Science Careers guide

With all the talk about hiring freezes, over-supply of postdocs for the shrinking pool of available TT faculty positions and dwindling research funding, a lot of grad students and postdocs are throwing their hands up in dismay at their perceived lack of career choices.

For those of you who are looking for additional resources outside the blogosphere, Science Careers has put together a pdf booklet that is basically just a compilation of their online articles but it contains some useful information and links (you can also view individual chapters online in html format). The topics range from choosing a mentor to networking and choosing a career path all the way through to diversity issues in science.

The reason I would recommend people check out this guide is that it touches not only on the how, why and what of academia but it also has a couple of chapters on industry and so-called “non-traditional” careers for PhD graduates.

In particular, I liked the section on transferable skills and portable careers and this bit from Philip Clifford, associate dean for postdoctoral education at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee:

"When you get to a postdoc, there are virtually no rules," Clifford says. Many postdocs lock themselves in the lab and hope that their toil will pay off in publications that lead to the job they want. "People feel that they need to do project after project and publish, publish, publish," Clifford says, but he suggested that they need to develop skills beyond the bench too, even if it means getting out of the lab.

Anyway, go check it out for yourselves. It’s not a perfect guide by any means and is very, very generic but it might be helpful for some, particularly undergrads, grad students and postdocs.

UPDATE: for those who are looking for non-academic info and advice in the blogosphere, I totally forgot to add a link to The Alternative Scientist (thanks to ScientistMother for the reminder).

And as an aside ... congrats to Dr Isis for making it into the American Physiological Society's weekly news update email this morning. It's always good to see bloggers get recognized by big-ass societies for their contribution to Teh Scienz ... and shoes. Now if we could get our own session at Experimental Biology, just think of the havoc we could wreak ...