Embarking on a scientific career is an exhilarating journey filled with discovery, innovation, and the pursuit of knowledge. However, without a well-defined career plan, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the numerous possibilities and challenges. Effective career planning is essential for scientists to achieve professional success and personal fulfillment. This blog post will guide you through the crucial steps of career planning, focusing on assessing your skills, values, and interests, and the importance of introspection.

Self-Assessment Part 1: Identifying Your Skills

Get to Know Your Free NIH OITE Career Counseling Resources 

Whether you're a postbac, graduate student, or postdoc at NIH, the Office of Intramural Training & Education (OITE) offers a wealth of free career services to help you thrive professionally. 

The NIH Office of Intramural Training & Education (OITE) Career Services Office offers both Career Counseling and Educational Advising to trainees at the NIH. 

 Career Counseling 

Career pivots are becoming increasingly common. 52% of Gen Z’ers and Millennials have reported making a career pivot and they are more likely to do so than previous generations. While career pivots are becoming the norm, they are still very unsettling on a personal level.  Often changing career paths means entering the unknown to hopefully pursue a more fulfilling life and use of your energy and skill sets. 

The updated and revised version from the New York Times Bestseller, Crucial Accountability: Tools for Resolving Violated Expectations, Broken Commitments, and Bad Behavior offers key insights about problems that often plague organizations and families.  Colleagues break a rule, coworkers miss a deadline, a friend fails to live up to a commitment and nobody says a word. Nobody is held accountable. Addressing accountability is a crucial aspect of managerial responsibility; however, it is often handled poorly. 

When you're in the throes of an interview for a new job, it's natural to focus on selling yourself and your skills. However, it's equally important to ensure that the company aligns with your professional goals and overall happiness. After all, you'll be dedicating a significant portion of your time to this job, so it's vital to ascertain if it's the right fit for you. To aid in this decision-making process, we've compiled a list of seven crucial questions to ask about a potential new job.

1. What are your expectations for this role? 

You’ve been offered an interview with a lab or an organization. As you prepare for the interview, remember to consider cultural fit in your evaluation.  

Waiting for news about our future, whether that be about grad or med school, a new job, or a health diagnosis, can be hard to tolerate. With it often comes feelings of anxiety, fear of the unknown, or worry about potential news we’re not hoping for. These feelings are often intense and highly uncomfortable so we can find ourselves coping with them by distracting, numbing, avoiding, or constantly checking our devices for any new information that may have come in the last few minutes. This can sometimes feel like a new-found anxiety.

Mentoring is essential for the next generation of scientists. It can also be exhausting when you are managing largen mentoring responsibilities on top of your everyday work.  The Harvard Business Review offers five strategies to help you manage mentorship efficiently and sustainably throughout your career. These are summarized below, but the full article can be read here: How to Mentor More People and Not Get Burned Out. 

1. Team-Based Mentorship:

An interesting research paper from the NIH sheds some light on new year’s resolutions.

We are entering the season of New Year’s Resolutions and goal setting.  A commonly used framework for goal setting is to make your goals SMART. It is an approach we have encouraged through the years as it reminds you to make goals that are specific, measurable, action-oriented & achievable, realistic & time-oriented.