Sponsorship Highlights: SSE Sponsorship Highlight: Diverse Careers Workshop

Contributed by kjm34 on Sep 20, 2019 - 02:04 PM

The SSE Sponsorship Highlights present personal stories from individuals who have received SSE funding. This month we highlight the Diverse Careers Workshop [1] at Evolution 2019. Continue reading to hear more about the workshop from the Diverse Careers Committee.


The SSE generously funded a workshop on career exploration for graduate students and postdocs at this year’s Evolution meeting. The workshop, titled “Leveraging Your PhD: Careers In and Out of Academia”, offered participants concrete tools for exploring career options beyond tenure track faculty roles, with a focus on networking and informational interviews. The event also provided participants opportunities to speak with evolutionary biology Ph.D.s employed in a diverse range of institutions and fields, including museums, community colleges, academic administration, science writing, crop breeding, and tech start-ups.  


Based on pre and post workshop surveys, participants reported feeling significantly more prepared and confident about finding jobs outside academia.  When asked in a follow up survey what they found to be the most valuable part of the workshop, they gave the following responses:


“I used to feel unskilled, but now I feel that I can sell the skills that I have/will gather during my Phd.  Also knowing about informational interviews, that (is something) I was unaware about.”


“I loved the techniques for career exploration and meeting so many people with different careers after graduate school.  I feel like knowing about other options is the hardest part for me.”


“The roundtable discussion because we got to speak with a diverse array of panelists working outside of academia.”


“All of the panel were super helpful in explaining their past and supportive to the participants.”

Links
  1. https://evolutionsociety.org/https://sites.google.com/site/evolutionpostphd/workshop2016
  2. https://evolutionsociety.org/'https://evolutionsociety.org/tag/students/'
  3. https://evolutionsociety.org/'https://evolutionsociety.org/tag/diverse-careers/'
  4. https://evolutionsociety.org/'https://evolutionsociety.org/tag/evolution-2019/'