Career Paths

Nathan
Vanderford
Just Publish!
Do you want to write, be an author, or publish? Well, here’s my advice…but first, some history.

Christine
Zafra
The Art of Picking a Lab: The Pre-Application Stage
Over the past 10 years, I have talked with numerous graduate students that are in the process of selecting a laboratory to conduct their research. One thing that has stood out during those conversations is the lack of homework that students do when selecting a laboratory. With the average time to a ...

Kate
Sleeth
What is your Worth?
I haven’t been on Twitter a lot recently, but imagine my surprise when I glanced at my news feed and saw all the scientific bloggers I follow, talking about the same subject. This is unheard of, and they were all very unhappy. They even had a hashtag specifically for it #istandwithDNLe...

Jennifer
Reineke Pohlhaus
What is government contracting and why should I care?
What is government contracting and why should I care? If you have only a vague idea of what is means to “be a contractor” then this blog post is for you.Being a contractor means making my living by providing services (my skills, abilities, and knowledge) to the government and nonprofit sectors. ...

Jennifer
Reineke Pohlhaus
The Seven-Year Postdoc
I am on the WICB (Women in Cell Biology) email listserv, which, on occasion, has some real gems of articles that are distributed to the group. WICB is a Committee of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB).

Jennifer
Reineke Pohlhaus
The Best of Both Worlds
I’m a government contractor and I often say that my job is the best of both worlds: being a government employee, and being part of the private sector. Here are the ten reasons why I think being a government contractor is so great:

Nathan
Vanderford
PhDs Are Everything
Over 50% of PhDs work outside academia (Science and Engineering Indicators 2012) which means that many PhDs are indeed working in a variety of different jobs, and most importantly, this means that the majority of PhDs are not pursuing tenure track faculty positions. Despite this, a perpetuating stig...

Jennifer
Reineke Pohlhaus
How Much is Too Much?
I recently read this article from the Guardian website, “Are universities collecting too much information on staff and students?”,and I found myself thinking about the question posted in the title. I’m not sure of the answer, but the gist of the article was that the University of Huddlef...

Maida
Taylor
Foreign Intrigue: Does outsourcing jobs mean outsourcing ethics?
The drug giant, Glaxo Smith Kline, has a lot of explaining to do. This month the company has suffered a public relations storm with charges of bribery, arrests of executives in China, and allegations of falsifying research results, to name a few. Here at home, GSK is also in hot wa...

Kate
Sleeth
Getting a Professional Opinion
Today I want to focus on something that I believe a lot of scientists should consider getting – getting a professional opinion. We are all familiar with the idea of being trained by an expert in our field of interest, after all that is what we did with our doctoral degrees, but we don’t se...