Science Communication

Hello iJOBS community, My name is Deepshikha Mishra. I recently joined iJOBS blog as a writer and I am very excited to be a part of it. I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmacology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. After completing my Ph.D. in India, I moved to US to pursue my postdoctoral research. Biology has always fascinated me since my school days.

by Talia M. Planas-Fontánez The following is an opinion article about science communication, adapted from the “Communicating Science” class offered at Rutgers University. Have you ever tried to give your parents, or any family member, a clear explanation of what you do as a research scientist? How many unfamiliar technical format and jargon did you use? Science communication and public outreach is one of the biggest challenges in any field of research.

Stephanie Veerasammy, Ph.D., is a Rutgers alumnus and currently a Scientific Writer at Regeneron.  As a scientific writer she writes about ‘nonclinical pharmacological studies performed to characterize the pharmacodynamics of a drug’. She credits the SciPhD program in preparing her for her career. It gave her the skills necessary to make the transition from academia to her current job.

This past Thursday, March 22, 2018, I attended a seminar about Medical Affairs held at the Medical Science Building in Newark, NJ.

When I began my graduate journey, I wasn’t sure what my career objectives were, or how I would accomplish them. I quickly realized that it was ‘trendy’ to make assertions of how I was going to transition into industry, but that was the extent of my plan at this point. Furthermore, I thought the only possible route into industry for a Ph.D. was to be a post-doc or bench scientist for a small startup or large pharmaceutical company. Little did I know that this was just one option of many!

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.

I got my job in industry through networking, and I’m not ashamed to admit that (or at least, I’m trying not to be).

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?

By: Chris Lowe Some of our iJOBS participants have been able to complete industrial internships during their PhD studies. We recently had the chance to sit down with Dharm Patel, a 5th year PhD student in Biochemistry, to learn about his internship experience and see what advice he would offer other students looking to transition into industry. This post is part 1 of our 2 part interview with Dharm.

By: Maria Qadri As the new semester starts, I would like to share a smidge about what's been happening behind the scenes here at the Rutgers iJOBS blog. First, some history: Just like the process of developing a project into a Ph.D. dissertation, this blog has been growing from an idea into a well-developed repository of our Ph.D. and postdoctoral experiences. It started out in the late spring of 2015 as an opportunity for graduate students to practice their non-scientific writing skills, promote the newly formed iJOBS program, and learn "how-to" blog in a low risk setting.