Tag Archives: blog

Make a (sketch)note of Science!

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Raise your hand if you doodle while taking notes.

Taking notes is a time consuming – and occasionally boring – process, but doodling and using symbols can make it easier, more fun – and could be better for your studies, says Marianna Ricci.

https://youtu.be/qp3kdN58SD0

Personally I’ve always liked to draw and I think of myself as a “visual person”: I’m sensitive to paintings and photos as well as nice color combinations or a cool pattern.

When I need to study something, the easiest way for me is to write it down and draw a diagram. Especially in my veterinary medicine studies, I used mathematical symbols and diagrams as well as colour codes and eye-catching drawings while taking notes and summarizing the lessons. Continue reading →

How to be a science journalist

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Dan Cressey, a reporter at Nature, speaks about getting a job as a science journalist at the Naturejobs Career Expo, London, 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iilmmDHxgPY

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Craft your connection

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Twitter is the medium du jour, and if you’re like many other early-career researchers, you’re all over it. Fantastic. But digital and social media is about much more, and there’s more to consider than the content that you and everyone else are tweeting and retweeting.

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Don’t forget that you need to nurture your online persona – the summation and entirety of every bit of online information about you or that involves you, both written and visual. Someone may well have already posted some of this. But you can still shape and guide a great deal of the accessible online information about you — and the image that this information creates — by actively managing the content over which you have some control.

This is especially true if you’re looking for a job. It’s safe to assume that potential employers will look you up online and so you need to have control over the information presented about you.

LinkedIn is still one of the most highly used sites for finding out about jobs through your virtual network – and occasionally getting one. You’ll need to make your profile look good — and you’ll need to find a way to stand out from the rest of the pack.

If you’re not seeking employment, though, social media is still a hugely powerful and useful tool. It can help you reach networks of like-minded scientists, build research collaborations and even make friends

Lots of your colleagues find particular sites to be key venues when they want to engage in collaborative discussion, peer-review papers, share negative results that might never otherwise be published, and even upload raw data sets

And through these sites, you can build a powerful virtual network that will yield opportunities, information and advice. Here’s to the click!

#scidata16: Publishing Better Science through Better Data: Writing competition

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This competition provides the chance to attend the Publishing Better Science through Better Data October 2016 event, work with a Nature editor and have your writing published here on Naturejobs.

After a very successful event last year, we are again looking for five budding science writers to help with news coverage of this year’s Publishing Better Science through Better Data event.

 

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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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Most read on Naturejobs: August 2015

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Drug hunters, social media, assessing PhDs and more!

naturejobs-readsWith the run up to the Naturejobs Career Expo in London on September 18th 2015, we’ve been busy sharing the articles from the journalism competition we ran earlier this year! On top of that, we’ve also launched a new writing competition for the #SciData15 event in October (today’s your last chance to send in your applications – so get on it!). Lot’s of opportunities for you to contribute to the blog, as many have done this month.

Here we’ve collected your favourite reads of the month from the blog and from Nature Careers.

1. As the biotherapeutics industry is burgeoning, it needs scientists with specialized disease knowledge and technical savvy to join in the drug-discovery efforts, according to Jeffrey M. Perkel in his piece Biomedical research: Drug hunters wanted. 

2. The key to a strong grant application is a well-considered and detailed outline of expenses, says grant director Ingrid Eisenstadter in The dream budget. Continue reading →

The Naturejobs blog: A brief backward glance at 2014

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In January 2014 I started running the Naturejobs blog; it’s been an interesting journey and I’ve enjoyed working with some great writers (see full list below!) to make the blog what it is today. My vision was to turn the Naturejobs blog into a place where scientists could come for career advice and personal stories: to read (or hear) about the experiences that other scientists have had in their careers and learn from their experiences. Using a combination of blog posts, podcasts and videos, I hope that I have achieved this and that you, our readers, have benefited from these stories.

I’ve been through the numbers and have picked out the top ten most popular blog posts from 2014. Here they are in order:

1) When a PhD isn’t enough, highlights Bianca Marcolino’s experience of finding a job after finishing her PhD. “The best advice I can give a graduate student is to start asking yourself the hard questions regarding your career aspirations as early as possible.”

PhD and coffee

{credit}Image credit: Daisy Hessenberger{/credit}

2) Thesis writing tips for the I-left-it-to-the-last-minute PhD student, is what it says on the tin: tips for writing up your PhD if you’re running out of time. Daisy Hessenberger shares her story of joining a writing group and dividing her time into tomatoes. Yes, you read that correctly. Tomatoes.

3) Make your cover letter and CV stand out gives advice on how to make sure that your CV or cover letters aren’t overlooked when you apply for a job. By using techniques similar to those in web design, you can make the important parts of your CV and cover letter jump off the page and keep the attention of future employers. By Julie Gould. Continue reading →

Internships: Time to think small?

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For those keen to get an internship, SMEs provide a different kind of experience, and placements may be easier to come by.

Personality is key at SMEs Credit: Stockbyte/Thinkstock

By Rob Blythe, contributor

Securing internships and graduate placements in 2012 is difficult. There has been a 25% increase in applications to graduate employers since 2009, with an average of 52 applications for each job, according to a comprehensive survey by High Flyers Research.

Certainly, as you’ll know if you’ve found your way to this blog, research roles are particularly competitive, but the landscape isn’t as bleak as the statistics suggest.

There are only vast numbers of applications for a small minority of well-publicised opportunities. Big corporations spend enormous amounts of money making sure their roles are really competitive both because it ensures they are introduced to the very best candidates but also because graduates subsequently really want their jobs.

But what about smaller companies? A recent survey produced by UKCES that interviewed over 15,000 UK employers from a cross-section of sectors reported that 27% of businesses have recruited someone aged between 19 and 24 in the past twelve months. There are jobs out there, but the vast majority will be with companies you won’t be familiar with and won’t have been on campus trying to reach you there.

‘SMEs’ (or small to medium enterprises) is an umbrella term for a real array of businesses. It might be a company run from the founder’s kitchen table or a business with hundreds of employees and very slick offices. The category represents the vast majority of UK employers – and a vast majority of prospective jobs.

If you haven’t considered applying for work placements at SMEs, you could be missing out. Not only are there fewer applicants per role but also some real advantages to the roles themselves. Working in close contact with senior management gives any new recruit the chance to learn from the best, and fast-growing businesses delegate real responsibility early on.

Finding the roles can be the hard part. To increase your chances of success:

Continue reading →

Away from home: Indian postdocs abroad

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Cross- posted from the Indigenus blog, a blog from Nature India.

Every Wednesday, Indigenus blog takes a peek into the lives of Indian postdocs working in foreign labs. The ‘Away from home’ series will feature one postdoc each week recounting his/her experience of working in a foreign lab, the triumphs and challenges, the culture factor, tips for Indian postdocs headed abroad and what he/she misses most about India. 

Last week, we met Mainpal Rana, a PhD from the Biological Sciences and Bioengineering Department of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and currently a postdoctoral associate at the Magee-Womens Research Institute Pittsburgh affiliated to University of Pittsburgh, USA. He told of the joys of not having to wait for reagents for experiments and the woes of not having Indian utensils in an American kitchen. Read more.

The week before, Moumita Chaki, a PhD from Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB-CSIR), Kolkata, currently working as a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Medical School, USA, talked among other things, about the problems of funding for independent postdoctoral research that visa-holders like her might face in the US. Read more.

Then there was synthetic and systems biologist Kayzad Nilgiriwala who is working as a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA. Kayzad completed his Ph.D. (Microbiology) at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai, India and wants to import some strong points from the US research scene when he comes back home. Read more. 

Finally, the first in the series was Kangkan Halder, who completed his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology (IGIB), New Delhi and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Applied Synthetic Biology Group at the University of Göttingen, Germany, who offers his advice on how to find a postdoc position in Germany. Read more.

Don’t forget to check back for the latest addition to the series each Wednesday, or follow Indigenus on twitter for more.

Challenging the integrity of research

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Stories of scientific misconduct, from plagiarism to falsification and fabrication of results are on the rise.

What leads scientists to make such poor judgements when it comes to their work? And how can you make sure you carry out your research with integrity? For instance, you might not make up your results – but what if you fail to record your data properly making your research hard to replicate? And how bad is it to plagiarise your own work, seeing as you wrote it in the first place?

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These are questions tackled by a new report on responsible research conduct, published today by the InterAcademy Council and the IAP – the global network of science academies. The  report examines how scientists can uphold values vital for  science in an increasingly pressurised research environment.

Although the report says it’s impossible to accurately estimate the number of cases of irresponsible research that happen each year, they are not unheard of, with the US Office of Research Integrity reporting 9 findings of research misconduct in 2010 and surveys indicating that incidence is higher than official statistics might suggest. The percentage of scientific papers that have been retracted also seems to be on the up.

According to the report, with the rise of interdisciplinary research (where each field has its own established rules and practices), the growing importance of research in policy and public decision making, and a number of high-profile cases of misconduct reported around the world, it is more important than ever to address the issue of research integrity. Continue reading →