MySciCareer – first-person stories about science careers
Posted by Eva Amsen, on 27 February 2014
It’s been a while since I last wrote on the Node, but I have something to share that ties in to a project I started while I was still the Node’s community manager. In 2011 I commissioned a series of career posts, where people in a variety of different non-research post-PhD careers all described how they got their job and how they are using their PhD experience away from the lab. It was a popular series of posts. Many PhD students really like hearing from PhD graduates, to find out what kind of career options there are.
But it’s not straightforward to meet many people who left research after their PhD. Even though the majority of PhD students will eventually leave academic research, most of the PhD graduates they meet on a day-to-day basis are the ones in their institute: the ones on the academic research track.
With this in mind, Lou Woodley and I have spent the last few months working on a website that we just launched: MySciCareer. Here you can find personal stories from people with a background in research, who talk about their career. Many of them will have PhDs, but we’re also including stories from MSc and BSc graduates. We make no distinction between research careers and other careers: If you scroll through the current quotes on the front page you’ll see academic researchers, editors, writers, politicians, and others. If you see a quote you like, you can click it and read a longer excerpt.
You may recognize some of the quotes and excerpts. The launch content contains several posts from the Node, and there may be others in the future. We’re aiming for a broad coverage of scientific fields as well, so the tales from biologists are side to side with those of physicists, but with the menu in the sidebar of each entry you can search more selectively.
We’re on Twitter and Facebook, where we’ll post details about new content on the site as it is added, as well as resharing other relevant science careers discussions and letting you know if we give talks about science careers.
If you post content elsewhere that you’d like to be part of the science careers conversations, please add the #myscicareer hashtag – this will work on all major social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Storify, Instagram and Flickr.
So, please take a look at the site, send us your feedback, spread the word and let us know what stories we’re missing. We’re intending this to be a growing collection of resources so if you’d like to contribute we’d love to hear from you – and you can share your story on the Node as well!
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This is a great resource Eva – thanks to you and Lou for putting it together! I’d encourage our readers – particularly those thinking beyond the boundaries of academia – to go take a look.
And for the complete set of Node careers stories, see https://thenode.biologists.com/tag/altcareers/