Happenings in Science Careers

In September 2017, Michael Roach and Henry Sauermann examined the declining interest in academic careers; published in PLOS ONE . One might assume that this decline is due to a difficult job market, however, the authors found that the majority of graduate students who lost interest in academia had other reasons. The question was examined using a longitudinal survey that followed 854 Ph.D. students, in the natural sciences and engineering, from 39 U.S. research universities.

By: Huri Mücahit The following blog post was written after attending the iJOBS Workshop: Strategic Online Networking to Propel Your Career on January 18th, 2018. With this workshop, iJOBS once more offers the opportunity to expand networking skills with the program 2Actify. Following the success of the pilot program launched this past summer, (see Fatu Badiane's experience with 2Actify), the founder, Penny Pearl

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’.

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.

The following blog post was written after attending the iJOBS Career Panel: Product Development, Tech and Sales Support in Life Sciences Companies on October 3, 2017. Do you like communicating with other scientists about their projects? Do you enjoy being an expert in a particular method and explaining that method to non-experts? Do you enjoy meeting new people? Then boy, do I have a job for you! If you have overlooked sales and tech support as a job opportunity, you may be missing out on a rewarding, meaningful, fun, and interesting career choice.

On the evening of September 12, a casual event between students, post docs, and alumni was held in the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Research Tower at the Bush/Piscataway campus. As a second-year Ph.D.