iJOBS Blog

This piece was written after attending an iJOBS workshop entitled: How to Get and Keep a Job presented by Nancy Mark from Johnson & Johnson on June 29th, 2017 in Piscataway, NJ. As graduate students and post docs, we work in a semi-professional environment, wearing the uniforms of bright t-shirts, coffee stained jeans, and disintegrating shoes. Transitioning from this scholarly environment to one that requires tailored clothes and dry cleaning can be daunting, requiring more than just a simple trip to Nordstrom’s.

This past academic year, I was selected as a Raimondo Fellow as part of the Eagleton Fellowship program. This fellowship allows selected students to gain a better understanding of government, public affairs, and the legislative process through a class offered in the fall and an internship completed  in the spring.

Urmimala talks with Dr. J.D. Thomas, Rutgers' Assistant Dean for Project Management, Communications, and Special Projects about the development of his career in higher education administration.

By Jennifer Casiano On May 11, 2017 I had the opportunity to assist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Career Symposium.

iJOBS hosted a career panel, on May 22, 2017, in hopes of enlightening students about career opportunities in education and science outreach. The panelists included: Lucille O’Reilly Ph.D. (Science Teacher), Tiffany King, Ph.D. (BioBus), Patricia Irizarry, Ph.D. (The Rutgers Science Explorer Bus), Paul Winslow Ph.D. (Students 2 Science) and Kara Mann, MS. (Liberty Science Center). Many of us are a source of inspiration to the children and young adults in our lives.

  For this post, I decided to do something different. Instead of doing the usual post about a serious topic, I wanted to lighten the mood. As graduate students and post docs, we all work long, hard hours. Our personalities tend to skew towards introversion, yet we must often work with, or at least near others. This can be frustrating, because, PEOPLE can be frustrating! Inevitably, pet peeves develop. For this post, I went around interviewing a handful of my peers, asking them what their lab pet peeves were.

To continue (somewhat) a thought I touched upon on my previous blog post on the juggling act that is grad school, I wanted to highlight something that most grad students find annoying at best and terrifying at worst: the thesis committee, and the annual thesis committee meeting.

  In my experience, one of the more common responses after asking current graduate students what they plan on doing after graduation, is “find a job in industry.” While the transition from academia to industry can be challenging, a recent article by Angela Hopp and Rajendrani Mukhopadyay aims to outline some pointers for those that might be interested in a career in industry. The article is based on an interview with Kenneth I. Maynard, a member of the National Institutes of Health Common Fund’s External Scientific Panel for the Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training program.

This piece was written after attending an iJOBS workshop entitled: An Introduction to Good Laboratory Practices presented by Melissa Elliott from Envigo on May 8th, 2017 in Piscataway, NJ. Good laboratory practices (GLPs) are a series of regulations which standardize the quality of research used in clinical trials, or food development. Before human consumption, or treatment, there are several stages of research: exploratory, preclinical development, clinical trial, and manufacturing. The latter three stages are all federally regulated.

by Jennifer Casiano In 2007, Larry Page, co-founder of Google stated, “Science has a serious marketing problem.” Ten years later, we are still struggling. We just haven’t learned how to effectively communicate science. We publish our results and present at symposiums, sure, but what about the non-scientific community? What are we doing to communicate the importance of our results to them?