Communications 101

Career Story Blog Post By Amy Donner, PhD, Director of Communications at RA Capital Management, LLC

A brilliant idea that cannot be communicated is no more useful than no idea at all.

Whether you aim to specialize in communications, manage projects, develop strategic alliances or run your own company, strong communications skills are an essential component of a successful career. If you are a good listener and writer, you already possess two important skills that set you apart from most scientists. Put your self-assessment to the test by considering the following question: Can you take the information you gather from multiple sources, turn it into a plan of action, and communicate that plan to others in a simple and comprehensible fashion? If so, congratulations, you are well on your way to a successful career. If not, what do you need to learn to get you to a ‘yes’?

Three Data Points: Two Cold Calls and One Connection, Plus a Hat Trick

Career Story Blog Post By Tracey Baas, PhD, URBEST Executive Director

I wanted to be included in the Career Story Q&A Seminar lineup to let URBEST trainees know that I accomplished getting one research job and one research-related job without having any personal connections. I wanted to represent one of the outliers. I used science-focused job boards and sent my resumes as online applications. While I do agree this method isn’t ideal, and I’m strong believer in networking, it is not impossible to make it work.

 

Job Lore: Brianna Sleezer

Brianna Sleezer, a neuroscience PhD graduate student in the Hayden Lab, is URBEST’s (Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training) first intern that has been matched with a host: The Children’s Environmental Health Network. Brie made things happen by connecting with Nsedu Obot Witherspoon, the Executive Director for CEHN, at a URBEST Career Story. Before Brie left for her three-month internship at CEHN, she agreed to answer some questions for URBEST Job Lore, a new blog category that will help guide URBEST trainees to find their own internships, skill-building activities and future jobs.

Evolution of a Company and a UR PhD Graduate Student

Career Story Blog Post By Ernest Smith, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Vaccinex

I entered graduate school in the summer of 1994, a couple weeks after graduating from St. John Fisher College with a Biology degree. I joined UR’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology, which afforded me a wide range of labs to work in. Over the following nine months, I did rotations in labs that focused on Immunology, Virology and Biochemistry. Even as a graduate student, I have always been more interested in developing new technologies than I have been in discovering new biology. I see discovery research as a form of detective work; you uncover the facts, follow the leads and present your case. You don’t change the facts; you just try to understand them. In contrast, I found inventing new technologies exciting because you are changing the reality and making something exist that didn’t exist before. Although building a knowledge base through discovery research and understanding biology well enough to intervene and treat diseases are both critical, I was most excited at the prospect of inventing technologies that are used to solve intractable biology questions.  

Traveling the winding road: Perspective from an early career PhD

Career Story Blog Post By Jennifer Head Wheeler, PhD, Research Investigator II at Bristol-Myers Squibb 

When I found out I had been accepted to the Toxicology PhD program at the University of Rochester, I had a vision of how my career would unfold: 4 years of research and a 2 year post-doc followed by a tenure track professorship. This path that I ended up taking was not what I initially imagined, but has ended up being much more than I had hoped for. Throughout my experiences in grad school, my post-doc and in my current position, I’ve learned that there’s so much more to training to be a successful scientist than just the work you do at the bench and the papers you publish. For this blog post, I want to share my experiences from graduate school and post-doc and how they have shaped my scientific career so far.