Abandoning the Search for the “Perfect” Career

News Article By Julianne Feola

In doing some recent “career soul-searching”, I stumbled upon a document that I wrote in my second year of graduate school as part of a pre-doctoral fellowship application to the NIH.  Here, you can find a confident proclamation of my desire to continue on the academic route, first acquiring a postdoctoral fellowship and eventually rising to faculty member at an esteemed university.  While I don’t doubt that this option sounded attractive to me- aspects of scientific research will always excite me- I can say with certainty that my confidence in this decision was not there, and these goals changed almost as quickly as I had written them.

URBEST Mentoring for Faculty: Past and Future Workshops

News Article By Tracey Baas

On January 28, 2016, nineteen UR faculty members gathered at 8:30 am in the Center of Experiential Learning to participate in a URBEST Mentoring Workshop and share breakfast.  Departments in attendance were Microbiology and Immunology, Orthopedics, Neuroscience, Environmental Medicine, Surgery, Pathology, Medicine, Biomedical Engineering, Pediatrics, Pharmacology and Physiology, and the Cardiovascular Research Institute.

Although URBEST is known for its mission to Broaden Experiences in Scientific Training (BEST), which is mandated and funded by NIH, the focus of the Mentoring Workshop was not research or career development. The goal was to foster effective mentor-mentee communication practices that would better support trainee autonomy here at UR. Faculty at all levels - novice to experienced, tenure track and non-tenure track - were invited to fine-tune their mentoring skills in a supportive environment with their colleagues.

The Hybrid Academic

Career Story Blog Post By Helene McMurray, PhD, Director of the Bioinformatics Consulting and Education Service of the Edward G. Miner Library and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Genetics

Mythology offers a wide variety of hybrid creatures comprised of bits of other, more garden variety animals.  From the Griffin, Chimera, and Sphinx to a horde of other creatures from various traditions  to the post-modern Rainbow Unicorn Butterfly Kitten (if you haven’t seen this on social media, run a Google Images search for the name), stories and images of mixed up, muddled up creatures abound.  For the past two years, these conglomerations are the entities with whom I most identify.  During that time I have developed and run the Bioinformatics Consulting and Education Service in Edward G. Miner Library here at URMC, which makes me a Scientist-Consultant-Educator-Librarian.  

 

Science Policy and the Road Ahead

Career Story Blog Post By Sesquile Ramon, PhD, Health Policy Specialist and AAAS Fellow

So you got a Ph.D., now what? Degree in hand, you now have the option to pursue a diverse number of career possibilities, including science policy. You do not necessarily need another academic degree, but you do need to diversify the skills section on your CV and learn how to leverage and translate your graduate school skills into marketable ones.

 

Building a Career in Science Policy

Career Story Blog Post By Brad Smith, PhD, Director of Policy at FasterCures, a center of the Milken Institute¹

In the 15 years since I earned my PhD, I’ve had experiences, met people, and made contributions that I could never have imagined had I stayed at the lab bench. As I was finishing up my graduate work (studying DNA repair in E. coli and B. subtilis), I made the decision to embark on a career in science policy. There are many ways to engage in the public policy process as a scientist. My work has orbited around the intersecting axes of science policy, health policy, and national security policy. I’ve fielded phone calls about B. anthracis at the height of Amerithrax in October 2001 (just two months after I defended my thesis!), worked with Congress to pass needed legislation, coached former prime ministers and other leaders to mimic an international crisis as the BBC’s cameras were rolling, analyzed innovative R&D policies while in a think tank and then got the opportunity to implement one such policy in the federal government.

¹Adapted from: Smith, B., “Careers at the Interface of Biology and Public Policy,” ASBMB Today, Sep. 2006.