and expectations’ ([42], p 23), although the concept of identity in the health profession is more complex as there is a ‘continuously redefining’ process of ‘what professional identity looks like’ ([42], p 12). Academics across the health professions might benefit from reflective activities too in order to achieve ‘professional learning and academic identity’ ([43], p 693); moreover, recently appointed lecturers in nursing, midwifery and the allied health professions felt that ‘sustained support specifically for developing scholarship and research’ was needed to achieve and reinforce their own identity as academics ([44], p 69).

Stage-specific vs transversal skills for neuroscientists

Besides the core skills identified by the three groups interviewed, characterised by a substantial overlap, minor differences were found:

• alumni focused more on personal development and pragmatic skills.

• Junior academics recognised the importance of seizing every chance arising from interactions within their communities.

• Senior academics did not mention networking but valued the importance of the ‘big picture’, scientifically and career-wise; they offered a grand angular vision, mostly on leadership-related abilities.

This again aligns well with Laudel and Glaser’s theoretical framework model of early-career researcher development [24] (Fig. 5 top), which epitomises the passage from apprentice to being colleagues, from being a supervised researcher to an independent one. It is based on three components: cognitive career, community career and organisational career. Interestingly, each component might be more relevant to a specific career stage:

• cognitive career for the alumni;

• community career for the junior academics;

• organisational career for senior academics.

However, some theoretical changes, to be confirmed experimentally, can be recommended (Fig. 5 bottom). At the organisational level, there might be more emphasis on being a mentor and being a mentee since the first academic steps. At the cognitive level, the framework can include master projects instead of starting at PhD stage. In parallel with the continuity of the research trail, discontinuity should be considered, within and outside the academia, as voiced by junior academics. The skills gained should be counted as factors per se. Moreover, the variable competition can provide a more accurate depiction of the neuroscience community. At the community level, two variables can be added: group activities to reinforce the sense of belonging, as a bridge connecting students and staff, and public engagement activities to showcase STEM diversity and create a sense of identity outside the academic community.

Strengths and limitations

This study is the first one exploring the neuroscientists’ identity development across career levels and the first one combinedly assessing identity, influences and sense of belonging at the master level in neuroscience. The semi-structured nature of the interviews allowed a mixture of rigour in following a plot and freedom to explore the emerging topics. The use of two validated scales, the relatively high number of participants and the recruitment of participants from three different career-level groups (alumni, junior and senior academics) are strengths of this study. The strategic choice of using the General Self-Efficacy Scale instead of the Academic Self-Efficacy Scale was instrumental in gathering information not strictly related to the academic field. This study has one main limitation: all the academics recruited were male. The issue with one-gender participants is that several factors may have impacted female academics’ identity development, which future studies should specifically investigate.

Future studies

Future works should interview female academics at different career levels. Women are underrepresented in STEM [45,46,47], including neuroscience [48], from leadership roles [49] to citations in journals [50] and scientific awards [51]. They suffer from gender discrimination, which impacts career progression [52] and experience difficulties related to work-family balance [53]. Interviewing female academics can favour the design of schemes to overcome career challenges they face, especially considering they have been impacted more than males by the COVID-19 pandemic [19]. This could lead to analysing whether gender-related differences in academic self-efficacy in neuroscience, shown by a large meta-analysis with almost 250 studies and more than 68 thousand participants in STEM and social sciences [54] a decade ago, still exist. As the largest effect size was located for respondents of 23-year-old or more [54], whether this bottleneck exists in neuroscience (and how to neutralise it) remains to be investigated. Other works can measure self-efficacy over time and link it to academic outcomes, as in [55], and analyse whether differences exist between STEM-only and non-STEM-only institutions, and between research-intense and teaching-intense higher education providers.