Leaving’s never easy. Especially when leaving a world as complex and intricate as academia, says Judith Reichel.
Tag Archives: academia
Podcast: Stars of the yeast
If you’re not loving what you do, try something new. That’s the message both from Ricardo Wilches and Eyal Schwartz. The two researchers swapped academia for careers that combine their love of science with their love of bread (in Eyal’s case) and wine (for Ricardo).
Schwartz was undertaking a neuroscience PhD in Israel when he moved his family to London and started work at an artisan bakery in east London.
And Wilches was a postdoc at the Max Planck Society in Tübingen, Germany when he decided to return to his native Colombia to co-found a vinticulture company that imports and promotes wine.
Moving south from Colombia to Chile, Naturejobs editor Jack Leeming talks to Aleszu Bajak about his recent article on the South American country. Chile is the jewel in the crown for astronomers around the world. Why are other scientists working in Chile envious of their success?
Other podcasts
Family life, career life: making it work
Know the odds
The odds of landing a tenure-track position in the life sciences are low while the chances of being stuck in multiple postdocs are high. So the leaders of nine top US universities and one research institution this month announced a plan to communicate those probabilities in an effort to grapple with a clogged biomedical research pipeline.
Tackling the #manel problem
Female scientists give fewer colloquium talks than do their male counterparts, finds a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A culture of kindness: overcoming bullying
Recognising bullying is the first step to overcoming it, says Eileen Parkes.
No-one could fail to be moved by the video shared this week of a schoolboy crying over bullying. As adults we hope that we’ve moved away from school bullies. But in academia it seems that bullying is a persistent problem, with up to 42% of academics reporting some form of workplace bullying. In adult life, bullies rarely steal our lunch money or gum our hair. But they do steal our self-confidence, make us feel inadequate and question our work. My own experience with bullying has taught me how to recognise it, and what to do to overcome it in the workplace.
The urgent need to recognize and value academic labor
Two Harvard professors share their thoughts on the latest from the US Republican Party’s tuition waiver tax plan.
Recently the House of Representatives essentially voted to destroy graduate education in the United States. By taxing tuition waivers as income — and therefore treating their taxable income as two to three times the amount graduate students are actually paid — the Republican tax bill would effectively put graduate study outside of the reach of all but the independently wealthy. While the Senate version of the tax bill does not include this provision, it is far from certain what the final bill after the reconciliation process will look like.
Changes to the U.S. tax code will harm graduate student mobility and career prospects
Increased financial burden for students will harm science in the long run, says Aliyah Weinstein.
A recent editorial in Nature described the harm that newly proposed changes to the United States tax code will have on graduate student finances. If passed, these regulations — ostensibly designed to simplify tax calculations — will eliminate benefits previously given to students. Of particular harm to graduate students and the scientific world would be the elimination of the tax-free status of tuition waivers.
Joining a new college: prepare your superpowers
Empower yourself with a creative mindset and start-up skills to adapt in a new college, says Nadia Al-Banna.
Congratulations on your faculty position at a newly established college! You think you know what the job entails: teaching, research, and some administrative service. As you read job advice, you wonder why so many pieces include the phrase “survival tips.” “Surviving” was your most-commonly-used word during your PhD and postdoc. Surely, there‘s no more surviving to be had in a brand new college?
The struggles of female and underrepresented scientists
Initiatives to increase diversity among faculty members—particularly in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM)—have prompted efforts to track university recruitment and retention of women and underrepresented minorities (URM). Three new US studies shed light on the issues, including salary and publication rates.
What Can You Be with a PhD?
What does it take to land your dream job beyond academia? Do PhDs even have marketable skills? the 2017 What Can You Be with a PhD career symposium has some answers, reports Elisa Lazzari.
{credit}Jeff Weiner/NYU Postdoctoral Affairs Office{/credit}