We just wrapped up Career Development Week for 2022. During this week, lab members choose from dozens of Career Development activities compiled here. The lab collectively completed 76 career development activities, including informational interviews, creating a website, and completing tasks like converting CVs to resumes. We make CDW a bit of a (friendly!) competition and this year Kendall (reigning champ) won the Cardev Cup after completing 28 activities and earning a total of 93 points. Congratulations, Kendall!!
Some of our group’s take-home messages from Career Development Week were:
Career paths are not always or even often linear.
Trainees especially liked hearing about folks’ day-to-day schedules and activities.
We sometimes surprise ourselves by interest in jobs and careers we hadn’t considered before.
It’s helpful to have a structure to tackle tasks we avoid.
We should not limit ourselves.
Other people are always willing and eager to help!
We also welcomed 5 guest speakers to our Career Development Week this year:
Dr. Kristin Jernigan spoke with us about her faculty position at Columbia State Community College. She spoke of her career path and shared the unique joys, rewards, and challenges of teaching biology at a community college.
Dr. Eric Hill, a planarian colleague who completed his doctoral work in the Petersen lab. Dr. Hill shared with the group how he sought and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Gibson lab. He also discussed his recent move to industry and his current position as a senior scientist at MRI Global. He also generously shared his resume and cover letters for both postdoc and industry positions so that the group could see examples of these job materials.
Dr. Denise Zannino, who spoke with us about her position as a Science Policy and Communication Analyst with the National Science Foundation. We covered a lot of ground in this chat, including paths to policy and scicomm positions and what it is like to work for the federal government.
Dr. Martis Cowles, another former planarianologist from the Zayas lab. Dr. Cowles is currently Chief Business Officer at Epicypher. We chatted about his beginning his work in industry at a start up company focusing on grant writing and then working his way up. It was so helpful to have someone discuss the unique opportunities that come with starting in a small company and sticking with it as it grows.
Dr. Bram Lambrus, former Newmark lab alum who completed his Ph.D. in the Holland lab, took a position with Boston Consulting Group, is now working at Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Business Development. Dr. Lambrus helped us explore careers in consulting and explained what it looks like to apply a STEM Ph.D. to business development.
It was so very fun to reconnect with my two roommates from graduate school (Kristin and Denise) and several planarian lab alums. It is so wonderful to see where former colleagues have ended up and one of the main themes that emerged from the chats (best explicitly stated by Dr. Jernigan) was that there are many, many paths to happy career outcomes. Thank you so much to our wonderful guests. We appreciate you!
And as always, thank you to many colleagues who helped with this event and thank you to Dr. Prachee Avasthi (now Chief Science Officer at Arcadia!) for the initial inspiration for this R-G lab tradition! She writes about her lab’s version here.