The meandering path to a career in science offers challenges that can be difficult to confront alone. Finding an effective mentor who offers advice and inspiration can help you navigate the maze successfully, say Andrew Gaudet and Laura Fonken.
Laura Fonken
Andrew Gaudet
https://youtu.be/1ZnyQ5aKR0o
Choosing your career path is a difficult one. Doing it on your own is even more so. Having someone to talk to and share your concerns/challenges/ideas with can be extremely beneficial. The official term for someone like that is a Mentor. At the Naturejobs Career Expo in London this September, a panel of four academics got together to discuss their wildly different careers: Jim Usherwood from the Royal Veterinary College only spends his time doing research. Anita Hall from Imperial College London only does teaching. Lorraine Kerr and Louise Horsfall from the University of Edinburgh split their time (with different percentages) between research, teaching, business and management.
One of the questions our audience posed to them was: “How important is it to have a mentor in your academic career?” Here are their responses.
Usherwood suggests speaking to the postdocs – they’re the ones that do the research and will give you a “reality check”. By approaching many postdocs you can get lots of different opinions.
Hall has found that having a mentor to whom you can relate is very valuable. Don’t reach for the Nobel Laureate, go for someone who’s done one more postdoc position than you, or who has started their postdoc after their PhD.
Horsfall disagrees with Usherwood: “if you’re aiming for an academic position, you don’t want to go to a postdoc because they haven’t got the academic position either.” She suggests working with the university mentor schemes that are provided by universities. “It’s just an encouragement from somebody who is outside your immediate situation. They can give a different perspective.”
Mentors are a big discussion topic in the science career space. We’ve talked about the issue before:
Mentoring: More than just a pair of hands
Read more about How to navigate an academic career and about all the other conference sessions and workshops at the Naturejobs Career Expo in London.
Una Ryan
Naturejobs is celebrating Women in Science. Every day this week we’re interviewing an inspirational female scientist. Yesterday, we spoke to Roma Agrawal, structural engineer at WSP.
Today we’re in conversation with Una Ryan, the Chair of the Bay Area Bioeconomy Initiative and an angel investor in the San Francisco Bay Area. I met Una at a SynBioBeta event at Imperial College London in April this year, where she chaired an all-male panel on the venture capital climate in the Bay Area, and how it differs to that in the UK. Una was disappointed that the panel was comprised entirely of men, but noted that unfortunately there aren’t many female biotech venture capital investors to choose from.
This is something that Una is hoping to change. She invests a huge amount of time in young scientists—both male and female—to support them through their careers. I spoke to Una after her panel event to find out about how she became interested in science, and how she is hoping to inspire others.
By J.T. Neal, contributor
With a bit of structure and extra effort, both mentor and mentee can gain more from the experience.
{credit}iStockphoto/Thinkstock{/credit}
Our lab, like many labs, has been buzzing with high school and undergraduate summer students over the last several weeks. Many of these students have never set foot in a lab before, and this lack of training, coupled with a mentor’s already busy schedule, can lead to occupying junior mentees only with menial tasks, or worse, make-work (think organizing the lab chemicals alphabetically.) With summer winding down, I’ve taken some time to think about what I’ve learned from mentoring these students, to reflect on my own experiences as an undergraduate mentee, and to come up with a few tips to help new mentors and mentees make the most of the experience. Continue reading
Thursday 26th July saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com, the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German, Spanish and Dutch. To celebrate this addition to the NPG science blogging family, some of the NPG blogs are publishing posts focusing on “Beginnings”.
Participating in this cross-network blogging festival is nature.com’s Soapbox Science blog, Scitable’s Student Voices blog and bloggers from SciLogs.com, SciLogs.de, Scitable and Scientific American’s Blog Network. Join us as we explore the diverse interpretations of beginnings – from scientific examples such as stem cells to first time experiences such as publishing your first paper. You can also follow and contribute to the conversations on social media by using the #BeginScights hashtag.
Click for video of Jerry De Zutter and others
A scientist’s first job can be a thrill, a terror, a challenge, a source of inspiration or the inspiration to do something different. So say some of the researchers whose career paths led them through Kendall Square this week. Conversations inside and outside neighborhood labs and offices explored the question – What lessons did you learn when first starting out?
Some researcher had mentors — or at least people who gave them memorable advice. Jerry De Zutter met his first boss — Gary Barsomian of Genzyme – while playing Ultimate Frisbee. De Zutter interned at Genzyme as an undergrad, worked at the Cambridge-based pharma for a year, and got some advice from Barsomian before heading to graduate school :“The one thing you want to make sure you do when your rise to the level of a PHD science, is to become an expert in something. “
De Zutter focused on the signal transduction processes that underlie neurodegeneration. After several jobs in the pharmaceutical industry, he now runs a team of researchers working on discovery and the pre-clinical pipeline at ALS Therapy Development Institute. The company is one of a growing number of non-profit pharmaceutical development projects.
On a break at a Kendall coffee shop, Deepti Sharma also said she had a supportive boss. Working with LC-MS ( liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry] at Advion, a company in Ithaca, New York, she said her supervisor encouraged her to take on more responsibility: “That gave me a good opportunity to explore the product development platform with full enthusiasm and energy,” she said. Sharma also got the best of both worlds – academic and industry. While at the company, she was able to work with Cornell professor Jack Henion, whom she described as “the father of LC-MS…It was as if I was working as a student but in an innovative, fast-paced environment,” she said.
Not everyone queried in the square remembered an inspiring boss. Chris, a pharma chemist who asked that his last name not be used, said he had a supervisor with “a very serious temper problem” at his first job, which was in an academic lab. But, that isn’t what drove him out of the university setting and into the world of corporate science. Without a PhD, he didn’t see any future in academia.
Kathryn Erat
When Kathryn Erat started her career in the 1950’s, she quickly stepped into the future. A degree in math and physics landed her a job with a combustion engineering company working on power systems for nuclear submarines. After struggling for days to solve complex math problems, she suggested to her boss that they might be able to work more efficiently with a new form of technology – the computer. Back then, that meant a mainframe and a trip to New Jersey.
Two chemical engineers lunching outside a local biotech – Tanya and Hong – both faced the same problem when finding their first jobs in the US. The two women – who asked that their last names not be used – had to convince employers that the skills they learned in Communist countries would apply to work in this country. When Tanya, who was trained in the former Soviet Union, got her first job, she was grateful for the chance to prove herself: “For those who are not born in the States and do not have an American education, to find a first job is extremely challenging because you don’t have the right experience in this country. Your experience anywhere else seems to be absolutely irrelevant.”
Hong, who arrived from mainland China 20 years ago, said she had the same problem, but ended up landing a job with a helpful boss. Her first realization was that the U.S. drug development industry worked under a different set of rules.
“Twenty years ago in China, (regulations) were a lot looser,” she said. Here, for example “the regulations about patient safety are very strict.”
Computational biologist Kevin Galinksy spent two years at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Maryland before coming to the Broad Institute. As a young scientist, he’s only worked in a wired world. So, the advice to publish or perish had a different meaning for him – he can post some of the code he’s developed on the web.
John Lincecum
Back at the ALS Therapy Development Institute, Director of Discovery John Lincecum, said he was interested in science and took premed course as an undergrad. But he decided to focus on the liberal arts and leave most of the science for grad school.
He fled the oil bust in his native Texas to look for work in then booming Massachusetts. Lincecum emphasized the science on his resume and was hired as a technician for a company now known as Charm Sciences, which was developing radioimmunoassays to test for penicillin levels in milk.
“I was absolutely terrified because my worry was that they would figure out I really wasn’t a scientist,” he said. “I was English major.”
His fears came true when he spent an entire week pressing the wrong button on a scintillation counter. Instead of carefully measuring ionizing radiation, he was pushing the button for the timer. He expected to get fired. “But they were very patient,” he said. What he found was that the approach he had been counting on paid off: “I felt all I had to do was — ask a lot of questions, be very, very enthusiastic and be willing to admit every mistake I made.”