Last week’s blog post imparted some Tips for Finding Balance.  The most common piece of advice around finding that elusive work-life balance was setting proper boundaries – set designated time and space for your professional and personal time and even time for electronics like email/social media.

Happy Postdoc Appreciation Week!

To recognize and raise awareness of the significant contributions that postdoctoral and clinical fellows make to the US scientific endeavor, the National Postdoc Association (NPA) has declared this week Postdoc Appreciation Week. The 2022 theme is Finding Balance. With this motto in mind, OITE has asked NIH alumni and friends to share their tips for current postdocs/fellows on “finding balance”.

When you are job searching, it can be helpful to think of your search as a three-legged stool. The three legs stand for:

The simplicity of the A-B-Z Framework makes it applicable to anything and everything. It can help you make plans for a work project, a professional or even a personal goal. So, when you have a goal in mind and you are thinking about making a plan, figure out these three things:

A. Where you are right now

B. Your next step

Z. Your end goal

Sometimes job seekers forget that they should be interviewing a future boss as much as they are being interviewed. Make sure you prepare questions that will help you assess management style and cultural fit. Pay attention to any red flags you see or feel during your interview as well. Here are some questions to ask your next boss:

What have you learned about yourself, or your leadership style based on feedback you’ve received from members of your team?

Post Written By: Sara Hunter, Wellness Advisor, OITE 

On this blog, we’ve shared a few posts about luck, including “What Luck Really Looks Like”  and “What’s Luck Got to Do With It”. We’ve talked about luck because, of course, it plays a part in a career.

This text is based on a presentation entitled ‘Depression and Depressive Disorders.’ This is the third part of a six-part seminar series from OITE entitled ‘Mental Health & Wellbeing of Biomedical Researchers’ focused on mental health, which aims at providing strategies and tools to help participants support their own mental health and that of others.

With five generations together in U.S. workplaces for the first time (Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Generation Xers, Millennials, and Gen Z), communication styles and cultural differences between the generations are emerging.  According to NPR, there are even generational differences in how emojis are interpreted. Take for example the “thumbs up” emoji, “older people” literally interpret this as an affirmative/yes, but “younger people” see this as passive-aggressive and even a close cousin of the middle finger!

Post written by guest blogger Angie Snyder, PsyD, OITE Wellness Advisor 

Last week, we wrote about the purpose of one's inner dialogue and we encouraged you to journal for a week to catch your own thoughts.

Shift to a Compassionate Critic

When we think of taming the inner critic, it can be helpful to look at the definitions of a critic.  There are two definitions of criticism with different connotations: