Category Archives: Podcast

Naturejobs podcast: Flexibility and forward planning

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#IAmAScientistAndA-smaller

London Naturejobs Career Expo speakers, exhibitors and attendees share how flexibility in a scientific career is beneficial.

“Science is a multifaceted and large enterprise, and there are lots and lots of very interesting ways to contribute to science” said Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society, lab leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and joint winner of the 2009 Chemistry Nobel, at the 11th annual Naturejobs London Career Expo on Oct 4th 2017.

Ramakrishnan encourages scientists to think about the wide variety of options available to them; that having a PhD in science doesn’t mean you need to follow the tenure track career path. Continue reading →

Communication: talk to peers and the general public

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Effective communication will improve the value of scientific discoveries, says Eleni Wood

As scientists, our work is often driven by data collection and results. But a key step in the scientific process, and one that increases the value of our findings, is the effective communication of our investigative processes and results. Science communication is not only important within our fields for the advancement of our disciplines – communication to other audiences also influences the public perception and credibility of scientists and the work we do.

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Naturejobs podcast: Sacrifices for science

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Naturejobs-podcastA wide range of initiatives exist to help early career researchers achieve their goals, but there are practical challenges and difficult decisions to make along the way.

In this podcast we hear from Burcu Anil Kirmizitas, who describes the struggle to find affordable housing for her and her family in three of the world’s most expensive cities. We also hear from Ibukun Akinrinade, a neuroscience PhD student at the Gulbenkian Institute of Science in Oerias, Portugal. Ibukun needed to access training that was not available in her home country of Nigeria and had to leave her husband and young son behind. This month’s career expert is  James Gould, Director for the Office for Postdoctoral Fellows at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Dental Medicine. James answers a question about transferable skills from Simon Peyda, a research assistant at the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. Submit your question to the Naturejobs editor here.

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Naturejobs podcast: Planning your time and your goals

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nj7656-175a-i1Time planning and goal setting can make your work and career planning more efficient, as well as help you prioritise what it is you love to do.

 

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The Naturejobs podcast needs you!

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Ask a careers expert your job-related questions on the Naturejobs podcast.

 The Naturejobs podcast is making a long-awaited comeback in July 2017 and we’re setting up an expert panel of careers advisers to answer your job-related questions.

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Each month we plan to feature a hot topic for relevant members of our panel to answer. Do you have a workplace dilemma that you’d like to discuss? Are you struggling to decide what your next career step should be? Do you need help answering tricky interview questions, or tips on how to structure your CV? If you need help answering these questions and others, email your question to naturejobseditor@nature.com.

If we decide to feature your question we’ll be in touch to discuss ways of including it in the podcast, including an opportunity for you, the questioner to feature on the podcast!

In our opening episode of this new #NJPodcast series, Lauren Celano, co-founder and CEO of Propel Careers, will be our expert. Lauren has been working closely with Naturejobs for many years, regularly featuring on the blog and at our Boston Expo.

Her work with Propel Careers has allowed her to help many early career researchers find their feet when pursuing a career in the life sciences.

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Five tips to overcome authorship conflict

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Discuss authorship assignments to avoid fallout with collaborators, says Andy Tay

When I started my first year of graduate school, I was referred to a post-doc in my lab by some fellow students. Eager to start my research, I expressed interest in the project without thinking through the reasons behind my colleagues’ reluctance to join the post-doc.

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Mobilise your creativity

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How do you break into the publishing world?..

…That is, media and publishing, not publishing your manuscript. It isn’t the easiest path ever, but there is a breadth of opportunities and creativity, as celebrated this week by the UK Department of Culture, Media & Sport and the Creative Industry Council. And ‘break’ is not the key word – you don’t need a break. You just need to get creative – and get started.

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{credit}Getty Images/Mateusz Zagorski{/credit}

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Careers in science: Celebrate the failures

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The history and development of science is littered with failures, so early-career researchers should embrace, rather than be afraid of them.

Naturejobs-podcast“Success is advancing from failure to failure without loosing enthusiasm.” – Not said by either Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln.

“The things I remember best from college were the questions I got wrong on the exams.” – Kathryn Yatrakis, dean of academic affairs, Columbia College.

These are two of my favourite quotes from Stuart Firestein’s (professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, NY) new book, Failure: Why science is so successful.

Science’s history is littered with failures. Without them, science woudn’t have advanced to the point it’s at today. And yet a negative connotation goes hand-in-hand with it.

In this final Naturejobs podcast of 2015, I speak to Firestein about what failure in science means, what the negative connotations are, why they exist, why they impact young scientists and what they can do to overcome them.

Academia to industry and back again

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Eric Betzig, one of three chemistry Nobel laureates from 2014, shares what he learned from working in both academia and industry, and how he applies it to his career now.


Naturejobs-podcast
It’s often said that being a science graduate is a great thing: it opens so many doors and gives you the chance to take on any career. Although this might be true, it also makes deciding what career to focus on, and train for, very difficult.

This month, Nature Careers published a great piece based on the 2015 Nature Graduate Student Survey, where Nature tried to uncover what careers early career researchers were hoping to get, and how they were preparing themselves. In this podcast I was joined by Monya Baker, one of the Nature Careers editors, to give us some further insight into the survey.

The second part of the podcast is an interview I did with Eric Betzig, one of the three chemistry Nobel prize winners in 2014. In our chat we talk about his work in breaking the diffraction limit, what it’s like to see living cells move and his transitions from academia to industry and back again.