By Tomas Kasza How do doctoral recipients adapt their career interests and career searching techniques to pursue careers outside academic pathways? As a growing percentage of doctoral recipients enter non-academic careers, understanding how they choose or investigate those careers has become more important.
Hey everyone! I hope your summers have been well! Things have flown by. I thought I’d give you all an update. I am currently preparing for my next journey in the D.C. metro area science policy space as an American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Technology Fellow in the Division of Engineering Education Centers in the Broadening Participation in Engineering division. Also, I’d like to take this time to thank the Rutgers iJOBS community. The various programs I participated in were eye opening and broadened my perspectives.
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.
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. 
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.
It is the dream of every researcher to publish in a journal with a high to decent impact score, for your research to be deemed of high quality, and for the number of citations of your paper to skyrocket. For most PhD students, not only do we begin this journey with the delusion…I mean…aspiration of finishing in as little as three years, we ALSO aim for the highest-impact journal. While there is nothing wrong in dreaming big, and in fact it does work out sometimes in a very fast-paced lab, our dream withers as the years go by.
By: Tomas Kasza
[caption id="attachment_1693" align="aligncenter" width="300"]
Asm. Zwicker speaking to the assembly session about NJ STEM Week.[/caption]
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?