We’re no longer publishing career stories from our global community of scientists on this platform. Instead they’ll be posted in a shiny new home at nature.com/careers alongside the latest print news and features from Nature’s careers section. We believe this will better serve our authors and audience. Read more
This is a sponsored post from Nature Research Editing Service, part of Springer Nature … Read more
I submitted my PhD thesis on the evolution of jumping genes in December 2016, four days before Christmas. It wasn’t perfect — in many ways, it wasn’t even good. By the end of my graduate studies, I had hoped to be a proficient programmer and an established scientist with multiple high impact papers. At the bare minimum, I expected to find evidence to support my hypothesis. Instead, my thesis was largely unpublished, my coding was preliminary, and my results were inconclusive. In my eyes, it was a failure. Read more
“Exciting new line of attack for aggressive breast cancer” … Read more
In many undergrad STEM courses, high-stakes exams — such as mid-terms and finals — determine as much as 60-70% of the student’s overall grade. However, this emphasis on tests may be inadvertently putting some students at a disadvantage. Read more
I’ve already written about how PhDs can prepare for and decide whether or not they should pursue a postdoc. Here, I will discuss what more universities and funding agencies should be doing as stakeholders in training and employing researchers. Read more
You are coming towards the end of your PhD – so what next? There are many options open to you; one obvious one is to apply for a postdoc position. You should think carefully about what you want to do and not just pursue this through inertia. I have supervised many engineering PhDs and some postdocs in my 32 years as an academic. As Head of University College London’s Doctoral School, I oversee the environment and policy for 6000 doctoral candidates and 3200 postdocs. Read more
Many scientists hope to translate their discoveries into something useful and financially profitable. A biologist, for example, might hope to create a new line of health care products. Many use special grants or family resources to establish small companies. However, given the enormous challenges in the healthcare market, virtually every nascent enterprise needs outside funding; whether from wealthy “angel investors,” venture capital, or investment from large pharmaceutical and device developers. Read more
I recently had a phone call with a frustrated colleague looking for some advice. She had two key pressure points, both common in the field of science communication. Read more
There’s a difference between mentoring and doling out to-do lists. This is something I’ve learned over the past year, my first as a mentor. Mentoring undergrads became part of my job only recently – in the past, research came first. Most advisors value research outcomes over mentoring, and departments certainly place more value on publications. Before this past year, I was used to just a single undergrad working in my lab, and I thought of them as worker bees, not as future colleagues. Read more
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