[caption id="attachment_1693" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Asm. Zwicker speaking to the assembly session about NJ STEM Week.[/caption]

I got my job in industry through networking, and I’m not ashamed to admit that (or at least, I’m trying not to be).

As I think back to when I was applying to colleges (nearly 10 years ago...wow!) and began to think seriously about my career plans, I remember scrolling through web pages that described all of the different majors a student could enroll in. After scanning through several of these "major search engines", Biomedical Engineering (BME) stuck out.

We have all been told at one point or another that the skills we develop in graduate school can be translated into industry value if we communicate them properly. However, I have always wondered about the credibility of this statement. How can technical lab skills be helpful in non-academic career tracks?

My name is Aminat Musah, I am a fifth-year graduate student in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Rutgers University. I work in the lab of Dr. Teresa Wood, where my research focuses on defining the effect of mTOR signaling in oligodendrocyte development. Specifically, my interest lies in the mechanisms underlying mTOR regulation of oligodendrocyte cytoskeleton during differentiation and myelination. Before embarking on my graduate school journey, I attended Delaware State University (DSU) where I attained a bachelor’s degree in Biology.

I am going to go bold here and state for the record that writing a grant is the single most important undertaking you should devote yourself to during graduate study. Sure, developing and evaluating a testable hypothesis is what consumes most of your waking (and sometimes sleeping- gosh darn it!) hours.

How’s it going? My name Tomas Kasza, I’m a 3^rd year PhD student in the Neuroscience program at Rutgers University. Although I am studying here in New Jersey , I am originally from California. In 2012, I received my degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from UC Santa Cruz. My passion for research was sparked by participating in an undergraduate research course called Phage Hunters (http://seaphages.org/). In this class, we were tasked with purifying and naming our own bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria.

Over the course of attending numerous iJOBS career panels and workshops on different job opportunities for PhD graduates, the one question invariably asked is: “Is a postdoc required for this position?”. Surprisingly, while there are several employers that have no problems answering this question, there are a few who seem to have a hard time committing to a simple “yes” or “no” answer. Which begs the question, what is a postdoc?

Lots of things have changed since the last time I posted. I am currently in Washington DC at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) for the Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy fellowship. I will have a follow-up post on this, but for now, this post will focus on my journey into science policy by going over a few tidbits on my past year doing science policy informational interviews.

By: Zakiya Qualls