On March 20, 2015, the 2nd NatureJobs Career Expo in Boston brought together a series of career-oriented workshops and exhibitors representing various potential employers for early career researchers to meet and discuss their next steps. The Expo aims to raise career awareness by providing talks, panels, workshops, and exhibitions. It also provides the opportunity to talk to employers, have resumés viewed and critiqued, and generally help early career researchers to prepare themselves for and build confidence in their career development.
The Expo began with Robert Langer‘s Keynote Address. Langer is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading biomedical engineers and has written over a thousand papers. He is also involved in the founding of dozens of biotech companies. With a wealth of experience in both academia and the biotechnology industry, he gave a very interesting talk highlighting some of the challenges in his academic and entrepeneurial careers, including the six years he spent trying to file his first patent. You can read an account of the talk in more detail from Diana Cai here at Naturejobs.
I couldn’t stay for the questions, as I had to head with my colleagues and co-presenters from the Future of Research (Patricia Goodwin, Erica Walsh, and Kearney Gunsalus) to a workshop that we were very kindly given the time and space to perform, entitled “How Can We Improve Career Awareness and Preparedness?” I wrote a description of the workshop in more detail here at the NatureJobs Career Community, but in brief we wanted to discuss some of the barriers that early career researchers face in trying to find out about career development and the potential solutions to overcome these barriers. In getting concrete actionable items, we also wanted to identify who should take action to improve career awareness among undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs.
We expected to easily manage four groups, with each of us moderating a few people, but, as you can tell from the picture above, it was standing room only. We each had about 30 people to moderate, which actually worked better than we could have hoped, as participants rapidly became engaged and were more than willing to contribute, while we directed them to write down all their thoughts. The results of the discussion are being written up and will be distributed in due course, openly through both Future of Research and NatureJobs.
With the workshop finished, I was able to attend several panel discussions, on science communication, bioscience industry in the Boston area, and academic careers (panelists pictured below). In the industry panel, Joanne Kamens, CEO of Addgene, pointed out the growing dissatisfaction in industry with the irreproducibility of academic research, and how difficult and dangerous it is to invest venture capital in results that can’t be reproduced. This is an interesting point of reflection for researchers aiming for industry, where the focus is on reliable results, compared with the focus of academia on high-profile publications. The panel on academia was very poorly attended, and a particular low point was one professor discussing how she had been able to hire a former PI fleeing political persecution from another country and pay him as a postdoc. It would be interesting to know whether this poor attendance is indicative of shifting attitudes among early career researchers away from academia.
Future Expos are in the works in the UK, Germany, San Francisco, and Boston. You can follow more info both at the NatureJobs blog, and also join in discussions at the Careers Community. If you happen to be near one of the upcoming Expos, definitely try to check it out as it’s a way of quickly hearing advice to help you figure out what you are doing right and what you could be doing more of to prepare for your career. I always like to throw Jessica Polka’s wonderful/terrifying infographic in here, to remind us all of how few jobs there are in academia, and that we should be aware of the need to be prepared and informed in pursuing our career goals.
About the Author:
Gary McDowell is Executive Director of The Future of Research, Inc. (http://futureofresearch.org/), a nonprofit organization seeking to champion, engage and empower early career researchers with evidence-based resources to help them make improvements to the research enterprise. He is a COMPASS alumnus.
