BGS Career Development

Making It Count!

Science: Working Life

Designing Your PhD: A Career Exploration Workshop

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” Are you wondering what you could do with a PhD? What skills you have that would be valued by a wide range of employers? What kind of post-PhD work life would make you happy? Then come to this interactive workshop led by PhD Career Advisors to help you get started in answering some of these questions using design thinking to manage your career. Whether you’re in the early, middle, or final stages of your PhD program, graduate students will benefit from this workshop by participating in interactive activities to help you get a strong sense of what your interests, skills, and work-values are, gain the confidence to tell your story and explore career paths, and come away with a career roadmap and resources to make the best use of your time in graduate school.

You’ll be using card sorts to prioritize your skills, interests, and values; drawing mind maps on dry-erase boards, and visualizing different versions of a ‘future you’ to help you be creative, strategic, and optimistic as you learn how to leverage your PhD for your future career.” (Via Career Services)

Date: Tuesday, May 21st, 2019
Time: 2:30 – 4:00 PM
Location: Van Pelt Library, Collective Classroom (Room 113)
RSVP: https://app.joinhandshake.com/events/305253/share_preview

12th Annual NIH Career Symposium

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12TH ANNUAL NIH CAREER SYMPOSIUM
NIH Campus, Bethesda, Maryland
Natcher Conference Center, Building 45 
May 10, 2019 8:00 am – 4:00 pm

Register

The NIH Career Symposium highlights the diversity of career choices available to your generation of biomedical researchers.  Whether you are a new graduate student, postdoc, or clinical fellow just beginning to consider career options or a senior student/fellow ready to look for a job, the NIH Career Symposium is for you. Here are the panel descriptions and the agenda:

Panel Descriptions
Career Symposium Agenda

NIH invites any postdoc, clinical fellow or PhD-level graduate student to join, regardless if you are part of the NIH intramural program or not. This event is free to attend (participants are responsible for their own travel expenses)

Wondering what the Career Symposium is all about?  Check out past events here.

(Via NIH)

BEST: “Take the leap? What to do when the first job offer comes your way”

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The NIH Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training (BEST) career development blog recently published this post about navigating a multi-prong career search. The author is a postdoctoral researcher who found themselves weighing their interest in a tenure-track faculty job versus a non-academic career, either in medical writing or graduate & postdoc professional development. They reflect on the logistical challenges of strategically applying to both academic and non-academic jobs as well as the factors that led them to ultimately accept a role helping postdocs navigate their career search processes. These factors included intuition, work-life balance, and salary, among other considerations.

Read more here.

Nature: “How to use Twitter to further your research career”

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Lab scientist with smart phone illustration

Credit: Getty

This Nature article explores the uses of Twitter in professional development. The platform allows for broad-dissemination of information in a tight-packed format, making it a powerful tool for science outreach. As the author explains:

“Many are keen to make research visible and understandable to the wider community. For many, Twitter is one step towards this goal, because it allows non-scientists to find new research instantaneously without having to seek it out on lab or university websites. Twitter also provides a ‘way in’ for members of the public who want to contact scientists directly.”

The article details how scientists use the platform to increase circulation of their own publications, how they use automated paper-searching bots to populate their Twitter-feed with relevant papers in their field, and ways it can facilitate personal connections.

Read more here.

SACNAS Mid-Atlantic Regional Meeting 2019

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On Monday, June 10th 2019, the Penn SACNAS Chapter will host a day-long event of professional development workshops, as well as talks, poster presentations, and community building open to STEM undergraduate student, graduate student, postdoctoral, and faculty members. Their goal is to celebrate the power of diversity in STEM.

SUBMIT AN ABSTRACT:
Prizes will be given to top three Best Poster winners: 1st place: $250 gift card, 2nd place: $150 gift card, 3rd place: $75 gift card, sponsored by Mahoney Institute for Neurosciences (MINS).

Registration Deadline: April 22nd!

Register at: https://forms.gle/6UgN8mokCX3zZMUA7 and more details at: https://www.med.upenn.edu/sacnas/regionalmeeting.html

Upcoming CTL Workshops

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Giving and Receiving Constructive Criticism
Dr. Stephen DiNardo, Cell and Developmental Biology and Katerina Placek, CTL Graduate Fellow, Neuroscience
April 25, 2019, 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
BRB 0501 (5th floor conference room)

You have worked hard on a set of experiments and on drawing conclusions from them.  Intellectually, you know that receiving feedback from peers and mentors on those experiments is central to your progress.  But, hearing criticisms can be tough, especially given the investment you have made.  Reciprocally, delivering critiques to a colleague in a manner that will help them can be just as tricky. In this workshop with Dr. Stephen DiNardo, attendees will engage in activities and lively discussion to develop ‘best practices’ for giving and receiving constructive criticism. Come and join to build on valuable communication skills that will serve you throughout your scientific career! 

Counts toward the CTL Teaching Certificate.
RSVP here
Contact placekk@pennmedicine.upenn.edu for more information.

Communicating your Science with Confidence
Dr. Nandita Mitra, Biostatistics, and Katerina Placek, CTL Graduate Fellow, Neuroscience
May 7 2019, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
BRB 0501 (5th floor conference room)

Public presentation of one’s work – whether at a lab meeting, conference, poster symposium, or thesis defense – is a challenge regularly faced by BGS students and is often accompanied by nerves and jitters. How can BGS students conquer nervousness to confidently present their work to others? Dr. Nandita Mitra will lead an engaging workshop to help attendees communicate their science with confidence, focusing on ‘tips and tricks’ to use for preparation, presentation, and managing feedback when publicly communicating your science. If you have a public presentation coming up or have dealt with presentation-related nervousness in the past, then this workshop is for you!

Counts toward the CTL Teaching Certificate.
RSVP here.
Contact placekk@pennmedicine.upenn.edu for more information.