The K-to-R transition asks you to do something that sounds simple but isn't: zoom out from the project you've been working on and start seeing yourself as someone with a research program. That shift is harder than it looks — and it's exactly where Deanne Tibbitts found herself in the final stretch of her K award, while simultaneously navigating a nine-month job search in one of the hardest years academic research has seen in recent memory.

She arrived in K to R Essentials thinking she needed to tackle "a big mountain" of an R01 — and what she got instead was a realization that her net was too broad, that only one of her research directions was actually lighting her up, and that her R01 wasn't an isolated problem to solve but an expression of the ecosystem of her work.

We also get into what it means to see yourself as the most important asset in your research program, and why that reframing matters even more when you're staring down the end of your funding without a job offer in hand.

Interested in joining the next cohort of K to R Essentials? Join the waitlist at https://sarahdobson.co/k2r