According to Laura Carstensen, a Psychologist at the Stanford Center on Longevity, our lives and careers have been arranged wrong. She contends that we shouldn’t start working until the age of 40. Instead, she purports that rather than a four-decade professional sprint ending abruptly at age 65, we should plan for longer careers which are dotted with more breaks along the way. Breaks that account for the myriad factors in one’s life, namely family needs and opportunities for more learning. The current norms around career pacing don’t allow young adults to explore careers through education and apprenticeships. The current model doesn’t account for the demands that come with having children…
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Slowing it Down: 4 Simple Ways to Incorporate Mindfulness Into Your Day
Find yourself stressed out from work? Between the office/lab environment, mentor and mentee relationships, outside training and education, and life demands, it is all too common for stress to hijack your wellbeing. One quick effective way in dealing with life stress is to use techniques in mindfulness meditation. A recent review of mindfulness interventions at the University of Cincinnati shows mindfulness techniques to be effective at creating positive change in stress and stress-related psychology and physiology, especially in the workplace. Benefits of these techniques are shown in a range of occupational positions, including healthcare professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, continuing education faculty, and community members. Length of the surveyed interventions…
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4 More Questions To Overcome Blocks to Action
In an earlier blog post, we discussed John Krumboltz’s Happenstance Learning Theory and we offered four powerful questions for you to ponder. Questions aimed at individuals who feel stuck and need some help moving forward with their career goals. If you haven’t read that post yet, then take a look here. Krumboltz recognized that career paths are often formulated through a mix of small decisions, big decisions, and happenstance or luck. He didn’t believe that people should make one plan and stick to it. Especially, if that meant staying in an unsatisfactory occupation just because it was declared to be your goal at one point in time. According to Krumboltz…
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4 Powerful Questions
Are you feeling stuck? Are you looking to recharge some aspect of your career and/or life? Here are four powerful questions to ask yourself: 1. What is a chance event that you wish would happen to you? 2. What can you do now to increase the likelihood of that desirable event? 3. How would your life change if you acted? 4. How would your life change if you did nothing? To learn more about these questions, continue reading a post from the OITE Career Blog originally published in May 2010. **** Post written by: Anne Kirchgessner, LCPC, NCC, Career Counselor Feeling stuck in your current job? Not sure what your…
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Building Confidence for a Successful Career in 2014
Almost everyone faces challenges with confidence in the workplace at some point in their life. Challenges with confidence can be more noticeable if we live or work in a culture that is different from the one in which we were raised. Our family, cultural background and personal preferences may also affect our comfort with expressing ourselves in a confident way. However, one can stay true to their values and still learn to express themselves confidently. Two key steps to increasing your confidence include: 1. Identify areas where you feel both confident and unsure. In an article in Science Careers, Sharon Ann Holgate offers many useful suggestions about developing confidence. She…
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2014 Career Success Plan
Here at OITE, our continued resolution is to help trainees become skilled in a variety of core competencies. We view these four competencies as vital to your career development. They include: 1. Career Exploration and Planning 2. Communicating 3. Teaching and Mentoring 4. Leading and Managing Our goal for the blog this year is to cover a variety of resources and projected outcomes for each of these core competencies. One of the first we will tackle is career exploration and planning. This often involves four phases: Exploration, Preparation, Action, and Adaptation. You will most likely go through these steps more than once because one’s career development very rarely follows a…
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The Top 4 Things You Should STOP Doing on LinkedIn
By now you have probably realized that LinkedIn can be a powerful tool during your job search, but LinkedIn is not just another social networking site – it is the professional social network. As in real-life workplace situations, judiciousness and professional courtesy should steer all of your activity on LinkedIn. You have worked hard to make and keep a good impression in your lab and/or office. The same should hold true on LinkedIn; you need to make and maintain a positive, professional appearance. A LinkedIn faux pas has the potential to damage your career path, so here are a few red lights to heed to along the way: 1. Stop…
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NIH Alumni: Where are they now? Profile 14 – Research Scientist, Industry
This is the fourteenth in a series of profiles about recent NIH postdocs who have found an array of jobs, from academia to industry to communications and beyond, in the U.S. and abroad. What do they do now, and how did they get there? What challenges did they face, and what advice do they have? Read on to find out. Name: Michael Abram Current position: Research scientist, Gilead Sciences, Inc. Location: Foster City,CA Time in current position: 11 months Postdoc: Fidelity of HIV-1 replication with Stephen Hughes at NCI-Frederick Day-to-day: I work in clinical virology. It’s about 50 percent scientific research, filling in knowledge gaps about HIV drugs that are soon…
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NIH Alumni: Where are they now? Profile 4 – Scientific Program Management
This is the fourth in a series of profiles about recent NIH postdocs who have found an array of jobs, from academia to industry to communications and beyond, in the U.S. and abroad. What do they do now, and how did they get there? What challenges did they face, and what advice do they have? Read on to find out. Name: Tshaka Cunningham Current position: Scientific program manager at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; adjunct assistant professor at Howard University Location: Washington, D.C. Time in current position: 2 ½ years Postdocs: Cancer and HIV/AIDS with Jay Berzofsky at NCI; viruses and immunology with John Yewdell at NIAID How I got…
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REAL WORLD NIH: Thursday, June 24, 10:00 AM
Join us LIVE this Thursday for our first REAL WORLD chat with a current NIH trainee! The trainee joining us for this live, online chat on Thursday has been invited to interview for a position at the intersection of science policy, science communication, and grants administration. To give you a better sense of the position, read through the following phrases from the job description: Design and conduct evaluations that will examine many qualitative and quantitative endpoints that measure scientific productivity, scientific and public health impact, and economic return on investment Write, review, and edit materials, at various levels of technical difficulty, for use in communicating information effectively and serve as the…
