Orienting Your Future According to Orians

Orienting Your Future According to Orians 

By Hannah Uebele 

If you’re an aspiring biologist, it’s hard not to want to aim high to be someone like Professor Colin Orians.

As a leader in his field, Orians has done extensive research studying the interactions between the plant and insect worlds, including topics such as how plants defend themselves from hungry pests. His work has been widely published in such places as Ecological Entomology to Oecologia.

When creating research teams which combine disciplines across many different fields, Orians realizes the importance of working with different perspectives to solve pressing questions. In addition to being a successful scientist, Orians is also a respected professor at Tufts in the Biology department and is the Director of Tufts’ Environmental Studies Program.

So how does one go from being an undergraduate Biology major, to become the Director of an entire academic program at a world-renowned university?

While Orians says there isn’t a secret to his success, he did explain how being open to different ideas and new directions in his research has definitely helped him.

“I’ve always been open to new opportunities…if you try to make your data fit your preconceived notions, I don’t think you’ll be very successful. If you have some hypotheses that you’re testing and you’re willing to reject them, and as you reject them you get excited about the alternatives, that I think is the key in the sciences anyway,” Orians said.

Orians explained that the best thing in his career is the discovery aspect of research and being able to collaborate with students. “Both of those are really important to me, it’s the research, the teaching, and the sort of training the next generation of potential scientists,” Orians said.

Orians did explain however that students pursuing a career in science or academia do need to be aware of some of the harder parts about the career. “The truth is, when you go into a career in research you don’t always see immediate results, so if you’re a person who needs immediate results it may not be the career for you, because it takes a long time to collect the data.”

Orians also mentioned that aspiring professors need to have some sort of idea about how they will go about funding their research and attracting the interest of grant reviewers. “That’s probably the most challenging part of today’s scientific world, getting funding for your research, because funding rates are kind of low,” Orians said.

Orians majored in Biology at Earlham College and earned his Ph.D in Entomology at The Pennsylvania State University, but he said there isn’t a single correct path to take for students wanting to emulate his career. He explained how there are many different ways to get involved in scientific matters even if someone didn’t start out as a scientist.

“There are economists that work on these issues as well, so I wouldn’t say that there is a discipline that is more important than another, but I would say that you do need to have disciplinary grounding,” he said.

He further explained how interdisciplinary research has proven to be very advantageous in his research, but that people need to be sufficiently strong in their respective fields in order to then be able to come together to collaborate.

“If I were too interdisciplinary where I was sort of a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none, I think that’s a much more difficult place to be if you’re interested in research and a career in academia. You want to have disciplinary grounding that then you can feed into the interdisciplinary world,” he explained.

Orians said that students need not follow the path that they think will make them most successful, but that they should become involved in something that fully and truly interests them.

“I think that students have to follow whatever their passion is…I have no allusions that every one of my students should follow my career, I want them to follow the career that they’re most interested in. Maybe that takes them into the sort of policy realm, maybe it takes them into the much more applied medical world, so I just want them to follow their own interests,” he said.

Orians advised students to connect with faculty and get experience researching with them. “If a student wants to get involved in research, it’s good to reach out to faculty and explore it, and don’t get disillusioned if you don’t get an email back right away, try again,” he said.

So send those emails, follow your unique interests, be open to working with a range of different ideas, and you’ll be on your way to becoming the next director of an academic program at a distinguished university.