You found an awesome job posting or graduate program, crafted the perfect curriculum vitae, and created a cover letter capable of convincing the staunchest of holdouts that you are a vital addition to their team. The only problem is you remembered to attach your resume after pressing send on your cover letter e-mail. Forgotten attachments happen to everyone, but the job application process is where you are supposed to distinguish yourself as a better candidate than everyone else. So – now what? Unlike many career advice searches on the internet, there are not a lot of professional sites with comments on forgotten attachments. The obvious action requires you to send…
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Understanding Emotional Intelligence: perhaps a secret to success?
Last week at the NIH, Daniel Goleman delivered a talk about Emotional Intelligence and how it influences leadership. The premise of Emotional Intelligence is that understanding your emotions, the emotions of others, and how the two interact allows us to be more successful and happier. Emotional Intelligence suggests that to be successful the following traits are important: Self awareness: being able to assess and understand your emotions and having self-confidence Social awareness: having empathy, organizational awareness and service orientation Self-management: having emotional self-control, adaptability, initiative and optimism Relationship management: developing others, influence, providing inspiration, conflict management and teamwork While that all seems well and good, we often hear that scientists…
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Becoming Skilled and Competent: The Essentials of Presentations
One of the most common forms of professional communication is the ‘Presentation.’ No matter what career you have – professor, researcher, science policy analyst, CEO of a company – chances are you will have to prepare and deliver professional presentations. In fact, you probably give presentations regularly already – for lab meeting, at professional conferences, for your thesis proposal, or for your job interview. However, no matter why you are giving your talk, the goal is the same: Communicating and sharing information with your audience. Because of this, there are some simple principles that any talk should have – and you can use these are the building blocks of any…