Individual Development Plans

By Juliana Corrêa-Velloso

By Natalie Losada

"A problem well stated is a problem half solved."

Charles Kettering

By Juliana Corrêa-Velloso

by Vicky Kanta

Finding a job that perfectly matches our personality is a difficult task. Graduate students and postdocs are constantly surrounded by a multitude of career choices. However, what makes this search even more complicated is that many of us are not even aware of our innate abilities. For this reason, a recent iJOBS workshop helped us find and familiarize ourselves with our individual strengths.

Edited by: Aminat Saliu Musah You approach the office of your program director with sweaty palms and little scientific progress. You have been dreading this progress meeting since your graduate program assistant asked you to fill out a doodle poll a month ago. As you enter their cluttered office you wonder about how you compare your progress to other graduate students and your own personal career and skills development. When will I graduate? What, if anything in science, am I good at? When will I be ready for the next step in my career progression?

When it’s time to start thinking about a future career, one of the first questions that might come to mind is, “What am I good at?” This can often be a difficult question to address, and unfortunately, it may be easier to think of things we are not good at. Laura N. Schram, an academic program officer at the University of Michigan, along with humanities students learned five useful lessons for Ph.D. students interested in identifying their skill set, in an eight-week career exploration program. These five lessons are broad enough to be applied to almost any field, including STEM.

by Talia M. Planas-Fontánez

During the week of March 18th, the Myelin Gordon Research Conference (GRC) took place in Ventura, CA. This year, the Myelin GRC was focused on human biology throughout various ages of development, while also offering perspectives on age-related myelin dysfunction that lead to debilitating diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and leukodystrophies, which currently have no cure.

By: Huri Mücahit   The following blog post is a summary of, “Break or burn out” by Kendall Powell and “Burnout syndrome: five ways to keep it together” by Gaia Cantelli   PhD students and postdocs work in some of the most rewarding positions, with the potential to truly be at the very cusp of the newest discovery - but all of this can come at a high personal cost.

This post was written as a follow up to the iJOBS event on August 29 with Dr. Thomas Magaldi discussing career preparation for graduate students and postdocs. Dr. Magaldi led a very personable and informative discussion on August 29 at Rutgers Newark with current postdoc and graduate students regarding their career goals and how to prepare for the next step in our journey after graduate school. He took time to ask each individual person in the room what their plans were for the future and recommend pointed strategies for how to advance to the next stage.

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.