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?

This past February, nearly fifty graduate students and post-docs braved the winter weather and attended a four day long workshop called SciPhD to learn how to frame skills gained in academia to be marketable towards careers in industry.

Your success as a graduate student depends on the quality of your mentorship. Often times, we choose a mentor based on our interests, or just to get into a lab that has money. Choosing a lab should be meticulously planned, the same way a great dance involves a planned order of steps.  Here is a quick guide to help you plan the steps you should take before you dance: