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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 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.

This post was written following my participation in the 2Actify Online course offered by the iJOBS program from July 17 to September 15, 2017 We have all been there: you’re attending iJOBS and (Alliance for Career Advancement) ACA events to learn about potential career options, you’re updating your resume and curriculum vitae to be ready for that first application, but then you suddenly hit a brick wall when you realize your LinkedIn profile hasn’t been updated since college (ack!!).

This was adapted from Cheeky Scientist’s webinar titled: Tailoring your resume for an industrial job. “A good resume is not enough to get a job, but a bad resume is enough to keep you from getting a job”. This was a quote that struck me as I was watching the webinar hosted by Cheeky Scientist’s Isaiah Hankel. During the hour-long webinar, I learned about tailoring one’s resume for a job in industry; a resume optimized for a non-academic career.

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.

This post was written after the September 27, 2017 iJOBS event: Applying for jobs as an international student, advice from an immigration attorney held at Rutgers University On September 27^th, immigration lawyer Michael J. Goldstein gave a talk on the process of going from a student with F1 status to finding a job with an H1-B petition and further. During a time of turmoil regarding immigration laws, Goldstein stressed how important it is to find a lawyer focused primarily on immigration law.

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.

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.

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.

Almost a year ago, I had one of my annual thesis committee meetings, and my adviser and committee gave their blessings and said the much-coveted magic words: “I think you’re ready to graduate”. After briefly enjoying the moment, my adviser and I got down to business:

(1) working out a timeline to finish the remaining experiments