My Researcher experience for one month

I've been in my new position - Assistant Data Science Researcher for one month now, it is so different than that of a Ph.D. student. I want to use this blog to document my experience with this new position for this one month.

First of all, I am a little surprised by this researcher position. Because at the beginning, I am a little sad that I didn't find a faculty position and think this researcher position is just an enhanced postdoc position. But after one month, I found this position is a light version of a faculty position that I could practice a lot of things I wouldn't have chance as a postdoc (actually, at some other university, this position is called - Research Professor, but at Berkeley, we don't have this title). Why light? (1) We don't have a startup as a faculty to start our research team; (2) We are on a soft-money position, which means that our salary has a certain percentage fixed, all the others that we need to write proposals to get myself funded (it ranges from 6 month - 12 months at different cases, luckily, I do have some portion come as fixed for now). In contrast, a faculty will have 9-month salary fixed, and only 3-month's salary needs to be raised every year, much better and easier than 6 to 12 month; (3) We can not grant degrees to students, at least for assistant researcher (I heard at a certain level, we could serve as the committee member of Ph.D. students, but I forgot when); (4) Researchers don't have the obligation to teach a class or serve administration services, all we need to do is to work on our research. I guess these are the main differences.

On the contrary, there are also many similarities between researcher and faculty position. (1) We could serve as a PI to apply for research grants; (2) We could build our own research team to work on interesting things; (3) We have similar ranks, i.e. assistant, associate, and full researchers.

Anyway, back to my experience of this one month. I was actively thinking about the following things as a researcher:

• Now I need to think more ideas and write proposals to get myself funded, and then potentially to start my research team by hiring some students/postdocs to work with me (of course, maybe co-advice with some faculties). 
• I think I should dream big at the beginning about set up this research team, this will determine my future level. Since if I could have a large research team by having some students working with me, then I could get more work done, which in turn may attract more funding. This is kind of like a positive feedback loop. 
• I should do something creative work, even though it may take longer time to get some publication, as long as it is something fun and could distinguish myself, I think it will worth pursuing. 
• I also found myself is deviated more and more from the technical work I really like to do, for example, programming, building machine learning models, etc. As a researcher, now I do more thinking, more meetings, more writing on proposals, but less technical work as I did as a student. But I guess this is good because I can really think something fun to work on, and then in the future to find some students to work out the ideas. 

Overall, it is a great experience, even though I do feel higher pressure now. But I am happy to practice and experience my skills on this light version of the faculty position. I hope in the near future, I could get a faculty position after improving my skills on this position. Let's see more things may change on me in the future......