Career advancement for postdocs

Career advancement for postdocs
One Thursday afternoon in May, a conference room at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, Massachusetts, is filling beyond capacity. More than two dozen postdocs and young faculty members from the BIDMC and other affiliates of Harvard Medical School in Boston stream in for tips on how to produce an effective oral presentation. The attendees, many of whom are not native English speakers, look overworked but expectant. They have relinquished the freedom of a late-afternoon coffee break because their career advancement is on the line. They know the importance of being able to deliver an hour-long lecture or a ten-minute talk, daunting though that might be. “I have been giving talks for 30 years,” begins the presenter, Terry Maratos-Flier, an endocrinologist and neurologist who directs the Office for Academic Careers and Faculty Development at the BIDMC. “So I figure I should take my expertise and offer it to you.” To read more, please see below.
Career Adv.: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7411/full/nj7411-419a.html

NIH Director starts blogging

NIH Director starts blogging
For those that do not know, Dr. Francis Collins, the current NIH Director, has started a blog. To read his comments and posts, please see below.
NIH Director’s blog: http://directorsblog.nih.gov/

Bias Persists for Women of Science, Yale Study Finds

Bias Persists for Women in Science, Yale Study Finds   

Information was given to professors describing a recent graduate looking for a laboratory manager position. When the name of the applicant was changed from Jennifer to John, professors regarded the applicant as more competent.

Click the above link to read the article about the study. What do you think?  Do these practices exist at University of Chicago?  What can be done to overcome this?

Tooling Up: Questions to Set Your Sails By

Tooling Up: Questions to Set Your Sails By  by: David G. Jensen, November 16, 2012, Science Careers.    

If you love working at the bench and are confident that doing bench science will make you happy for the foreseeable future, then you can find opportunities on either side of the academia/industry divide.

The Obligation for Biologists to Commit to Political Advocacy

The Obligation for Biologists to Commit to Political Advocacy by: Thomas D. Pollard,  Cell Volume 151, Issue 2, 12 October 2012, Pages 239–243.   

The failure of Congress to adopt a deficit reduction program in 2011 resulted in a fall-back option called sequestration, which may reduce federal funding across the board by 8% on January 1, 2013. If this comes to pass, we face widespread unemployment in the biological research community and the loss of many valuable research programs.

Immigration: Waiting for green

Immigration: Waiting for green by: Karen Kaplan, Nature 491, 483-485 (2012), doi:10.1038/nj7424-483a.  Published online 14 November 2012.  

 A US 'green-card' visa can open up career possibilities. But getting one requires stamina — and a dash of luck.

myIDP: Interests

myIDP: Interests

By Bill Lindstaedt, Cynthia N. Fuhrmann, Jennifer A. Hobin, Phillip S. Clifford
November 02, 2012

A careful and detailed analysis of "interests" is at the core of the assessment phase at myIDP.

Click here for the third article in a series designed to help you create an Individual Development Plan (IDP) using myIDP, a new Web-based career-planning tool created to help graduate students and postdocs in the sciences define and pursue their career goals. To learn more about myIDP and begin the career exploration and planning process, please visit: http://myidp.sciencecareers.org.

Have you tried the new myIDP yet?  Have you found it useful?