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582 Publishing without perishingtheir research and applying for funding is a critical skill that we statisticiansmust develop.This volume commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Committee ofPresidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) presents an excellent opportunityfor me to share my experience, for the most part learned the hard way, onbalancing the competing demands we face and on being an effective communicator.As you’ll see in the next two sections, it took me some time in myown career to develop these skills. Despite my slow start, I have subsequentlybeen very fortunate to have served as a journal editor, a chair of NIH grant reviewpanels, and as a consulting and collaborating statistician, through whichI have learned a great deal about both of these topics.With many colleagues over the past decade, including authors of someother chapters of this book, I have served as a senior participant in whatis now called the ENAR Workshop for Junior Biostatisticians in Health Research,which has been supported by grants from the National Institutes ofHealth. (Xihong Lin and I wrote the first grant application, and the granthas subsequently been renewed under the expert direction of Amy Herring.)Although targeted to biostatisticians, this workshop covers skills that are essentialto all young researchers. Much of what I have to say here has beenshaped by not only my own career but by the insights of my fellow seniorparticipants.48.2 Achieving balance, and how you never knowEmbarking on a career as a statistical researcher can be daunting, probablyconsiderably more so today than it was for me back in 1987. I had just receivedmy PhD in statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill andhad accepted a position in the Department of Statistics at North CarolinaState University, barely 25 miles away. I was excited to have the opportunityto become a faculty member and to teach, consult with other scientists oncampus, and carry out statistical methods research.And, at the same time, I was, frankly, terrified. Sure, I’d done well in graduateschool and had managed to garner job offers in several top departments.But could I really do this? In particular, could I really do research?Iwasextremelyfortunatetohavehadathesisadvisor,RayCarroll,whowas what we would call today an outstanding mentor. Ray had not onlyintroduced me to what at the time was a cutting-edge methodological areathrough my dissertation research, he had also been a great role model. I’ll tellyou more about Ray in the next section. He seemed confident in my prospectsfor success in academia and urged me to forge ahead, that I would do just fine.But I couldn’t help being plagued by self-doubt. While I was in graduateschool, Ray was always there. He proposed the area in which I did my disserta-