Contributor Joanne Kamens
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Networking has gotten a really bad name. I take your card, you take my card and then we don’t call each other. Scientists often don’t make time for it because it seems “fake” or as though it isn’t worthwhile. In reality, strong and abundant professional relationships are necessary for most people to have opportunities to develop their careers, including scientists. Continue reading
This post was originally published at MassBioHQ on March 25th 2014
As a leader in your company or team, it is important to be able to communicate effectively with your staff.
In small start-ups and in the fast-paced biotech world, there are many opportunities for young graduates to help build a business and kick-start their careers. Many of these new recruits will be fresh-faced, eager-to-learn students straight from university: Generation Y, born in the 1980’s and 1990’s. This group has grown up in a digital world to which they’re constantly connected. For the same reason, they’re always curious about what others are doing, and this flows right into the way they work.
They have a different way of getting things done, so it’s worth finding out what makes them tick.
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Contributor, Ben Thomas
The path to a fulfilling science career is steep and lined with obstacles, so landing a comfortable position can feel like a welcome relief. But what happens when you’re ready for a new challenge, a change of pace, or just to find out what you’re really capable of? In this three-part series of articles, workers in the sciences will explain how and why they got stuck in career ruts, and how they broke out into more fulfilling, thrilling careers.
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Many scientists cringe when they hear the word “selling.” In our academic culture, we are taught that our technical work should speak for itself. “Selling” implies persuasion and potentially intentional distortion with (heaven forbid!) a monetary (and not an intellectual) goal. As “proper” scientists, we feel that “selling” is not only debasing but also a bit dirty.
Continue reading
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It’s not easy being a student, managing financial support from multiple sources “from teaching-assistant and research-assistant posts, external awards, internal scholarships, one-time entrance scholarships, tuition waivers and reimbursements…” Continue reading
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“The rise in retractions could be because scientists are making more errors, but it could also indicate a growing culture of coming clean on errors.” Continue reading
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As Euan Adie and Alex Hodgson discussed in this month’s Naturejobs podcast on scientific publishing and a digital future, the amount of data being created in science is phenomenal. It is being created faster than the technology to store it. But as the volumes are increasing, are scientists getting any better at managing it? As it turns out, there are still a few kinks in the system.
An article on Research Information called Better management reduces data loss risk, highlights some of the problems that scientists might have.
“After moving all of his data home to write up, biologist Billy Hinchen returned one afternoon to find that his laptop and all his backup hard drives had been stolen.” Continue reading
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To match this month’s Windback Wednesday series on publishing, Julie Gould speaks to Euan Adie, director at Altmetric, and Alex Hodgson, head of marketing at ReadCube in this podcast about scientific publishing and a digital future.
Technology is changing fast, and it is having an effect on the way you can access, discover and share scientific publications. Euan, Alex and I discuss how we predict these three things will be changing.
Alex Hodgson makes a good point that we can look at the changes in how scientific papers are discovered and read. It used to be all about the printed word – it was easy, flexible and simple to manage. Now things are read online via databases. “If you stop to think about that, I mean, that’s a really big shift from more of a journal focus to more of a specific article focus.” And in order to read these papers, tools have become available that let scientists to “sift through the noise so that you’re not missing an important paper.”
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“Our designers cooked up a collection of smart fashions for spring, so why not display them on the bodies of women with really big brains?” Said the Betabrand CEO Chris Lindland in an interview to Adweek, “sixty women from around the world applied.” Just seven were chosen as the βetabrand to be the “New Women’s Spring Collection: modeled by a ravishing roster of PhDs & doctoral candidates.” Continue reading
