iJOBS Blog

I attended a two-day workshop called “What Can You Be With a PhD?” (WCUB) on November 4-5, 2017. This article is published as the first in two-part coverage of the “Teaching and Education” panel during WCUB. What exactly can one do once they are deemed an expert in their respective field? The answer to that question turns out to be: many things!

When I imagine myself in industry I often see myself wearing a suit performing a task, but the details of those tasks are unclear. After speaking to other trainees about what tasks they envision performing in industry, they describe job definitions, but not specific tasks. This becomes problematic because while you may think that you are a good fit for a profession, performing those unknown duties might make you feel differently. I am surely not the first PhD student to ask the question: what job duties would I do in industry, more specifically Medical Affairs?

I didn’t know what I expected on Thursday when I traveled to Bridgewater, NJ to visit GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) Medical Affairs office. This was my first opportunity to get a day-in-the-life industry perspective during my time in graduate school. If you read any of our previous blog posts or even just the description of the iJOBS program, you will understand that its sole purpose is to expose graduate students and post-docs to non-academic career options.

On November 1, 2017, iJOBS hosted a site-visit to Bayer in Whippany, NJ. This location is Bayer’s U.S. headquarters for the Pharmaceuticals and Consumer Care divisions. The day began with a talk by Edio Zampaglione, MD, Vice President of U.S. Medical Affairs for Women’s Healthcare and Neurology.

Huri Mücahit and Yaa Haber If you’re looking for a career in which you can plan, organize, and oversee all aspects of a project to reach a specific end goal, then project management is the career for you! In this iJOBS workshop, Kristin Fitzgerald, Director of Global Project and Alliance Management at Merck & Co., covered the day-to-day aspects of project management within a pharmaceutical company, as well as the skills required to succeed. In order to understand project management, it is first necessary to define the term ‘project’.

This post was written following my participation in the 2Actify Online course offered by the iJOBS program from July 17 to September 15, 2017 We have all been there: you’re attending iJOBS and (Alliance for Career Advancement) ACA events to learn about potential career options, you’re updating your resume and curriculum vitae to be ready for that first application, but then you suddenly hit a brick wall when you realize your LinkedIn profile hasn’t been updated since college (ack!!).

Dr. Evelyn Erenrich serves as the Associate Dean at the School of Graduate Studies and Director of the Center for Graduate Recruitment, Retention, and Diversity (GR²aD) at Rutgers University. In her capacity as Associate Dean, she is responsible for promoting diversity and inclusion at Rutgers the from undergraduate to faculty levels.

This post was written as a follow up to the iJOBS event on August 29 with Dr. Thomas Magaldi discussing career preparation for graduate students and postdocs. Dr. Magaldi led a very personable and informative discussion on August 29 at Rutgers Newark with current postdoc and graduate students regarding their career goals and how to prepare for the next step in our journey after graduate school. He took time to ask each individual person in the room what their plans were for the future and recommend pointed strategies for how to advance to the next stage.

That is the question. The million dollar question! While we may not soliloquize our internal debate like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we’ve all asked ourselves this question. Going to graduate school for a Ph.D. is not a decision to be made lightly. One must take several factors into account, both personal and professional, before embarking on the epic journey that is a graduate dissertation.

When I began my graduate journey, I wasn’t sure what my career objectives were, or how I would accomplish them. I quickly realized that it was ‘trendy’ to make assertions of how I was going to transition into industry, but that was the extent of my plan at this point. Furthermore, I thought the only possible route into industry for a Ph.D. was to be a post-doc or bench scientist for a small startup or large pharmaceutical company. Little did I know that this was just one option of many!