Jon Tennant spent time networking with fellow paleontologists on Twitter. Unbeknownst to him, this method of communication would ultimately lead to a new research collaboration and a published paper. Here he explains his story at the 2015 London Naturejobs Career Expo.
Further reading:
A new year brings with it new hopes and possibilities and if that includes taking on a new job, we want to know about it.
Mobility within scientific research is valuable. The experience of working in different institutions, companies and even countries can be beneficial in many ways. The skills that you learn in each job, whether technical or otherwise, help you develop as a scientist and a person.
At Naturejobs we celebrate these changes and transitions. We’ve spoken to Nessa Carey, currently the International Director at PraxisUnico, about her move from academia into industry, David Carr about his leap from academia into policy, to Martine Bernstein about her transition from academia to a start-up after finishing her degree, amongst others. Many of you have been in touch asking if we could feature more job transition stories.
We want to fulfil your requests, but we need your help. We want to share your transition stories: let us know if you’ve got a new job! Tweet your new job with the hashtag #ScientistOnTheMove, and once a month we will select a few people to profile on the Naturejobs blog, sharing their personal transitional stories and hopes for the new role.
We want you to get involved! Let us know if you’ve changed labs, moved institutions, become a professor, transitioned to another discipline or made any move that qualifies as a new job.
We asked. You responded. They came in all shapes, sizes and colours. Some were seriously retro, others not so. But all were inspired choices. The #MysciLab was a brief glimpse into laboratories far and wide, as @NatureNews asked its followers “is your old lab equipment worthy of a museum? Or an art installation?” Continue reading
Matt Shipman is a public information officer at North Carolina State University, where he writes about everything from forensic entomology to computer malware. He previously worked as a reporter and editor in the Washington, D.C. area for Inside EPA, Water Policy Report and Risk Policy Report, where he covered the nexus of science, politics and policy. He blogs about NC State research at The Abstract, and you can follow him on Twitter where he is @ShipLives.
On March 13, the Royal Institution held a debate about the coverage of science in the media, asking whether scientists and journalists need different things from science. You can read the nature.com Communities team write-up and Storify of the tweets about the event here. While the event took place in London, it was followed online by a large (and vocal) group of scientists, science writers and others interested in how science is communicated. One of the questions that came up was whether reporters should read the scientific papers related to the story that they are covering.
The vast majority of responses can be summed up thus: “Yes.”
I agree that it would be great if reporters read all the papers they wrote about. However, I also think it is both wildly optimistic and very unrealistic to expect most journalists to do so. After all, the odds are excellent that the journalist would not be able to understand what they’re reading anyway.
To be clear: I’m not writing this to defend the practice of not reading papers. I am also not advocating that reporters should avoid reading papers. Rather, I’m hoping to explain why many reporters will either not read a paper, or will read a paper but not understand it (or worse, misunderstand it).
There are some reporters who are able to make a living writing about a specific field of study, whether it’s astrophysics or paleontology. But for most reporters, making a living means writing about whatever subject your editor assigns to you. Or, for freelancers, whatever story you can sell. That could mean writing about astrophysics and paleontology. And materials science. And entomology. And that’s just this week.
Researchers spend years learning the ins and outs of their fields, mastering a jargon that is beyond the ken of those outside their specific fields of study. Most reporters do not have that luxury.
This is where most scientists – and many science writers – chime in: “Stop!” you say. “We didn’t say it was easy. But how can you write about a paper you haven’t even read? That makes no sense. You’d just be making stuff up! You MUST rely on the primary literature.”
To which I say: Yes, it would be better if all journalists could read and understand every paper they write about. But, since they can’t, should we give up hope?
I don’t think so.
Full disclosure (and this will not shock you): I am not a scientist, I was not a science major, and while I try to read journal articles, I often don’t understand what I’m reading. It may be clear prose to you, but it’s a shibboleth to me (and if you don’t know what a shibboleth is, you’ll know how I feel when I read phrases like “rectification using multiheterojunction”).
Still, somehow, I’ve made a living writing about science (directly or indirectly) for 14 years. And I’ve never had to run a correction related to the scientific content I’ve written about. How is that possible, if I don’t understand the papers? Easy. I ask questions. A lot of questions. “What questions were you trying to answer with this research? Why? What was your methodology? What were the key findings? What new questions did this research this raise?” And every time I don’t understand the answer, I ask them to explain it.
In a sense, the researchers act as translators, walking me through the paper step by step. This sort of dialogue is essential for any non-expert (like me) who wants to write about a paper. It allows me to understand the content and context of the research in the paper, even though I don’t understand the lexicon used in the paper itself.
All that said, I do think reporters should try to read the papers they’re writing about. Once in a while, they’re actually written in prose that is accessible to the lay reader (or at least the abstract is). This is true for institutional science writers/public information officers (PIOs) too.
For example, a friend of mine is a PIO at a well-regarded university who writes research-oriented news releases (and, no, this is not a thinly-veiled reference to myself). A while back he was reading a paper and noticed that at least one of the statements in the “discussion” section of a paper was at odds with the data itself. When he mentioned it to the researchers, he found that he was right – and the mistake had somehow been missed by the authors, reviewers and journal editors.
When he was telling me this, he said, “This is another reason why [PIOs] should always read – and make sure they understand – studies” that they write about. I’ll meet him halfway. I think science writers – reporters and PIOs – should always understand the studies they write about. I just don’t think reading the paper always helps that much.
If you’ve enjoyed this post from Matt, you may like to read his 3-part mini-series on Soapbox Science about The Promise and Pitfalls of Public Outreach.
To complement Social Media Week, the nature.com blogs team are publishing a series of posts about science and social media. Two of the posts focus on recent social media memes about science careers – the #IamScience hashtag on Twitter, and the ‘This is what a scientist looks like’ meme on Tumblr.
The #IamScience hashtag is being used by scientists to share the variety of ways they began their science careers. A guest post by Ben Lillie, co-founder of The Story Collider, explains how the meme emerged:
About three weeks ago, a science writer named Kevin Zelnio tweeted this:
And with that, he completely transformed what I thought was possible, and indeed what the point was, of social media.
The tweet came from a discussion of how people had started their science careers, and Kevin’s frustration that the path to a scientist was always depicted in one way: go to college, go directly to grad school. Hope it was a top-tier school, then, “Bam! You’re a scientist.”
But that wasn’t the path Kevin took, and it wasn’t the path most of the people he knew with careers in science took. So he tweeted, and encouraged others to tweet. It struck a chord, and within hours there were hundreds of people tweeting their stories with the hashtag #IAmScience.
Ben goes on to explain why the stories being shared via #IamScience are important:
These are tales of wrong turns, failed classes, delayed dreams, failed schools, rejection, disabilities, mistaken careers, and as you saw in Kevin’s tweet, much, much more. As science communicators we talk a lot about humanizing science. It doesn’t get much more human than this — but I’ve rarely seen a major science publication touch most of these subjects. And that, of course, is the power of Twitter. Things that would never be published anywhere find a way of bubbling to the surface.
While #IamScience is helping share diverse stories of how scientists began their science careers, the ‘This is what a scientist looks like’ website is showing the world that it’s not all lab coats and safety glasses once you get there. In another post, the nature.com communities team explain the concept:
Developed by science writer and multimedia specialist Allie Wilkinson, the concept is simple, a Tumblr blog which collates pictures of scientists from all walks of life. Allie explains, “there is no cookie-cutter mould of what a scientist looks like. A scientist can look like you, or can look like me.”
Allie wanted to show that anyone can be a scientist:
“In the movie Ratatouille, the motto repeated throughout is, ‘anyone can cook’. Although initially frustrated by this motto, the critic in the movie eventually realizes that not everyone can cook, but a great cook can come from anywhere,” explains Allie. “I want people to realize the same for scientists. Not everyone can be a scientist, just like not everyone can cook, but a great scientist can be anyone.” Allie hopes that this project will help change stereotypes and inspire kids to realize that they have the potential to be a scientist.
As the nature.com communities team conclude, only time will tell if social media initiatives such as #IamScience and ‘This is what a scientist looks like’ will really change the way people think about what a career in science involves. In the meantime, it’s certainly a powerful way to reach a wider audience and engage with the next generation of potential scientists.
Communities Happenings is a weekly post with news of interest to NPG’s online communities. The aim is to provide this info in one handy summary. Listings include tweetups and conferences that we’re attending and/or organising as well as new online tools, products or cool videos. We also occasionally flag up NPG special offers and competitions plus updates about NPG social media activities such as new accounts you might want to follow. Do let us know what you find most useful!
Social Media week and a super SoNYC!
February’s SoNYC is a super social media week special event at the American Museum of Natural History! Please join us on Thursday February 16th, in person or online, via the social media week livestream to discuss Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media. This month’s panel:
– American Museum of Natural History educators who are developing a “tool kit” of mobile apps, websites and more to help middle school students collect, share and present data on urban biodiversity
– Ben Lillie, the co-organizer of The Story Collider, which tells science stories by combining verbal narratives with podcasts, Twitter and an online magazine
– Matt Danzico, a BBC journalist who conducted a 365-day blog experiment called “The Time Hack” looking at how we perceive time
– Carl Zimmer, a science journalist whose latest book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed, is based on feedback he received on his Discover Magazine blog when he asked the question: are scientists hiding tattoos of their science?
– Moderator: Jennifer Kingson, day assignment editor, Science Department, The New York Times
The event is free to attend with an opportunity to meet the panellists and other attendees afterwards. If you’d like to follow the vocal online discussion (we average around 600 tweets per SoNYC event), keep an eye on the #sonyc hashtag or check back here for our write-up and Storify of the online conversations. Do also keep an eye on the official Twitter account for more details.
To complement the event, we’re running a series of guest posts, recounting experiences where social media has been a key part of an education project. You can find our introductory post here, including a presentation by Christie Wilcox on Science and the Public: Why Every Lab Should Tweet. To start the discussions, Dr Alan Cann from Leicester University gave us an academic’s viewpoint on how social media can be used as part of the curriculum. His post considers how the effects of social media usage can be measured and what the future holds for such technology:
Activity streams and the crowd wisdom of a peer network are at the centre of my approach to online learning. All this might seem like dry, academic posturing – but don’t say that to Facebook and Google, who have spent the last three years betting the farm on activity stream architecture. Starting with the highly influential but now moribund Friendfeed, we were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in terms of monitoring student engagement [3]. Students engaged in peer to peer discussions around shared resources and personal reflection on their own learning. The patterns of online activity were mapped using graphical tools and were used to inform staff how to guide individual students. Our statistical analysis showed that student contributions to the network could be used to discern student engagement with education in a way which give a far richer picture of online activity than traditional summary statistics such as course or exam marks.
The Story Collider
Co-founded by Ben Lille, one of this month’s SoNYC panellists, the Story Collider gives select scientists and science communicators an opportunity to share their experiences on a particular topic. Held monthly at Union Hall in Park Slope in Brooklyn, this month’s event is all about “Brains.” You can attend The Story Collider in person on February 15th or watch out for the podcasts of the stories which are shared via their Facebook page.
At the other side of the Atlantic in London, there are lots of social media events taking place this week and you can check out the science related events in our London Blog, or in our London scientific events calendar. We also have Google Calendars for some of the other major science cities: Paris, Cambridge UK, NYC, Boston, DC and San Francisco. Below you can find links to all of the Google Calendars we have put together:
Please do let us know if you can see any important omissions.
# SciBarCamb
Now onto an annual event held in Cambridge UK: SciBarCamb. SciBarCamb is a gathering of scientists, publishers, technologists, and others with an interest in science. The goal of the event is to create connections between people who have a lot in common, but don’t work in the same field and may not meet each other otherwise.
SciBarCamp meetings have been held since 2008 in the US, Canada, Austria, and in Cambridge. They have attracted researchers, science communicators, entrepreneurs, artists, media professionals, librarians and scientific publishers. To find out more you can find their website here, read this report of the very first SciBarCamp event in Toronto, check out some photos of last year’s SciBarCamb, or read what people said about the event on Twitter.
This year, the meeting will take place on the evening of April 20th and all day on April 21st at the Cambridge Union Society. There is a small registration fee to help cover the costs of room rental and food as the organisers, including nature.com’s Lou Woodley and Nature Network’s blogger Eva Amsen, don’t make a profit on SciBarCamb. Tickets go on sale today and if you’re quick, you can get an “Electron” ticket for £5, otherwise a regular “Atom” ticket for £10.
This week has seen the launch of another NPG account on Twitter: NatureMagazine
You can also find a full Twitter list of NPG journals and products here.
“Triple A-S” (AAAS)
Various representatives from Nature will be in Vancouver, B.C this week for the The American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, an annual gathering and one of the most widely recognised global science events. If you’d like to follow along, the hashtag for the event is #AAASmtg. If you’re attending the event and want to meet others who are active online, there’s a tweetup being organsied for the Saturday evening. Follow the #AAAStweetup hashtag and come along to meet Lou and others.
Frontiers in Materials: Spintronics
Nature Materials and the European Materials Research Society are organising a workshop with the aim of providing an overview of the most interesting developments in the field of spintronics, a technology that aims at controlling the electron spin beside the electron charge and that could provide efficient electronic devices with potentially new functionalities. The workshop will take place in Palais des Congrès, Strasbourg
The speakers:
Gerrit Bauer (University of Delft, The Netherlands / Tohoku University, Japan)
Manuel Bibes (CNRS Thales, France)
Albert Fert (CNRS Thales, France)
Laurence Molenkamp (Würzburg University, Germany)
Hideo Ohno (Tohoku University, Japan)
Theo Rasing (Radboud University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
Jairo Sinova (Texas A&M University, USA)
Jon Slaughter (Everspin, USA)
You can register for the workshop and find out more information here, or join the Facebook Event.
Communities Happenings is a weekly post with news of interest to NPG’s online communities. The aim is to provide this info in one handy summary. Listings include tweetups and conferences that we’re attending and/or organising as well as new online tools, products or cool videos. We also occasionally flag up NPG special offers and competitions plus updates about NPG social media activities such as new accounts you might want to follow. Do let us know what you find most useful!
A special SoNYC
February’s SoNYC is a super social media week special event at the American Museum of Natural History! Please join us on Thursday February 16th, in person or online, via the social media week livestream to discuss Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media.
As a communications tool, social media is an undeniably effective way to enhance your message. But within the science realm, top communicators – both academic and professional – strive to use social media for something greater: to engage the public in a conversation about science. Never before has it been so easy for researchers, public information officers, educators, students, and journalists to talk directly to the public about the benefits, limits, and implications of scientific knowledge. Social media not only makes these meaningful conversations possible, but it often also makes them fun and compelling. During this session, hear from scientists, communicators, and educators who use social media tools and the philosophy behind them to find creative, collaborative, and engaging learning opportunities.
This month’s panel:
– American Museum of Natural History educators who are developing a “tool kit” of mobile apps, websites and more to help middle school students collect, share and present data on urban biodiversity
– Ben Lillie, the co-organizer of The Story Collider, which tells science stories by combining verbal narratives with podcasts, Twitter and an online magazine
– Matt Danzico, a BBC journalist who conducted a 365-day blog experiment called “The Time Hack” looking at how we perceive time
– Carl Zimmer, a science journalist whose latest book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed, is based on feedback he received on his Discover Magazine blog when he asked the question: are scientists hiding tattoos of their science?
– Moderator: Jennifer Kingson, day assignment editor, Science Department, The New York Times
The event is free to attend with an opportunity to meet the panellists and other attendees afterwards. If you’d like to follow the vocal online discussion (we average around 600 tweets per SoNYC event), keep an eye on the #sonyc hashtag or check back here for our write-up and Storify of the online conversations. Do also keep an eye on the official Twitter account for more details.
This week has seen the launch of more NPG accounts on Twitter:
NaturePhotonics – Nature Photonics is a monthly journal which publishes top-quality, peer-reviewed research in all areas of light generation, manipulation and detection.
NatureOutlook – Nature Outlooks are supplements to Nature, filled with news, features and comment about issues of scientific interest.
APB_Neuro – Action Potential is a forum operated by neuroscience editors @noahWG & @ih_C_hi at Nature. They’ll discuss what’s new and exciting in neuroscience, publishing & policy.
You can also find a full Twitter list of NPG journals and products here.
A new Scilogs blog
We would like to wish a warm welcome to a new blog run by the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, which began on the Scilogs blogging network this week. NeuroCognition will provide insights into what scientists have on their minds. Posts may feature new studies, ideas, projects and initiatives, comments on current debates, conference reports, plus lots more. Their first post looks at brain waves:
Can you hear your own brain? Of course, you cannot. I nevertheless find myself returning to this fascinating play of thought. We often talk of “brain waves”. This is most likely inspired by the old images of electroencephalographs (“EEG”) that recorded electrical voltage changes straight from a participant’s scalp and scribbled them onto meter-long papers. Here is a picture from Berger’s famous first publications in the late 1920s:
We encourage you to check out the rest of the post.
Congratulations
We would like to congratulate this month’s Nature Network blogger who has qualified for a free 3 month subscription to Nature.
Well done to Anne-Marie Hodge – keep up the great blogging!
Our recognition system for Nature Network bloggers is open to any blogger who publishes a minimum of 1 post per week/4 blog posts per month in a given calendar month. For those bloggers who haven’t qualified, do not be disheartened as there is always next month. You can check out the guidelines here.
SLAS Conference and Exhibition
Nature will be in sunny San Diego, California this week for the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening meeting:
SLAS2012 unites the scientific savvy, technical innovation and energy of the former LabAutomation and SBS conferences to increase collaboration and prominence for the laboratory science and technology community. SLAS2012 brings together leaders in the scientific community working in drug discovery and development efforts, as well as clinical diagnostics, food and agricultural sciences, forensics and security sciences, petrochemicals and energy, and consumer products.
Come by to Booth #209 to say hello, and pick up free journals! (Also, ask about our conference discounts- 30% off Nature, and 20% of all other Nature Publishing Group journals.)
NPG offers further open access options
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is pleased to announce an expansion in open access among its society-owned titles. A new open access journal, Molecular Therapy – Nucleic Acids, has now launched at www.nature.com/mtna. In addition, Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics and Spinal Cord now offer open access options. Authors publishing original research in CPT and Spinal Cord can opt to pay an APC to make their paper open access immediately on publication. Martin Delahunty, Associate Director, Academic Journals & Pharma Solutions, NPG, explains:
“Open access has been central to NPG’s growth over the last two years so we are pleased to be expanding open access options among our society titles. We are also delighted to welcome Molecular Therapy – Nucleic Acids to our growing catalog of society titles.”
You can find out more in the official press release here.
We would like to wish a warm welcome to a new blog which began on the Scitable blogging network this week. The Promethean Cell will track ongoing issues and research in the regenerative medicine fields and will occasionally be interspersed with anecdotes from a fledgling postdoc’s career. Ada Ao, a postdoctoral research fellow at Vanderbilt University, explains more about her new blog:
Now that I’ve declaimed from my soapbox, what exactly will I blog about? The possibilities are endless. Recent discoveries in the stem cell field are incredibly exciting. This blog will encompass issues like basic biology, opinions and views, and where we may go next in terms of applicable therapeutics. I’m really aiming to put together the “big picture”.
We urge you to check it out and do feel free to send Ada a tweet; she’s @adaaocom on Twitter, with any feedback or suggestions.
On Nature Network we would also like to welcome post-doc student Ivana Gadjanski whose new blog, My Metacognitive Oasis began this week. Her very first post discusses how she Zigs and Zags through her scientific career:
I still remember the feeling I had immediately after obtaining my PhD degree. It was a mixture of relief, accomplishment and somehow emptiness. And one question kept popping in to my mind. What now?
You can follow her story in her blog and please feel free to join in the discussion.
Neuroscience 2011 has been this year’s major event for neuroscientists from around the globe. Organised by the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), the event took place from November 12th – 16th, in Washington, DC. To tie in with this, some of the attendees have been sharing their observations from the event in an exclusive series of guest posts on NPG’s Neuroscience blog, Action Potential.
We’ve created two round-ups of the blogging coverage; part 1 here and part 2 In addition, Action Potential’s editor, Noah Gray, has created a Google + circle listing the guest bloggers and you can also follow the hashtag #NPGsfn11 on Twitter to share in the discussion. Do let is know if you have any feedback.
The details of December’s Science Online NYC (#SoNYC) event were announced this week. Please join us on Thursday December 8th, in person at Rockefeller University from 7pm EST, or online via our Livestream channel to discuss, Matching medium and messengers to meet the masses.
Reaching an audience that’s already interested in science is a relatively easy thing to do. Reaching a broader audience, however, can be a serious challenge. Attracting and maintaining an audience outside the core of science enthusiasts requires a carefully crafted match of the medium and messenger. When and how should scientists and science communicators seek to highlight science issues to the general public? Should we be ready to respond and correct public misunderstandings or attempt to influence science policy? What material can be handled through social media, and what requires a more involved form of engagement, such as a science festival?
This month’s panel has experience communicating with everyone from young kids to policymakers, and will discuss what they’ve learned about using different spokespeople and platforms to get their message out. The panel includes:
Darlene Cavalier: The woman behind the Science Cheerleaders
Jamie Vernon: A science policy analyst
Molly Webster: The lead producer for live programming at the World Science Festival.
Kevin Zelnio: The webmaster for the Deep Sea News and a freelance writer.
The event is free to attend with an opportunity to meet the panellists and other attendees afterwards. If you’d like to follow the vocal online discussion (we average around 600 tweets per SoNYC event), keep an eye on the #sonyc hashtag or check back here for our write-up and Storify of the online conversations. Do also keep an eye on the official Twitter account for more details.
Science Tweetups provide an excellent opportunity to meet local scientists and science communicators for an evening of chatting in the pub. For those interested in the next #camscitweet, this will be held next week on Thursday 24th November in the Kingston Arms pub. Join in from 6:30pm and anyone is welcome!
For those on the other side of the Atlantic, keep an eye on the #DCscitweetup and #NYCscitweetup hashtags for information on future events.
This week has seen the launch of another NPG journal account on Twitter, Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology who are tweeting as @NatRevMCB
You can also find a full Twitter list of NPG journals and products here.
Last week Google+ launched pages and several NPG journals and products have already created their own. See our circle featuring all the NPG Google+ pages. This circle will be continuously updated as and when accounts are created.
Yesterday we alerted you to the latest scientific calendar in our series, Science Events in Paris. The calendar is moderated by MyScienceWork, an open access scientific research network.
There’s always an interesting science event taking place and to help with diary planning, we’ve created Google Calendars for some of the other major science cities: London and Cambridge in the UK and NYC, Boston and San Francisco in the US. Below you can find links to all of the Google Calendars we have put together:
Please do let us know if you can see any important omissions.
As part of our efforts to make naturejobs.com more useful to jobseekers and employers, we’ve expanded our range of Twitter feeds. Our main feed, naturejobs</a>, will now feature the <strong>latest science careers news and features</strong> from across <em>Nature</em>'s publications and further afield instead of new jobs. We'll also tweet occasionally about <strong>upcoming special features for employers</strong>. To get the latest jobs, follow one of our <strong>new automatic jobs feeds</strong> - either <a href="https://twitter.com/naturejobs_feed">naturejobs_feed for all of our science vacancies (you’ll get a lot of tweets from this feed) or one of the more targeted feeds from the list below.
We’ve chosen the feeds based on what jobs you search for on our site, plus Nature‘s main content areas – if you think we’ve missed something, either leave a comment below or tweet @naturejobs and we’ll look into it. We did the best we could with the feed names – I’ve included an explanation below if they’re not immediately clear. One or two of the feeds might not have any tweets yet, but we should get new vacancies in those areas soon.
We hope you find them useful – and good luck with your job search.
Content feed
@naturejobs – latest science careers news and features from across Nature and further afield
Automatic jobs feeds
@naturejobs_feed – all science jobs
Job type
<a href="https://twitter.com/phd_jobs">phd_jobs
<a href="https://twitter.com/techniciansjobs">techniciansjobs
lab_tech_jobs</a> - laboratory technician jobs
<a href="https://twitter.com/researcher_jobs">researcher_jobs
<a href="https://twitter.com/senior_sci_jobs">senior_sci_jobs – senior scientist jobs
<a href="https://twitter.com/editor_jobs">editor_jobs
Discipline
<a href="https://twitter.com/chem_jobs">chem_jobs – chemistry jobs
<a href="https://twitter.com/earth_env_jobs">earth_env_jobs – earth and environmental science jobs
<a href="https://twitter.com/neuro_jobs">neuro_jobs – neuroscience jobs
<a href="https://twitter.com/compu_sci_jobs">compu_sci_jobs – computer science jobs
clin_res_jobs</a> - clinical research jobs
<a href="https://twitter.com/bioinfo_jobs">bioinfo_jobs – bioinformatics jobs
@microbio_jobs – microbiology jobs
Many employers think that PhD students often lack ‘soft’ skills such as being able to communicate well, according to a new report from the UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills (see ‘Survey shows science graduates neglect career planning’ for other findings). One of the report’s authors, Robin Mellors-Bourne from the Careers Research & Advisory Centre, says a lot of employers are sceptical that PhD candidates will fit in. “They’re deemed almost to be too specialised,” he says. Christine McCary, the employment concerns chair of the US National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS) and a full-time PhD student at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, says the situation is similar in the United States. So what can you do to improve your soft-skill set?
Science careers consultant Sara Shinton, of UK-based Shinton Consulting, says PhD students should always be proactive about developing their soft skills because of the high number of people being awarded postgraduate qualifications. “It’s like it used to be with [an undergraduate] degree,” she says. “A PhD on its own isn’t enough. You are going to be competing against people with the same baseline.”
Stand out from the crowd
Shinton’s advice is to look for unusual activities that will make your communication skills stand out from the crowd, such as being a representative on a committee for a professional body. “That’s not something everybody can do,” she says. It’s also something that will get an employer’s attention – in a recent survey of graduate employers, researchers from Oklahoma State University found having a leadership position in an academic organisation comes second only to the personal interview in importance for showcasing your communication skills.
Shinton says you should join the society or association first, and then get involved at a local level to raise your profile. Just being a young scientist can also help. “The voice of the young researcher at the front line is one that most professional bodies are very keen to hear from,” she says.
McCary says another way to stand out is to take a leadership role in your local community, for example by starting a science club for younger students. If you succeed, she says, “that would be direct evidence of your ability to communicate with people”.
Show initiative
Another major plus is showing initiative by making something happen that wouldn’t have otherwise, such as arranging your own scientific roadshow or conference, or setting up an informal journal within your university.
Remember to cover the basics
That’s not to say you can forget about the more traditional ways of developing communication skills, such as getting involved in outreach – Shinton says companies now expect to see this as standard on a candidate’s CV or résumé. “It’s worth doing on every sort of imaginable level,” she says, “but it isn’t something that an employer would highlight.”
And the basics include getting to grips with social media websites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. “These days every single scientist should have [a LinkedIn profile], even while they’re a student,” says McCary.
Get outside the box
Both Mellors-Bourne and McCary advocate developing your skills outside of academia. “Spending some time with different people or in a different environment is very valuable,” says Mellors-Bourne. “Even academic employers are looking for well-rounded people to work for them,” adds McCary. Shinton, however, cautions against this approach if you intend to stay in research: “It very much depends what your career trajectory is. If you intend to be a scientist, showing that you are having an impact in lots of different ways as a scientist possibly has more value.”
All three agree that studying overseas can be a boon for your communication skills. “The whole experience of overseas study strengthens you as an individual,” says Shinton. “It challenges you and it helps you to grow.” Mellors-Bourne spent four months in the United States as part of his PhD, which he found to be a life-changing experience: “I restarted my research afterwards with a completely different view of the world.”
Have your say
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