In June this year developmental biologist Ottoline Leyser stepped down as chief executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the country’s national research funding agency. In the final episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series about career planning, Leyser tells Julie Gould how the opportunity to lead UKRI came about, and how, for her, good career planning starts with reflecting on who you are what your values are. Leyser also finds the notion of work-life balance problematic, arguing that you cannot easily segregate the two from each other. “You’re not your job. You are who you are,” she says. “And you can build a really fulfilling career by following who you are, and keeping your eyes on the full range of opportunities available to you to be who you are. And it’s not going to be one thing. “In research careers, people get locked into this idea that there’s really only one pathway, and that’s the only way you can make use of your research skills and your research interests. And it’s so untrue.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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How to pause and restart your science career
In the penultimate episode of this six-part podcast series about career planning in science, Julie Gould discusses some of the setbacks faced by junior researchers, including political upheaval, financial crises and a change in supervisor.Shortly after embarking on a PhD at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, Katja Loos’ supervisor relocated to the University of Bayreuth, taking his team with him. But weeks later he died of an aggressive cancer.Loos, who is now a polymer chemistry researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, describes how she worked through the various choices and challenges she faced as a result of her supervisor’s sudden death, and why she abandoned plans for an industry career.Funding struggles in Argentina led to paleontologist Mariana Viglino relocating to Germany. But before moving she describes how a very prescribed career path denied her the opportunity to think about her long-term plans.Tomasz Glowacki says abandoning a rigid career plan helped him to better navigate the various challenges he faced after completing a PhD in computer science at Poznan University of Technology, Poland, in 2013.Finally, Julia Yates, an organizational psychologist and careers coach at City St George’s, University of London, reassures early career researchers facing a sudden disruption to their careers. It’s fine, she says, to put career planning on hold. Sometimes paying bills and putting food on the table has to take priority. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Keep, lose, add: a checklist for plotting your next career move in science
In the fourth episode of a six-part podcast series about science career planning, Julie Gould investigates "planned happenstance," a theory which encourages workers to embrace chance opportunities during their working lives.Holly Prescott, a careers guidance practitioner at the University of Birmingham, UK, suggests a slightly alternative approach, whereby a professional reflects on their experiences to decide what they would like more or less of in their current or future role.Listing the things you want to keep, lose or add in a job description, she argues, enables researchers to have happier working lives.In her view, the technique is preferable to devising a plan at the early career stage and then slavishly following it. This course of action, she says, does not account for new skills, technologies and life events that can open up fresh opportunities. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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When life gets in the way of your meticulously-planned career in science
In the third episode of this six-part Working Scientist podcast series about career planning, Sam Smith, a behavioral oncologist at the University of Leeds, UK, reflects on his plan as an early career researcher to relocate to the United States and become a professor. Did thing work out as planned?Instead of chasing job titles at defined points in his career to help him achieve his goal, Smith says he focused on winning specific grants that enabled him to do “cool science and solve problems” along the way. But becoming a parent and needing to earn a higher salary led to a rethink. Milicia Radisic, a cell and tissue engineer at the University of Toronto, Canada, left Serbia during the Yugoslav War in the 1990s, motivated in part by problems accessing scientific journals to develop her career expertise.Radisic tells Gould that she now encourages her students to work on both high and low risk projects simultaneously. Having this kind of contingency plan protects them if, say, a high-impact paper in Science or Nature doesn’t work out. She also recommends that junior colleagues allocate plenty of time to regularly think about their career path and the direction it is taking. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Two tools to help you achieve career success in science
Uschi Symmons says that attending a workshop about individual development plans (IDPs) during her molecular biology postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia blew her mind. Going away and crafting her own IDP helped her to identify technical skills she lacked, and consider alternative career options beyond academia.But one limitation of IDPs is that they don’t always take personal lives and values into account, says Symmons, who is now a programme manager at the European Innovation Council, the EU funding agency for breakthrough innovation, based in Brussels. In her case she needed to accommodate family priorities also, alongside her own career ambitions.In the second episode of a six-part Working Scientist podcast series on career planning, Julie Gould assesses how IDPs compare to more formal coaching sessions with careers guidance professionals, who either work on a one-to-one basis or in small groups to help researchers plan their careers.“I act as a kind of mirror,” says careers coach Sarah Blackford. Blackford and other career coaches who feature in the episode say they ask clients open questions and then reflect back they’ve told her about their skills, ambitions, priorities and personal circumstances. The next step, Blackford adds, is to help them develop an action plan to identify their longer-term goals.Each episode in this series concludes with a sponsored slot from the International Science Council (ISC) with the support of the China Association for Science and Technology.The ISC is exploring perspectives on career development in a changing world through conversations with emerging and established scientists on themes such as policy, AI, transdisciplinarity, mental health and international collaboration. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Working Scientist is the Nature Careers podcast. It is produced by Nature Portfolio, publishers of the international science journal Nature. Working Scientist is a regular free audio show featuring advice and information from global industry experts with a strong focus on supporting early career researchers working in academia and other sectors. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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