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Must-Know Industry Etiquette For PhDs Sep 23, 2019

Show notes

Skip ahead to:
6:53 Show Me The Data
26:05 Jacqueline Whitmore
51:24 Anand Devasthanam, Ph.D.

Are you unknowingly sabotaging your success by making common etiquette errors?

Fitting into corporate culture is an important part of your career success in your industry transition. Avoiding some common errors will help you make strong first impressions in your first days at your industry job.

This week on the Cheeky Scientist Radio Show we are joined by Jacqueline Whitmore – international etiquette expert and author to share her top etiquette tips for success in your industry transition. We are also joined by Anand Devasthanam, PhD, Medical Writer at Parexel. Anand will join us to talk about his career transition into his current position as a medical writer and give advice to others interested in this field.

About Our Guests

Jacqueline Whitmore, is an international etiquette expert, a certified speaking professional, and the founder of The Protocol School of Palm Beach, a premier business etiquette and hospitality consulting firm. She is the author of BUSINESS CLASS: Etiquette Essentials for Success at Work and POISED FOR SUCCESS: Mastering the Four Qualities That Distinguish Outstanding Professionals. Jacqueline ranks as one of the most widely quoted etiquette experts in the world. Her advice is sought by numerous publications including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. She has appeared as a guest on a variety of national radio and television shows including ABC’s 20/20, CNN, FOX News, Anderson Cooper’s AC360° and CNBC. Jacqueline has served as the cell phone etiquette spokesperson for Sprint and the holiday etiquette spokesperson for Office Depot, Sam’s Club and CLARISONIC skincare and the dating etiquette expert for EliteSingles.com.

Anand Devasthanam, PhD, moved into his role as a medical writer at Parexel by leveraging his experience in publications strategy, regulatory affairs guidelines and requirements, and specialized writing. His diverse background includes editorial and web content positions at the Royal Society of Chemistry, Toastmasters International, and he served as Scientific Editor for the AlterMed Research Foundation. Anand also spent 6 years at the Roswell Cancer Foundation in Immunology and Regulatory Affairs. In his current role at Parexel, Anand’s role involves research, creating, and coordinating the development of independent review charters (IRC), reviewer manuals, imaging case report forms (CRFs), and other clinical documents intended for submission to the FDA or other regulatory authorities. Anand also serves as the main client contact for IRC development, including presenting and leading client discussions.

Key Takeaways

What etiquette is and why it’s so important for PhDs going into industry careers- at every stage of transition.
Common areas of etiquette mishaps to avoid, and what to do to make strong first impressions in meetings, at dinners, and in your use of technology.
In industry, how a diverse background as a PhD can create a career using all your transferable skills and how to highlight those.

Must-Know Industry Job Etiquette For PhDs: A Conversation With Jacqueline Whitmore

Isaiah: I really want you to go buy these two books. Trust me, all of you have no idea what business etiquette means. I know because I had no idea. I thought I did, but I didn’t. It is a whole world in itself. That’s why we’re so excited to talk to Jacqueline. Her website of course is etiquetteexpert.com and we’re all on Linkedin. Many of us still looking for a job to make sure you connect with Jacqueline when you get a chance and a show her how, how kind and how grateful we are as PhDs to have her on. Hi, Jacqueline. Thanks for being here.

Jacqueline: Hi, Isaiah. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Isaiah: I really appreciate it. You know, obviously our audience has, not a lot of experience with business etiquette. Most of us think it has to do with, you know, maybe what you dress or which fork you use during a business lunch. My first question is why does business etiquette fascinate you? Why did you write your books? Why have you made a career out of it?

Jacqueline: I didn’t intend to become an etiquette expert. Isaiah, I actually have a degree in broadcasting and journalism and I worked in the hospitality industry for more than a decade. And while I was working at the breakers in Palm Beach, I took an etiquette course for executives and I realized that it was something that I needed. I grew up with a southern mother and a southern grandmother, but I didn’t have business etiquette skills. And I was put in a position where I was meeting and mingling high society and VIP…you name it. Royalty. Yeah. And I needed to know how to conduct myself. And so part of it was curiosity. Part of that was I felt I needed it for my current job and it led into me deciding to become certified in business etiquette and then start my own business. So that was 21 years ago.

Isaiah: Wow. And, so since over that time, 21 years, how has the definite definition of business etiquette changed or how do you explain business etiquette to someone who has no idea what it means?

Jacqueline: Business Etiquette is really treating others the way you want to be treated. It’s that simple, but it also can become complicated when you’re put in situations. For example, email, you’re sending an email to a perspective employer and you might include an Emoji. A lot of our millennials out there and Gen X ys Gen Z’s like to use these cutesy little emojis. They might like to use text speak. That doesn’t go over well with let’s say a baby boomer. So there’s error, there is room for miscommunication and that’s where I come in. So I teach everything from techno etiquette to dining etiquette to professional presence, image management, networking, anything having to do with putting your best foot forward and giving a good self first impression.

Isaiah: So maybe what are some of the consequences of poor business etiquette in the workplace?

Jacqueline: Well, it can lead to a lot of problems. You mentioned stress being one of them. It can also lead to mistakes and embarrassment. I had one employer tell me that he was walking by one of his employees offices and the employee had his shoes off. Now you wouldn’t think that would be a big deal, but people kick their shoes off all the time. Well, the problem was this employee oftentimes sees clients and so if a client walks around the corner into this person’s office, then you have a core first impression. So it’s a trickle down effect. It all starts at the top. If the management believes in good business advocate than the other employees will jump on board. But there are a lot of consequences to bore poor business etiquette. One in particular, um, I had a student come to me, a Phd student who said, I just can’t find a job. And he said, my resume is up to date. And I looked at it, it looked great. However, the way in which he dressed, the way in which he presented himself, he didn’t even know how to maneuver a knife and fork. He was stabbing his meat like a wild beast. He was talking with his mouth full of food. He didn’t even know how to tie a tie properly. All these things maybe you and I take for granted because we were taught the proper way, but not everyone grew up in, in a, in a household like mine where my mother insisted that we sit down every Sunday afternoon and have Sunday dinner together. So there’s a whole new generation out there that is inquisitive. They’re curious about this. And more importantly, they want to get ahead. They want to have some sort of competitive edge. And I believe business etiquette can give people that competitive advantage.

Medical Writer Career Track: A Conversation With Anand Devasthanam, PhD

Isaiah: We will bring Anand on with us and we’ll talk to him about how he got into his medical writing role, what he does on a daily basis. And any other questions that you have. Great suit and headset. I can see you and I can hear you…how are you?

Anand: Okay, well thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Isaiah: I want to jump right in and I want to ask you about your current role and what does it average day or maybe you know, an average week look like to you. How much time are you spending in meetings? What departments do you interact with? What can you give us some context?

Anand: Sure, absolutely. Uh, one of the things that surprised me about this role is how much communication that involves. I was making some quick notes when Jacqueline was speaking earlier about the importance of Medicaid specifically and having daily conversations as well as an emails and so on because that plays certainly a crucial role. Um, initially when I was thinking about medical writing, um, I thought it was going to be a lot of writing and communicating with others once in awhile. Uh, which is how typically writing was, uh, in, in academia where we, you know, pretty much write about our own projects. But in industry I think it’s mostly getting information from different sources, um, communicating with people with a background in medicine, regulatory affairs, quality, other scientists, other medical writers, to some extent business development and to some extent marketing, and writers from other business units as well. In order to get the information we need to develop different deliverables. The analogy that I like to use is that of a baker who needs to collect ingredients from different sources and then, you know, has to create the cake by letting it pick the right way. So it’s really about who you approach, how you collect those ingredients, how efficient you can be in communicating what you need, um, and how quickly you can get that information in order to, uh, put the document together and meet the, meet the necessary timeline.

Isaiah: Excellent. Yeah, no, I think there’s a, a large project management portion to a lot of medical writing roles. Um, and in many cases you’re not managing the people so much as the sources of the information you have to get in the deliverable. Right. Um, so in your case, what are some of the deliverables? You know, we talk about medical writing as this big umbrella term that can mean lots of different positions and you a really good way to understand the positions better is to understand what types of documents you have to deliver. So can you talk a little bit about the deliverables? We mentioned that you do and can you kind of compare and contrast the type of deliverables for, I guess medical writing as a whole? As much as possible?

Anand: Absolutely. As far as my role is concerned, it would be regulatory, medical writing, medical writing as a field. As you had mentioned is more of an umbrella term and medical writers. As a group we stratify ourselves into who we talk to in terms of who are we writing for. So regulatory medical writers for instance, we developed documents which, need to be submitted to the FDA or other notified bodies. So people who are involved in reading this document and making an assessment as to whether or not a drug should be approved or identifies must be cleared for use at who our audiences as regulatory and medical writers. We also have people who write to educate patients and patient advocates, people who write to educate other physicians and doctors such as continuing medical education type of medical writing and so on. We also have medical writers who communicate with other scientists and these medical writers put together documents such as abstracts, posters, manuscripts, slide decks, keynote addresses for major symposiums and so on.

And then you also have the medical marketing or the medical affairs type of medical writing, which is involved in the type of, writing, that liaises with medical science liaisons who go out and speak with these care providers. So clearly there’s a lot of writing that needs to go in, in order to prepare those types of materials and to prepare the types of marketing materials in order to educate people on the products and devices. So that’s another subset of medical writing as well. I’ve been in medical writing for two years and within this span alone in industry, there are so many new tones that I’m learning about and so many different types of niche medical writers that I’ve met. It’s just a fascinating field and it’s just a very exciting time to be in medical writing.

** for the full interviews check out the video above

To get advanced access to the full-length versions of these podcasts, as well as access to our live training webinars, exclusive training videos, case studies, industry insider documents, transition plan, and private online network, get on the waitlist for the Cheeky Scientist Association now.

The post Must-Know Industry Etiquette For PhDs appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

The Biggest Career Missteps PhDs Make Sep 06, 2019

Show notes

Skip ahead to:
6:50 Show Me The Data
23:50 James Gould, Ph.D
50:52 Sarah Rodrigues, Ph.D.

Are you making some of the biggest career mistakes PhDs make in their job transition?

You might not even know you’re making these common missteps that might be sabotaging your job search and career transition.

This week on the Cheeky Scientist Radio Show we are joined by James Gould who is director of the Office for Postdoctural Fellows at Harvard Medical School and works with postdocs for vocational and leadership training and guidance. James shares his experience of his own transition into using his PhD to help other PhDs avoid common, but not always well known, career missteps. We are also joined by Sarah Rodrigues, PhD, Customer Consultant at Elsevier, who discusses her transition into this role, the matrix hierarchy she works within, and how this is a perfect fit for her education and strengths.

About Our Guests

James Gould is the director of the HMS/HSDM Office for Postdoctoral Fellows at Harvard Medical School where he’s implemented research, career, and professional development programs and policies for HMS trainees since 2011. Jim has spoken and published on career and professional development topics in a variety of forums, locally and nationally, including articles in Nature Immunology covering CV to resume conversion, interviewing strategies, and manuscript writing. He’s been a guest blogger and steering committee member for Naturejobs and its Career Expo, a mentor in the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN), and a guest speaker on Cheeky Scientist and BioCareers webinars. Prior to HMS, Jim completed two postdoc fellowships at the National Cancer Institute of the NIH where he chaired the Fellows & Young Investigators Association, interned with the Office of Training and Education, and also found time to study cancer metabolism. He is a member of the National Postdoctoral Association, Graduate Career Consortium, and AAAS. Jim received his BS in Biotechnology/Molecular Biology at Clarion University of Pennsylvania and his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Louisville.

Sarah Rodrigues, Ph.D. in Hematology & Oncology, she first worked as business developer and now she works as a Customer Consultant in Europe. Sarah is a Medical laboratory scientist with experience in business development and consulting, driving customer engagement and market insights. Her driver is to support research and innovation to help bringing new applications to the market and patients. She has worked in clinical and fundamental research, in lab information data management, in scientific information analytics, scientific publishing and scientific/medical communication with the aim to support doctors and scientists.

Key Takeaways

How to avoid common career mistakes that PhDs make and how you can avoid those.
Ways for postdocs to transition into meaningful careers and the importance of creating endpoints for PhDs.
In industry, how your experience as a PhD can lead you into a career that plays to your strengths and a customized role to match your goals.

Biggest Career Missteps PhDs Make: A Conversation With James Gould

Isaiah: If you haven’t connected with Jim, I highly recommend that you do. He’s always posting great stuff, always speaking. Very, very active and our oldest in terms of going way back to 2003 person that we’ve ever interviewed and we’ve done a lot of collaborating with Jim, always learning from him. It’s great to have Jim with us.

Jim, how are you?

James: I’m doing well. How are you?

Isaiah: Good, let me hide the… Great to be on. Yeah, it was 2013, right?

James: I think so, yes.

Isaiah: That was the summer series of …?

James: I think it was a leadership series, maybe.

Isaiah: Did you start that at Harvard?

James: Yeah. It was something that we were trying to develop, understanding what gaps in programmings we had. One of the things that kept coming up from the postdocs was, “We need to know what leadership is and how to do it.”

Isaiah: Yeah, and I remember, so it was the very first talk that I gave under Cheeky Scientist was with Jim and he did a great job. He even mentored me.

He was like, “Well, let’s tone down this a little bit. Maybe change the topic here a bit,” but yeah, it’s interesting. I can’t believe it was almost six years ago. Pretty incredible.

James: Yeah, it’s been a while. I guess I am one of your oldest colleagues, though I’m not that old. I think you might be actually older than I am.

Isaiah: In terms of age, yeah. I was correcting myself. I was like, “Hey, wait a second, I’m aging myself,” because… I think what’s been interesting to me is to see your trajectory and everything you’ve been able to do and the clinics you put on.

Thinking about the first question, I was really excited to ask it because I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about it. What was your path? Why did you decide to get into helping develop PhDs to even go beyond that, to writing so much about it and to putting on these clinics? Why do you do what you do and how did you get into it?

James: Why do I do it? It’s always been something that I’ve done, even when I was a young kid, just helping others. I wasn’t perfect or a saint but I was always willing to say, “Hey, what about this?”

Because one of the things that I’ve found is I’ve made all of these mistakes that you were talking about on Cheeky Scientist, that you were talking about with that other previous speaker, I’ve made all of these mistakes. If I’m not learning from them, I’m helping other people learn before they make these same mistakes.

As an undergraduate, as a graduate student, and as a postdoc, I was helping my fellow students and postdocs figure out their larger issues, whether it was an interpersonal issue or conflict with their faculty mentor or it was maybe a personal issue but not so much. But how do I apply? What’s my approach? How do I reach out to people?

I’ve always been a people person. I mean, I’ve made all the mistakes and hopefully I’ve learned from most of them. It was very fulfilling knowing at the end of the day, I helped this person or I helped these three people and compared to my research, I would maybe do one successful experiment a week, maybe a month. It wasn’t enough to keep me going, keep me motivated but I knew I had to finish my PhD and I knew I had to do the next step as a postdoc and we can talk more about that.

But it was really the people aspect of my research and interacting with smart people and them helping me figure out my research issues as well as as career professional development.

But it was really fulfilling to do that. I found that I was actually, I had a nice natural tendency to be helpful rather than harmful and giving bad advice. I found it very useful and then I ultimately realized I could do this for a job.

The next step was actually convincing myself and then my wife that it was worth still getting my PhD and it was worth still doing a postdoc, that I would be getting my PhD, and if it’s worse, still doing a postdoc, but I would be transitioning into a research adjacent type of position, helping people do their research, because doing a PhD and a postdoc like, “Oh, yeah. I’m going to cure cancer.” And I quickly realized maybe it’s not going to be me, but maybe I can actually help someone realize their full potential, by removing some barriers, or at least raising their awareness of some barriers that might be harmful to their research. So again, it just comes back to … it was very fulfilling, then I realized I could actually do it for a job.

Isaiah Hankel: So in grad school, is when you first were like, “I want to help develop careers.”?

James: Yes.

Isaiah: Wow.

James: It was mostly, “I need to develop my career, and if I had an issue, many others had the issue.” And began exploring how to do that, talking with faculty. Thankfully, there were very sympathetic faculty saying, “There’s more out there than just academic research.” And became involved in developing a biochemistry student group for my department, became involved in recruiting students, and just developing myself, to help develop them.

Customer Consultant Career Track: A Conversation With Sarah Rodrigues, PhD.

Isaiah: And we’re going to move right on in. Sarah’s one of the very first people to join the association, and get hired through the association. I think in our founding year, she came, and she was maybe the third person, third ever. And this is thousands, and thousands, and thousands of members later. Very excited to have her on. She is currently a consultant at Elsevier. She’s had multiple other jobs, she’s worked at AgileBio, CEA, in terms of her academic background. Very, very excited to bring her on, and talk about her career track, and how she got into it, and what she does.

I know some of you have been considering working for different journals or publication companies, you’ve considered being consultants, and doing things that are off the bench. Sarah is a great person to talk to, and I’m going to bring her on. I know you’ve had a few careers now, a few different jobs in the industry, and I’m excited to hear about this one. Can you talk a little bit, just to help us understand what you do, and who you work with?

Sarah: Sure. So before joining my current company, I worked as a business developer at a small company, AgileBio, and data management, basically. And then I joined a company maybe you know of, Elsevier. So most people know about the publishing of Elsevier, but actually Elsevier, it’s more an analytics company, going through this transition from what content, and what we can do with the data-evidenced decisions.

Isaiah: So it’s a more data management, right? So you’re more on the analyst side, and you’re looking at consumer analytics, I’m guessing?

Sarah: So, yeah. So in my job I get insights that they are based on consumers, but also insights to the customers, to the return on investment. Also doing workshops, national trends, and analysis of a bunch of data, that is on the impact and publications of a country, or an institution, or department.

Isaiah: And this is fascinating. I love what’s happening just in the last couple of years. Like if you see jobs that end in analyst or consultant, you can be sure that you can get it. Or researcher, like we hear a lot about user experience researcher, customer consultant, business analyst, or consumer analyst. You’re looking at data. It’s data analysts, management. You have to have experience collecting it, etc., but it’s on the market, or how customers are responding to stuff. It’s to help guide decisions, in terms of like Sarah said, product development, business development. It’s an exploding field. It’s like data scientist is splitting, and there’s the data scientist positions where you need programming languages, but then there’s data scientist positions where it’s more about data analysts, like analyzing data.

And those are going into these other job titles and types, which is good news for most of you, who don’t know programming languages. You can get into these. So what do you love about your current job? I mean, what do you do on a day-to-day basis?

Sarah: So maybe it’s very much cliché, but we don’t have a routine. But what I actually like about it is we have a range of programs, tasks that we do. So sometimes I am over my Excel, doing a presentation on how the return on investment and opportunities, maybe gaps, etc. And the other day, I may … and a customer face-to-face, or doing a workshop, or doing big events, bigger events to institution. So I guess, it’s a like a perfect fit for me that likes that data analysis, but also likes to have, not just coded analysis, and delivering it, but also have this face-to-face with the customer, and public speaking side as well.

** for the full interviews check out the video above

To get advanced access to the full length versions of these podcasts, as well as access to our live training webinars, exclusive training videos, case studies, industry insider documents, transition plan, and private online network, get on the waitlist for the Cheeky Scientist Association now.

The post The Biggest Career Missteps PhDs Make appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

How Isolated PhDs Get Hired Aug 23, 2019

Show notes

Skip ahead to:
12:20 Show Me The Data
25:09 Dan Schwabel
45:02 Michael Morabito, Ph.D.

Has technology replaced your face-to-face interactions?

Technology can extend your reach for your job search with ease, but it can also work against you when it comes to sharpening the interpersonal skills you need to succeed in your industry career trajectory.

This week on the Cheeky Scientist Radio Show we are joined by Dan Schawbel bestselling author of Back to Human and Me 2.0, Partner and Research Director at Future Workplace, and the Founder of both Millennial Branding and WorkplaceTrends.com. Dan will talk about how technology can be a crutch and increases the risk of isolation, and the interpersonal skills needed in corporate culture today. We are also joined by Michael Morabito, PhD, Senior Analyst – VP Biotech Equity Research at Credit Suisse, who will discuss his transition into a senior analyst role in biotech and how other PhDs can pursue this career.

About Our Guests

Dan Schawbel is a New York Times bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, Fortune 500 consultant, millennial TV personality, global keynote speaker, career and workplace expert and startup advisor. He is the Partner and Research Director at Future Workplace, and the Founder of both Millennial Branding and WorkplaceTrends.com. He has written the career bestsellers: Me 2.0, Promote Yourself and his new book, Back to Human: How Great Leaders Create Connection in the Age of Isolation. Through his companies, he’s conducted dozens of research studies and worked with major brands including American Express, GE, Microsoft, Virgin, IBM, Coca Cola and Oracle. Dan has interviewed over 2,000 of the world’s most successful people, including Warren Buffett, Anthony Bourdain, Jessica Alba, will.i.am, Michael Bloomberg, Chelsea Handler, Colin Powell, Sheryl Sandberg, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Michael Morabito is currently a Vice President of Equity Research at Credit Suisse in New York City, where he is the lead analyst on four SMid-Cap Biotechnology companies. Previously Michael was the Senior Associate on the US Large Cap Pharma team. Prior to joining Credit Suisse, Michael was a Scientific Administrator for the Department of Genetic Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University, where he studied neural control of feeding behavior. Michael received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Vanderbilt

Key Takeaways

How reliance on technology can become a crutch and work against you in your job search.
What interpersonal skills PhDs need for career success, and how to develop those during your transition and in your industry career.
In industry, how biotech is presenting new opportunities for PhDs.

How Isolated PhDs Get Jobs: A Conversation With Dan Schwabel

Isaiah: If you had to drill down to the two or three things that happened to you … There’s always a triggering, right? As an author, there’s always a triggering moment for writing this book. So, for your newest book, why did you write it?

Dan: There’s a combination. Number one is every book I write helps people to get to the next phase of their career. So, Me 2.0 was college to first job. Promote Yourself was first job to management, and this is a leadership book. The second thing is I was interviewed for a documentary that’s coming out next year called The Revolution Generation. In the documentary, it paints the portrait of my generation of millennials. During the interview, I was asked what’s the biggest issue that we’re facing as a generation. You know, I talked about the student loan debt crisis, which is over $1.53 trillion dollars outstanding now. I talked about income inequality. I talked about global warming. All these huge issues. World war.

Then, in my head, I’m like, okay, but what’s really affecting people on a daily basis? And, to me, the biggest thing that’s affecting people is this feeling of isolation, the feeling that even though we have access to so many people … We can use these technologies to reach across geographies. You could connect with someone in the Philippines right now, and maybe you couldn’t have before unless you traveled there. But, at the same time, all of this technology has just made us feel more isolated because we’re dependent on it.

Technology companies like Google and Apple and Facebook … They are purposely creating devices and apps in order to get us addicted, because that’s their business model. They profit off our attention, and therefore we are the product. So, just knowing that is kind of liberating. It’s like, okay, now you’re aware of what game is actually being played. And it can be at our expense, because every time we look at a device, we’re not looking at a person, and we’re made … We’re tribal. We’re made to be in packs, to be with other people, and if we constantly rely on the technology devices and use them as a crutch at work and even at home, it can make us feel more lonely. Then, that’s really bad for our health.

Isaiah: No, I really appreciate that, and I’m glad you brought up the attention, whether it’s called the attention economy, etc. For a lot of our listeners here, you’ve probably heard of Beckman Coulter medical instruments. It was bought by Danier for like 6 billion, and then Facebook a few years ago bought WhatsApp for like 13 billion, like a messaging app, just because it’s where people’s attention were going, right? So, it is the most valuable commodity on Earth right now. What I’m curious to know from you is how are businesses failing in this area? How are businesses making their team members more isolated with technology?

Dan: Well, the reason why companies are promoting collaborative apps and the use of technology is because they basically, in a sense, take advantage of workers. We’re always kind of working. There’s a reason why the World Health Organization said that burnout is now an occupational phenomenon. It’s something that I’ve actually studied a few years ago with Kronos. When I wrote an article about the burnout epidemic, Bernie Sanders shared it to over a million people.

It’s important because people are working more hours because of work creep. So, technology … It’s a double-edged sword, technology. Technology gives us the freedom and flexibility to work when, where, and how we want, so there would be no such thing as remote work without technology. So, that’s a great thing. People are excited about it. They’re emotional about it. It’s good. I’m working from … I mean, this is my apartment right here, if you can’t tell.

But no one talks about the dark side. So, through my book, through my work, I’m revealing the dark side of, okay, because we have all of these abilities to work wherever we want, at the same time not being in the office, not being around other people can make us feel more isolated and lonely and actually make us less productive.

You know, in a sense, companies are like, okay, we have this technology. It is a cheap, cost effective way to scale communication within the company. That’s really what they’re trying to do, increase efficiencies and all that. So, they have their business case for it. But the big drawback is that we’re always kind of on. We’re on 24/7. Not having your phone is the new vacation. After work hours … What are work hours anymore? On weekends and on vacation, people are using their phone and responding to business texts.

We did a study with Randstad, the largest staffing firm in the world, and it’s like … I’ve done three or four studies with them. And the one this year what we found is that about half of managers expect their employees to respond to business email on vacation. So, there’s an expectation. If you’re on vacation, you’re not really on vacation if vacation is time spent away from work if you’re doing work. That has all led to burnout, unhappiness, and it actually hurts companies.

In the other study, we found that half of all attrition is due to burnout. So, companies might think that they’re benefiting from having workers always doing work and responding to business emails and being engaged, but in a sense, every time you have to replace a worker, the cost is even more. And you can’t fully maximize an employee if they’re burned out, if they’re just exhausted. They’re just not going to be as focused and engaged in their work. So, it actually backfires.

Biotech Analyst Career Track: A Conversation With Michael Morabito, Ph.D.

Isaiah: So, this is Michael. He is a senior analyst at VP Biotech Equity Research. He is in New York City. He is the lead analyst on four mid-cap biotechnology companies. Previously, Michael was a senior associate on the US large-cap pharma team. Prior to joining Credit Suisse … I think I’m saying that somewhat right. He was a scientific administrator for the department of genetic medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a post-doctoral research scientist at Columbia University. So, for those of you who don’t know, Michael came into the Cheeky Scientist Association. He’s transitioned since then. His career has really taken off. One of the things I’m interested in talking to about is … Of course, I want to know how you found out about this analyst career path. But I think it’s one of those career paths that PhDs just don’t realize that they’re perfect for.

Michael: Yes. Yes. Absolutely.

Isaiah: Analyst by definition is exactly … You learn how to analyze data in whatever PhD you get. So, how did you find out about the analyst career path, and how did you know that it was the right path for you?

Michael: Really, it was just doing some research through the association, through or post-doctoral association at Columbia. They had a little bit of information on it. But there really wasn’t much known about it, and it was only after talking to certain people and actually realizing that there were PhDs doing this job that I could actually do it. And I never thought of that, because my job … What I do is … If you watch CNBC, and they have a guest analyst on and says like, “I am a buy on Facebook,” or something like that. I’m one of those guys now. I’m not on CNBC or anything, but that’s what I do. So, I used to invest back when I was in graduate school. Sorry. When I was an undergrad. When I went to graduate school, I didn’t have any money or time, so I stopped doing it.

Isaiah: I was going to say, what?

Michael: But, basically, I learned is … I was like, wait, so I can take something that used to be a hobby of mine and then I can pair that with my degree and my experience, and that actually makes me a good fit to do this and make a career out of it? I was like, all right. Sign me up.

Isaiah: Yeah. I think, you know, expanding beyond the type of analyst that you are … I want to talk a little bit about that, but there’s lots of types of analysts.

Michael: Yes. Yes. I have heard … You mentioned competitive intelligence before, something like that is definitely something. I mean, it’s really anything … Like you said, it’s analysis. That’s why the job’s called analyst, and that’s what you learn to do with the degree. It’s how to take certain forms of data, whatever they are, and make sense out of them and come to a conclusion.

** for the full interviews check out the video above

The post How Isolated PhDs Get Hired appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

How to Nurture Crazy Ideas Aug 03, 2019

Show notes

Skip ahead to:6:20 Show Me The Data19:00 Safi Bahcall44:28 Heather Brown Harding, Ph.D. Does leaving academia seem like a crazy idea? It’s the ideas others deem “crazy” that often leads to your greatest success if you can stay focused, motivated, and learn how to nurture those ideas. This week on the Cheeky Scientist Radio Show we are joined by Safi Bahcall, physicist, biotech entrepreneur, and author of the national bestseller Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries. Safi will talk about the new systems and principles for success, and how the dynamics of group behavior can help support new ideas for growth and change. Safi will share how to find success as you challenge norms, be innovative, and find support ideas that others might deem “crazy”. We are also joined by Heather Heather Brown-Harding, PhD, Assistant Director of Wake Forest Microscopy, who will discuss her transition into a microscopy career and how other PhDs can pursue this career. About Our Guests Safi Bahcall is a physicist, biotech entrepreneur. He is the author of the National Bestseller: Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries where he writes about nurturing radical breakthroughs through revealing some surprising mysteries of group behavior. He received his BA summa cum laude from Harvard and his PhD in physics from Stanford, where he worked with Lenny Susskind in particle physics (the science of the small) and the Nobel laureate Bob Laughlin in condensed matter physics (the science of the many). He was a Miller Fellow in physics at UC Berkeley (the school of the many). After working for three years as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi co-founded a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. Heather Brown-Harding, PhD is currently the assistant director of Wake Forest Microscopy and graduate teaching faculty. Dr. Heather Brown-Harding received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida in Microbiology & Immunology. In graduate school, she spent most of her time on a home-built spinning disc confocal microscope. Heather realized a professorship was not for her and joined Zeiss Microscopy as Account Manager for MIT and surrounding institutions. When transitioning back into academia for core management at Wake Forest University she began working extensively to bring Expert Microscopy to market. ExScope launched in March 2019 and she is now in both academia and industry. Key Takeaways Why you need to know how academia and industry each view time and resources and the mindset shift that will help you cross over.How to reframe failure and criticism in your job transition to gather information through both with curiosity rather than contempt (and how to stay motivated in spite of both!)In industry, how the field of microscopy is presenting new opportunities for PhDs. How Crazy Ideas Can Help PhDs Get Jobs: A Conversation With Safi Bahcall Isaiah: We have a lot of people here who are considering that transition and I’m sure when you were in academia that it was a kind of a big decision too. What led to you making the decision to transition out of academia and wanting to start your business and write? Safi: That’s a great question. I’m actually really excited to be here because when I went into business for the first time, after a couple of years I was put in charge of a program of helping PhDs and MDs and advanced degrees transition from the academic world to the business world. So this is what I did for a living for a while. And one of the things that I would start by saying … A couple of things I would start by saying but one is that the way I would describe it to folks, the transition … I don’t think I set foot off a university until I was about 30 years old. My parents were both scientists. I grew up on the campus of Princeton University. All I knew was scientists and I just got very curious like what happens in the rest of the world outside of university? And I remember I was dating this woman at the time and she was working in an office and I was like, “Wow, that sounds interesting. What’s an office? What exactly is a job? I don’t understand.” … and I was literally 28 years old. So she took me into her … she was a paralegal at the time and she was working in a law firm and she took me in on a Friday afternoon. I remember going around and asking folks, “So could you tell me what you do?” And they’re like, “I really can’t describe it.” I’m like, “Are you happy? No. Are you happy? No.” Literally I went around and asked 15 people like, “Are you happy?” And they were like, “No.” And I was like, that sent me back. That kept me in academia for another couple of years. The way I describe it to folks who are scientists right now, or considering the transition is being an academia is like going to the gym and exercising your left bicep for years, like a decade or 20 years. You may have the best left bicep in the world, and one of the top five left biceps in the world, but the rest of your body is kind of flabby. And the transition to the business world in a lot of jobs, you really are problem solving in a similar kind of creative problem solving way. But you need to exercise much more broadly, all of your muscles. You may not have the best left bicep in the world, you may not be specialists in multivariate differential equations. You certainly won’t be needing that in the business world. But you will learn all sorts of kind of fascinating skills. How to motivate people, how to work within teams, how to influence folks ups down left, right, how to solve problems quickly and effectively and efficiently, how to structure problem solving in very new ways. So it’s like the difference between going to the gym and just exercising one muscle and being a much more broad athletes. So that’s one thing I like to say. Second thing is that you are playing a very different kind of game in the business world than the academic world. And the way to think about it is this, it’s speed chess versus regular chess. And in the academic world- In the academic world, you have in some sense, infinite time and limited resources, especially if you’re into PhD, it will seem like infinite time, but very limited resources. In the business world, it’s flipped 180. I have relatively speaking infinite resources, but limited time. It’s the same kind of problem solving and creativity and trying to figure stuff out. Similar rules of the game, but because of those constraints, it’s a very different game. You have to learn how to solve problems quickly, solve them at the good enough level, not the perfect level. Because the third thing that I tell people that they need to understand when they make this transition is what is valued is different. The rules of the game is different and how you win the game is different. In academia, the goal is originality. Your track record, your career, your publication list, for example. In the business world, the goal is results. The goal is results and it’s not at all about you. It’s about your team. People care about your team and you and how you’re able to motivate people. Why? Because you want to create new things. Let’s say you want to innovate or be an entrepreneur, you want to create new products. It’s never about an individual. Someone can have an idea in a shower, but that’s about 0.1% of it. The 99.9% of it is getting other people excited about your idea, developing market strategy, all sorts of things, product strategy, manufacturing strategy, sourcing strategy, customer strategy, revenue strategy, and implementing all those things. So that’s 99% and that requires a team. So wherein as in academia the focus is on your original ideas, in business, the focus is, it doesn’t really matter where the idea comes from. So that’s in a nutshell how I think about that differences between the two worlds. Isaiah: In the book you talk about a lot of exciting things in turns of phrases and you have this one that’s called a listen to the suck with curiosity. So can you talk a little bit about what that is and how it might be relevant to PhDs? Safi: Sure. And in fact it was a PhD … well actually was an MD who I got that from who was an incredible scientist and researcher who would have won the Nobel prize had he lived a little bit longer, but it was a guy named Judah Folkman who was a Chief of Surgery at Children’s Hospital in Boston. And as a young guy, he came up with a new way to treat cancer, block the blood supply feeding tumors. And at the time he was not only not taken seriously because the only way to treat cancer at the time was chemotherapy, which poisoned tumors or radiation, which burned them. People suggested ideas, nodes, blood supply, what are you talking about? Mysterious substance. It causes tissues to create new blood vessels. That’s crazy. And eventually there were ups and downs, like all sorts of research ups and downs and ups and downs. And at some point the Wall Street Journal published that headline after some people came out and were attacking him saying, “Noted cancer researcher stumbles as other labs failed to reproduce his results.” And that can be a career ending kind of thing. Non reproducible data, especially a national headline. The way most people would react to adversity like this or people rejecting your idea. Whatever you’re working on, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re working on a new project. If you’re a scientist, you’re working on a new idea. When an investor rejects your pitch or someone rejects your idea or a partner walks away, your initial reaction if you poured your heart and soul into it as to dismiss. Oh, these people are idiots. They don’t understand. They don’t know. What are they talking about? And you seek reassurance from, let’s say your friends, your mentors, your mother that you’re on the right track. And what Judah would do, and I found this so typically in so many successful scientists as well as entrepreneurs, is they would take off that defensiveness hat. I mean, they might wear it for a few minutes and Judah would rant privately to me. But then take it off and put on something more like a Sherlock Holmes hat. What you did in that particular instance, unlike others that might publish something or write an angry letter is he called up the guy who did his experiment, we tried to reproduce this experiment, said, “Hey, could you walk me through with your postdoc and your students step-by-step what you did. I just want to understand.” So he sat down with his students and the other guy’s student step by step until they saw where something was going wrong and they uncovered that in shipping and freezing down this protein and shipping it across the country, there was some leakage from the package just in the freezing process that was contaminating the protein and kind of an interesting way. Uncovered the problem, solved it, began working, got a lot of credibility and learned a bunch of new things. So LSC, listen to the suck with curiosity. And here’s why I add that curiosity, especially because if you’re in the business world, you’ll often hear stuff about blah, blah, blah, active listening, blah, blah, blah which basically means repeat what you’ve heard. Well that’s not good enough. Like if someone is telling you your stuff sucks, this doesn’t work, this doesn’t make sense. I’m not really going to buy your product. I’m going to walk away. If you just say, “I hear you, thank you.” And move on, you’ve lost. Why? Because there’s a little … There may very well be if you pull on that thread, and that’s not easy because people don’t want to really give you that information. But if you can put on that Sherlock hat and say, “Could you help me understand?” I know that’s not easy and it’s asking a lot for you to take your time and something, you know, it can be a difficult conversation and people don’t want to do it, but it’d be an enormous favor and gift if you could just walk me through your thinking. And sometimes when you pull on that thread, you’ll find a nugget of gold. You’ll learn something like, “Hey, well there was this competitor from Belgium who has this other product and it has this feature.” And be like, “Wait, what? Really feature?” And you’re like, it takes you two hours to reprogram or do something or meet that need and you have a win. Or this guy said, “You know, I was following all along here, and then I got lost right there and then I just gave up.” And you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s so easy to fix.” So LSC means listen to the suck with curiosity. Get rid of the defensiveness, forget all that active listening. Just try to uncover why. Once you do that, if you ever get very good at doing that, you can identify those little gold nuggets that can make either your idea in science or your product or your service. If you’re an entrepreneur, you can turn it around. And so I actually think of the great … the scientists that I’ve worked with, the Nobel laureates, the greatest inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs. Their skill was less about coming up with new ideas. Their skill was in investigating failure. Everybody can have ideas. Most of the time they fail. The truly great ones keep investigating those failures, and that’s where they learn something useful. Microscopy Career Track: A Conversation With Heather Brown-Harding, Ph.D. Isaiah: I wanted to bring on Heather briefly here to talk about why did you get into this? Because like Safi, you had this bug inside of you where you wanted to do something more, right? You wanted to create something. Kind of like what drives a lot of people that start their own business or write a book. You kind of did that together in this course. What drove you to want to take on creating a program? Heather: While I was still at Zeiss, I attended a Women In Science and Technology mixer to meet other people, and I was surprised that … just out in Worcester … that there were so many people that didn’t know how to use their microscope. That’s less than an hour to Boston, one of the biggest places to be able to get into science in the world. Their university didn’t have someone that was their microscopy director. They didn’t have classes to take. They had these perfectly good microscopes, but no one knew how to take a picture, let alone get actual quantitative data out of this. And so with that, that’s when I reached out to Isaiah and was like, “How do you start this Cheeky Scientist thing?” That’s when we decided that maybe a collaboration would be our best move forward. I was just very motivated to be able to get access to people throughout the world to be able to do quality microscopy, to not be afraid of getting on your microscope, and to have confidence in your images, as well as just being able to get through your projects faster. Obviously I have an extreme love for microscopes, but not everyone does. Some people just want to be able to know what they’re doing, get through it, and move on to their next thing. Especially when you’re in industry, when you have such a small amount of time to get things done, you don’t want to spend all your time troubleshooting an experiment that if you had just a little knowledge, you’d be done. So with that, that’s why I really put in a lot of effort to take all the ideas of microscopy. There’s a lot of physics and chemistry in microscopy, but you don’t need to know every detail. But bringing it down to a level that someone that’s, say, an upper level undergraduate would be able to understand was my goal, so that we could get as many people as possible using their microscopes right, and we could have more pretty pictures, as well as good data, in papers that we were seeing going out. I’m sure that you’ve read a paper that you just wonder, “How did this get past the reviewer? This is terrible.” Isaiah: And I think what’s amazing about your career and yo…

Full show notes at the publisher

Be Likeable, Not Weird, To Get Hired In Industry Jul 19, 2019

Show notes

Skip ahead to:
9:35 Show Me The Data
23:30 Vanessa Van Edwards
45:13 Gabriel Villar, Ph.D.

Are you making employers uncomfortable with your awkwardness?

You can learn how to be less awkward and win over your interviewers.

This week on the Cheeky Scientist Radio Show we are joined by Vanessa Van Edwards, Lead Behavioral Investigator at Science of People and Author of Captivate: The Science of Succeeding With People. As a behavioral scientist and researcher, Vanessa will share science-driven tactics for how to improve your likeability quotient and decode human behavior in interview and networking scenarios to feel more in control, more authentic, and less awkward. We are also joined by Gabriel Villar, PhD, R&D Scientist at Becton Dickinson, who will discuss his R&D Scientist transition (and his second upcoming transition) and how other PhDs can pursue this career.

About Our Guests

Vanessa Van Edwards is Lead Investigator at Science of People. She is the bestselling author of Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People. Vanessa shares tangible skills to improve interpersonal communication and leadership, including her insights on how people work. She’s developed a science-based framework for understanding different personalities to improve our EQ and help you communicate with colleagues, clients and customers.

Vanessa works with entrepreneurs, growing businesses, and trillion dollar companies; and has been featured on CNN, BBC, CBS, Fast Company, Inc., Entrepreneur Magazine, USA Today, the Today Show and many more. She regularly speaks to innovative companies including Google, Facebook, Comcast, Microsoft, and Penguin Random-House. Millions visit her website, scienceofpeople.com, every month for her methods of turning “soft skills” into actionable, masterable frameworks that can be applied in daily life.

Gabriel Villar, Ph.D. is an engaging, entrepreneurial, and innovative mechanistic scientist with over 13 years of experience investigating the molecular and physiological basis of complex traits and behaviors across both traditional and non-traditional model systems (i.e. mice, honey bees). His work is highly interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of genetics, sensory biology, chemical ecology, conservation, animal behavior, infectious diseases, and public health. Much of his research has aimed to address one of the foremost conservation challenges of modern times, the decline of pollinators. He transitioned into his first industry role in March, 2019, where he works as an R&D Scientist at Becton Dickinson, an industry leader in health tech. In a few weeks he will make his second industry transition as he joins Koppert Biological Systems (Ag Tech Company) in a director capacity, to conceive of and drive new R&D and process improvement initiatives.

Key Takeaways

1. The ‘fake it ’till you make it’ idea is causing you to be overlooked and forgotten.

2. During an interview keep a look out for the contempt microexpression, one-sided mouth raise, to know when you need to refocus on building rapport.

3. In industry, R&D is highly collaborative and interdependent where you are working alongside others toward a common tangible and time-bound goal.

Be Likeable, Not Weird, To Get Hired In Industry: A Conversation With Vanessa Van Edwards

Isaiah: So let’s say you identify that you’re being overlooked for jobs or not being able to close on interviews something. Where do you start to change things?

Vanessa: Yeah. In our research we found that one of the biggest problems is that most people learn people skills from extroverts. So if you look at all the resources out there on charisma or extroversion, you know, the quintessential how to win friends influence people. Dale Carnegie’s book, amazing. They were, most of those people are natural people, people. They’re naturally magnetic. They’re very charismatic, they’re extroverts. So they give advice very well meaning advice, like: just be yourself, be more authentic. But if you’re a recovering awkward person like me, I’m absolutely recovering awkward person, I am not a natural people person. So I would read these books and felt like, yes, I love these ideas, but how do I use this?

So what I found is that the worst thing we can do is pretend to be an extrovert. And that is the biggest problem for people who are getting interrupted or overlooked. They feel like they have to fake it till they make it and fake being extrovert to be heard. That’s actually the worst thing to do. And the reason for this is, the studies are very clear, is that our emotions are contagious. So if you’re faking it til you make it, all you’re putting out there is faking it, faking it, faking it. In fact, there was one study, it’s one of my favorite studies. It’s done by Dr. Barbara Wild and she she took people who were smiling and the first set of pictures were people who are genuinely smiling they we’re thinking about a happy moment and then the second set of pictures were people who are just fake smiling, they were told to smile.

Now the pictures look the same. If you were to say, which is the real smile, which the fake smile participants could not tell, which was the real and fake smile. However, when they looked at the real smile, they themselves felt happier. When they look fake smile, they felt nothing. Well, when we talk about being forgotten, when we talk about being overlooked, we’re like, why? Why are people not remembering me? It’s often because we are faking it till we make it. We don’t catch that emotion. We can’t catch that fake. We don’t, we don’t feel that, it doesn’t grip. So what I would say is the very first thing to do is self diagnosed. Are you really an extrovert? What’s your real brand of charisma?

Isaiah: Let’s say you’re going to an interview or other high stakes situation, and you’ve read the body language stuff, the face stuff. You know the working knowledge, but it’s really hard for you to call it up when you need it. So, what do you do to trigger yourself to actually call it up when you need?

Vanessa: Yeah, you ask a really, really good question because it’s usually I get asked how do you read faces? And that’s only part of it, right? The second part is how do you practically remember all the different facial expressions? So there are seven universal facial expressions. They’re called micro expressions. They’re actually 10,000 different facial expressions, but there are seven universal expressions of emotion. They were discovered by Dr. Paul Ekman and they’re great. You can memorize those seven. The second piece is what you mentioned is more important and that’s how do you practically use them?

Sample. Let’s say I’m in an interview as the interviewer, I’m usually very attuned to fear. I really want to see, because every interview everyone says they’re good with everything. Yeah, I can do that. I’m confident with that. I’ve had experience with that. So the emotion that I’m actually really looking for is fear. So that way I have one goal. I’m really looking for one emotion that I really think is going to tell me the most. Now fear, it’s a very easy emotion. So if you want to try this with me, I want you to raise your eyebrows as far up your forehead as they can go and then widen your eyes. That’s a micro expression of fear. Yep. By the way, if you do it for too long, you will begin to feel anxious.

If you actually hold that expression, you begin to feel anxious. The telltale sign of fear is the vertical lines on the forehead, right? So you can see them, those vertical lines that tie in. I got fear and the whites of the eyes. Wow. That’s it I don’t need to remember everything about the face. All I’m looking for is the whites of the eyes with those lines. If I see the whites of the eyes of those lines, I know I got fear. That’s all I’m looking for. So I tuck it away in the back of my head.

So, on the other hand, if I was being interviewed, I would actually probably be looking for contempt. So contempt is the simplest of the micro expressions. It’s a one sided mouth raise. Either side. I would just sit in that for a second. So everyone watching it, you can just sit in contempt.

You kind of begin to feel kind of like smug, like snarky. Yeah, little snarky. It’s a very, very dangerous expression. It’s most often we have a huge body language quiz on our website where we’ve had 25,000 people take this quiz. Contempt is the one that people most often get wrong. Most people think it’s boredom or apathy. So at an interviewer I would be looking for contempt because most people think it’s boredom. But actually you’re seeing a little bit of “I’m better than” a little bit of scorn, a little bit of superiority. And that’s when I would make sure if I saw it in my interviewer’s face, I would make sure I go right back into rapport building, get them back, figure out what is the issue here that’s making them feel like, Nah, I’m better than them.

R&D Scientist Career Track: A Conversation With Gabriel Villar, Ph.D.

Isaiah: Coming from a research background, what are some of the differences that you noticed right away after transitioning the differences in doing research in industry versus academia?

Gabriel: A great question. I mean, I was actually quite shocked, at first when I first transitioned. I mean, there was almost no no overlap in what I was experiencing. Collaboration is huge in Industry. As academics where we are used to a different style of collaboration where it’s okay, we’re collaborating now, but really it’s, you are going into your corner and you’re doing a part of a study independently by herself and then eventually you’ll share an authorship with somebody else. And that’s, that’s what the kind of a collaboration you see and academia but in industry, it’s quite different. You are many times interdependent on other people to drive projects forward. So really what you bring to the table and what others bring to the table need to be complementary. That’s how you end up moving projects forward and getting anywhere in industry. So it’s, it’s a much different version, a much more intense version of collaboration.

Isaiah: In terms of the interview and what did they ask to see on the presentation they wanted to see?

Gabriel: Yeah, a lot of my competencies, not necessarily technical. I mean they wanted me to be able to demonstrate that I had technical competency, but they wanted to see basically how I functioned as an innovator, as a leader. How I dealt with complex problems and issues and process them. You know, what mechanisms still are employed to drive projects forward. How do I deal with a failure? And also, of course, interpersonal skills. I mean, I cannot stress enough, how much that is a part of my day to day job right now. Just working with people, learning to collaborate, influencing people that I don’t have direct authority over all that is critically important. The day to day analysis. I think all those things were tested during that interview process.

** for the full interviews check out the video above

The post Be Likeable, Not Weird, To Get Hired In Industry appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Salary Negotiation Tips From Top FBI Negotiator (For PhDs) Jun 28, 2019

Show notes

Skip ahead to:
7:50 Show Me The Data
23:04 Chris Voss
44:00 Mansi Khanna, Ph.D..

Does the thought of negotiating your salary fill you with fear?

Learn how you can increase your starting salary and negotiate confidently.

In this episode, we are joined by Chris Voss, top FBI negotiator, CEO and Author of Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It. Using his many years of experience in high-stakes negotiations, Chris will share proven negotiation strategies that you can apply in your job search. We are also joined by Mansi Khanna, PhD, Regulatory Writer at Synchrogenix, who will discuss the regulatory writer career track and how other PhDs can pursue this career.

About Our Guests

Chris Voss has used his many years of experience in international crisis and high-stakes negotiations to develop a unique program and team that applies these globally proven techniques to the business world. Chris was the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as the FBI’s hostage negotiation representative for the National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group. During Chris’s 24 year tenure in the Bureau, he was trained in the art of negotiation by not only the FBI but Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School. Chris has taught business negotiation in the MBA program as an adjunct professor at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. He has taught business negotiation at Harvard University, guest lectured at The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, The IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland and The Goethe School of Business in Frankfurt, Germany.

Mansi Khanna, Ph.D. is a regulatory writer at Synchrogenix, a Certara company, where she prepares clinical documentation for national regulatory agencies for assessment of the safety and efficacy of drugs. Her inspiration stemmed during her postdoctoral studies in the Drug Discovery Group at the University of Pennsylvania. She became interested in the final stages of drug development that involves late-stage clinical trials and marketing. During her postdoc, she was also an Editor with the Postdoctoral Editor’s Association and a peer reviewer for multiple journals. In addition to her career, she loves traveling and is never found without a book. She is a big fan of Harry Potter and Cat in the Hat!

Key Takeaways

1. Use questions to shape thinking not to gather information.

2. Get a “that’s right” out of your potential employer.

3. Regulatory writing is different from general medical writing and is a good option for those who want to be connected to drug development.

Salary Negotiation Tips From Top FBI Negotiator: A Conversation With Chris Voss

Isaiah: What are some of the phrases that you use that really get people talking about what might be possible in terms of increasing a salary?

Chris: Well, what we do is we use questions to shape thinking. We don’t really use questions to gather information.

So how am I supposed to do that? I’m trying to shape your thinking into looking at my position. You could ask, what does it take to be successful here? A lot of people don’t ask that question. Instead they ask, what are you looking for in a candidate? Which is a stock question and has a stock answer.

When you say, what does it take to be successful here? an employer hears oh, you’re trying to make sure you’re successful with us as part of our team. You want to say something that’s gonna make them hear a bunch of other things.

And we’ve had a lot of people in job negotiations, you know, there’s always an interview panel on the other side and there’s always a guy in the interview panel doesn’t say a word. What does it take to be successful here? One of my students from Georgetown asked at a job interview, and the guy on the other side that never said a word, leaned forward and said, no one ever asked us that before. And then he laid it out.

Now the, the magic trick that just happened at that point in time, you get somebody who’s telling you, what does it take to be successful in that with that employer. You’ve actually just recruited your first mentor because if they lay that out for you and they’re wrong, they got something at stake. So what they’re going to have a tendency to do from that point on, without telling you is they’re going to look out for ya. You know, they’re going to, they’re going to keep you from getting blindsided. Unofficial mentors are far more important than official mentors. And that’s how you recruited on official mentor.

Isaiah: Another problem that I think the people that are watching here have is just the uncomfortableness of negotiating, They think I don’t want them to take away the job offer. I don’t want to lose. You’ve done some very high stakes negotiation. So how do you approach that? How do you handle that fear, that uncertainty?

Chris: Be in the moment instead of thinking about where you’re going. One of the sayings we have is “Never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better.” I mean the whole idea is to get your focus off of the objective a little bit because the more focused you on our objective, the more tunnel vision you get, the less you see other options and opportunities and the more out of the moment you are and the more you miss stuff.

I mean, I was coaching somebody last night and she was saying, you know what if this happens, you know this didn’t work out last time. I said, look this to some degree, this is like walking a tight rope. The guy walking on the tight rope, doesn’t look at the other side of the Grand Canyon where he wants to go because you’re going to fall off the rope. He looks down at his feet, he focuses on each step. He makes sure each step is right and low and behold he’s on the other side.

So you get a lot better if you just get into the moment, get your head out of where this is going. What if this happens as a disaster? I mean those are all distractions. As soon as you get into the moment and realize there’s a lot of space between yes and no. I don’t have to say yes, I don’t have to say no. I can just respectfully explore and clarify with that. Accepting or rejecting anything the possibilities really opened up.

Isaiah: What, what can you do to have that kind of bonding moment with, with an employer?

Chris: Yeah, it’s actually really simple. You know, it’s the stuff that we’re afraid to say.

You could look at an employer and go like, look, you guys are restricted here. I mean you guys are under a lot of pressure. You know, you got a lot of people inside your company that you really like them, the good people, but you know, you’re a little worried that you’re going to bring somebody else in and be disappointed.

I mean, you guys want to take your company to the next level and you want people that are committed to taking you to the next level. Employees that are not selfish and a not just looking out for themselves at all. You want people that are saying to themselves, what’s in it for us? How do we get to the next level? How do we do a better job feeding our families, putting our families in better houses, putting our kids in better schools? How do we succeed as a group?

Employers going to be blown away by that. That’s when what you say and what they hear is this person wants to make us successful. This person wants to help me have a better life for my family and my children, better future for my children. And that makes you immeasurably valuable and also gives you the opportunity.

Regulatory Writer Career Track: A Conversation With Mansi Khanna, Ph.D.

Isaiah: How did you find out about this career path? How did you get interested in regulatory affairs or regulatory writing?

Mansi: I started getting interested in medical writing specifically during my postdoctoral years at the University of Pennsylvania. I started to look at careers away from the bench because I realized pretty early on during my postdoc that more than actually doing the experiment I enjoyed actually analyzing them. And it didn’t matter to me whether the data was mine or someone else’s in a paper. But that seemed more exciting to me than actually doing the experiment myself. So I started to look at ways in which I could leave the bench but still be associated with the science part of it, where I could still see the data, like data driven careers but not necessarily generating the data myself.

And so medical writing came up. Now medical writing can be of two kinds. One is the regulatory path which I took. And the other one is just regular medical writing. But since I was in the drug discovery group realized that not only do I like analysis of data, but I like to keep up to date with what’s happening in the world of drug development. And so that’s how I chose the regulatory writing and started looking specifically at how I could stay within the realm of regulatory writing as opposed to just medical writing in general.

** for the full interviews check out the video above

The post Salary Negotiation Tips From Top FBI Negotiator (For PhDs) appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Disruptive Career Success Strategies For PhDs Jun 17, 2019

Show notes

Skip ahead to:
06:00 Show Me The Data
26:09 Dr. Patti Fletcher
53:40 Matthew Jefferson, Ph.D.

Are you struggling to feel ‘ready’ to transition into your next role? Especially as a woman in STEM?

Learn how you can cultivate a success mindset to develop confidence and use disruption to drive equity.

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Patti Fletcher who is an Award-Winning Business Influencer, Bestselling Author, Innovation Catalyst, and Speaker. She is the author of Disrupters – Success Strategies From Women Who Break The Mold. Dr. Patti discusses how you can cultivate a success mindset and make the transition into a position that is outside of your comfort zone. We are also joined by Matthew Jefferson, PhD, Medical Science Liaison at Viela Bio, who will discuss the MSL career track and how other PhDs can pursue this career. If you’ve been struggling with taking the next steps in your job search you will want to watch this episode.

About Our Guests

Dr. Patti Fletcher is included in the coveted list “18 Women to Watch in 2018” by Brown, Brothers, Harriman, Dr. Patti Fletcher, is an internationally sought-after speaker, seasoned tech executive, award-winning marketing and business influencer, board member, angel and investor. Dr. Patti has appeared on NASDAQ, Cheddar, Bloomberg, and Greater Boston among others. Patti writes for Entrepreneur.com, Inc., The Guardian, Forbes and The Digitalist, and has contributed to/been featured in Time Magazine, RealSimple, Al Jazeera, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Muse and The Huffington Post and many more. She is the author of best-selling Disrupters: Success Strategies From Women Who Break The Mold.

Matthew Jefferson, Ph.D. is a Medical Science Liaison (MSL) for Viela Bio, supporting the launch of a first-in-class therapy for Neuromyelitis Optica (NMO). Having earned a PhD in Neuroscience from Iowa State, Matt has a background in basic neuroimmunology research and an immediate expertise in neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration. As a researcher, experienced educator, and patient advocate, Matt’s passion is to communicate science for clinical communities and ultimately support the patient journey for those suffering from debilitating neurological diseases. Matt currently lives in Ames, Iowa with his wife Amanda and their now three corgis (Emma, Ellie, & Edgar). He enjoys collecting and listening to records, disc golfing, and being active outside as often as possible.

Key Takeaways

1. You will never be ‘ready’ to take on a position that is outside your comfort zone but this is no reason not to move forward and reach for higher level positions.

2. Look at the systems to identify and disassemble inequity.

3. You can transition into a MSL role right out of graduate school and it is a position where you will interact with a variety of people and build your communication skills.

Disruptive Career Success Strategies For PhDs: A Conversation With Dr. Patti Fletcher

Isaiah: What can someone do to overcome imposter syndrome and system-wide bias? What can they do to seize the opportunities when they present themselves?

Dr. Patti: Yeah, it’s a really good question and an important one. And, and going back to what you and Jeanette were talking about before I joined, everybody has imposter syndrome. So imposter syndrome is really important in me. I’m a disruptor and scientists tend to be disruptors too. As you see a status quo that’s no longer working, it’s inefficient, it’s ineffective, it doesn’t provide value in a meaningful way. And you have to create a new status quo, right? So you’re disrupted. That’s what you do as a disruptor. You assemble people to do that and that’s great. So as a disruptor, taking the job you’ve never taken before, doing something unprecedented, you can’t help but feel imposter syndrome.

And guess what? That’s a good thing. As a disruptor, you have to, because ultimately what you’re thinking is, “Oh crap, I haven’t done this before. Who am I to think that I can do this? They’re going to find out.” Well, guess what? When someone hires you, they already know what they’re getting and, and if you are a woman in that position, you should feel good about yourself because you’re bucking the system. We are conditioned as humans to believe that if a man doesn’t know something, he takes a job. If a woman doesn’t know something, she takes the class. So that’s enough for me. I’ve always taken the job, like we said in the beginning, so I suffer from imposter syndrome. That’s number one.

Number two, I focus in on competence instead of confidence. So confidence means that I’ve done this before. You’re doing something unprecedented, whether it’s for you or someone else instead, so you can’t have confidence. Instead, think about competence. You are already a scientist. Your job is to break stuff down, write the scientific method, ask a bunch of questions, and then you ask more questions and more questions and more questions. That’s the competence you have. Breaking down something that’s extremely complicated, complex, something that you’re probably going to bring your unique perspective. Build onto the wall of knowledge there you have what it takes, and I have to tell you, I coach a lot with women who are new CEO’s or new board members. They have careers that are 30 or 40 years long. They’ve done incredible things and yet they suffer from imposter syndrome because they forget that when they were brought onto that board or brought on a CEO, those board members knew what they were getting. They don’t feel you need to have the confidence. They just want you to have the competence to figure it out.

Everybody needs to understand you have the competence to figure it out. Start from where you are that will get you to where you need to be. And that’s really the topic around equity. Equity means I’m gonna meet you where you are, understand your journey’s different and give you tools in order to overcome whatever you need, barriers you have and all that fun stuff. Do that for yourself as well. Start from where you are. Take inventory of what you must know and what other people can help you with.

Medical Science Liaison Career Track: A Conversation With Matthew Jefferson, Ph.D.

Isaiah: What I see happen to a lot of PhDs is they think they have an unlimited amount of time or it’s too far away, so they just wait and they procrastinate and they wait till like their day before they defend and they’re going to be unemployed to really start job searching. So what did you do to stay on track?

Matthew: The informational interviews for me were overwhelmingly motivating. Like too many of us, I had a tumultuous PhD experience. I had the clinical depression, all that, you know, all that fun stuff. And you know, connecting with others and hearing that the grass truly was greener on the other side, kept me hungry. It kept me motivated. You know, it was like a free dose of Prozac talking to an MSL who said, yeah, just, make it through the PhD and once you get here, it’s the best job in the world. I believe that I had the confidence in myself and I was like I can add to an organization, I can add that value.

** for the full interviews check out the video above

The post Disruptive Career Success Strategies For PhDs appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

How PhDs Find Meaningful Work May 31, 2019

Show notes

Skip ahead to:
07:35 Show Me The Data
21:19 Dr. Alise Cortez
52:02 Brian Getson
1:07:20 Brent Ware, Ph.D.

Meaningful work is not exclusive to academia, as a PhD you can find meaningful and purposeful work in industry.

Learn how you can secure a high-paying and meaningful industry career.

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Alise Cortez, who helps you to more meaningfully and purposely connect with your work to achieve greater fulfillment, more impactful results, and harmonic work-life integration. We are also joined by Brent Ware, Ph.D., Medical Device Analyst at Medtronic. He will discuss how he made the transition out of academia and what it’s like working as a Medical Device Analyst. And on this episode we have a special appearance by immigration lawyer, Brian Getson. He will discuss the biggest immigration changes that international PhDs need to be aware of, don’t miss it.

About Our Guests

Dr. Alise Cortez is a Speaker, Consultant, Published Author, Radio Show /Podcast Host, and Purpose/Engagement Catalyst based in Dallas, Texas. Having developed her expertise within the Human Capital / Organizational Excellence industry over the last 20 years, today she is focused on helping companies, leaders, and individuals across the globe to more meaningfully and purposely connect with their work to achieve greater fulfillment, more impactful results, and harmonic work-life integration. She is a sought-after speaker and management consultant to organizations, conducts leadership development and employee engagement programs, and facilitates retreats to discover and grow your purpose.

Brian Getson Esq. has extensive experience preparing EB-1A, EB-1B and NIW petitions for scientific researchers throughout the United States. After graduating cum laude from Duke University, Mr. Getson attended The University of Pennsylvania Law School. Upon receiving his law degree in 1995, he joined the Firm and concentrated his practice on immigration law. Mr. Getson is a frequent speaker on the green card process for scientific researchers at annual meetings of the world’s most prestigious scientific organizations including The American Society for Cell Biology, Materials Research Society, American Chemical Society, The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, American Physical Society, and The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Mr. Getson has lectured to other immigration lawyers at continuing legal education courses, and has been selected multiple times as a Pennsylvania Super Lawyer. He is a member of the American Immigration Lawyer’s Association.

Brent Ware Ph.D. is from Shawnee Mission, Kansas, and earned a B.S./M.S. in biological systems engineering from Kansas State University and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Colorado State University. Driven by a passion to advance healthcare with engineering, he recently transitioned into industry as a medical device analyst with Medtronic’s Heart Valves Division. There, he sees how PhDs can apply their talents and skills towards improving the world around us if they persevere through their job search. When he’s not at work, Brent teaches Sunday school and gets as many laps in the pool as possible.

Key Takeaways

1. Meaning and connection to your work is essential for fulfillment and will allow you to perform better and achieve greater results.

2. If you’re an international PhD looking to get hired in the US, it is possible, you just need to know your options and be prepared to explain them clearly to any potential employers.

3. Working in industry offers the opportunity to be close to science, close to patients and for your work to have a tangible, positive impact on society.

How PhDs Find Meaningful Work: A Conversation With Dr. Alise Cortez

Isaiah: Why is meaning finding meaning in your work so important for everybody, including PhDs?

Alise: From my vantage point, the work that I do as a logotherapist in the purpose of engagement space, what we’ve learned, if you really pay attention, many people are in a meaning vacuum an existential vacuum. Bu you can fill that with meaning. The higher wellbeing you have, the more effective you are and the happier you are. So of course that’s what I’m up to with some people, helping people be present and find more meaning in their lives and their work. And the good news is we can do that as human beings, we’re extremely creative in that way. And so the meaning piece is really what drives you. You used the word engagement before and actually, in the purpose of meaning space, that’s what I claim as being a subject matter expert, what we’re vying for really first and foremost is fulfillment, not necessarily engagement. So kind of fulfillment replaces the word engagement if you will. It’s the next level up, right? So what happens is when we cultivate meaning in our lives and our work, we then become fulfilled. The byproduct is that we’re happy and that we’re engaged in why engagement is important is because it drives our performance, our persistence and our willingness to stay in an organization.

Isaiah: So what are some things you can do or questions you can ask yourself to figure out what might be most important to you in the realm of meaning? What might be meaningful to you in life? What might be fulfilling to you in life?

Alise: Ah! I say ah, because I researched how people experience meaning in their work in relation to the identities and I found these 15 modes of engagement and that would be one place to look. If you go to my website, alisecortezs.com the research tab shows that. And what I found is when people read that Isaiah, they start to recognize, oh you mean people experienced work differently than me? I thought there was just one way. Yes and no. There isn’t. In fact, what we find is that we as PhDs, we do have a need to use our brains. And so that inquiry into the cognitive space is usually pretty important. Or to solve really wicked nasty problems is important to us sometimes. But other people really need to be able to meaningfully connect with other human beings or to know that their values are being utilized at work and through their work.

And so back to what you said about know thyself, it’s really important to get clear about the times you do feel fulfilled. When you do find yourself feeling fulfilled, what are you doing? Cause it’s that feeling Isaiah, right? That we need to be able to propel ourselves through the hard stuff that happens in life. Whether it’s at work, whether it’s something atrocious happens in the rest of our life that throws us off board. We need to hang on to that feeling of meaning because that’s what fills our tank.

Medical Device Analyst Career Track: A Conversation With Brent Ware, Ph.D.

Isaiah: When it comes to your career path, can you tell us a little bit about it? What do you do specifically? What does it look like day to day?

Brent: So I wouldn’t say that there is a standard day, but my role is to look at why heart valves fail in the clinic after they’d been implanted in a patient. And that could be anything from getting on the phone and calling a doctor’s office to talking with the salesperson to even reading about it in literature articles and then being able to take all the individual pieces and put them together to tell a complete story to the FDA or just some of the regulatory body throughout the world.

Isaiah: How did you find out about this role? How did you even know it existed?

Brent: This was actually something I didn’t about know beforehand. But I was talking with the recruiter, a recruiter back towards the end of last year, who thought that my background in biomedical engineering would be a good fit for this role. He and was able to make that match and land me an interview. And when I got to the interview they realized that, you know, they can’t train you in school to do a job like this, but can you be organized, can you ask the right questions and can you learn quickly on the job and that’s what what they were really trying to tease out during the interview.

Green Card Q&A For PhDs: A Conversation With Brian Getson

Isaiah: The first question that we have teed up here is does someone need a job offer to self file for a green card based on their research accomplishments?

Brian: So the answer Isaiah is yes and no. Okay. So there’s two classifications where a foreign national can file for a green card, they’re the EB1, an extraordinary ability aliens classification. And that’s really only going to be used by people from China or India because there’s a backlog right now for the rest of the world. And then there’s the national interest waiver petition. And again, that is a long wait for people from China and India while there’s no wait for people from the rest of the world. So for those categories, you do not need an employer to sponsor you. You can file the green card petition by yourself and you should be okay. However, immigration wants to know what you’re going to be doing. They’re not giving you a green card to flip hamburgers at McDonald’s or work at Walmart.

They’re giving you a green card so that you can continue your research in your field. So while you are self filing you have to have plans for work. The EB1, a legal standard is plans for work in the United States. The NIW legal standard is that you’re well positioned to continue your proposed endeavor. I really don’t like to file it way before somebody graduated their PhD because after you graduate your PhD and you have your OPT in, you’re working. Now it’s easy to say to immigration, here’s my plans for work. I’m in the OPT job. I’m going to keep working in this job if you give me a green card or if I change jobs, it’ll still be in my field.

** to hear the full interviews watch the full episode in the video above.

The post How PhDs Find Meaningful Work appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

How PhDs Get Hired Through Loose Connections May 17, 2019

Show notes

Skip ahead to:

07:00 Show Me The Data
28:20 David Burkus
1:02:00 Disharee Nath, Ph.D.

Struggling to make networking a part of your job search? Feel like networking is awkward and doesn’t work?

Learn the science behind networking and how you can apply these teachings in your networking efforts.

In this episode, we are joined by networking expert David Burkus. David is the best selling author of the book Friend of a Friend, he uses the science of human behavior to teach how you can grow your network and build key connections. We are also joined by, Science Writer, Disharee Nath who will share insight into this career track and how other PhDs can pursue a similar career. If you’ve been struggling with networking or you want to take your networking to the next level this is a must watch episode.

About Our Guests

David Burkus is a best-selling author, a sought after speaker, and associate professor of leadership and innovation at Oral Roberts University. His newest book, Friend of a Friend, offers readers a new perspective on how to grow their networks and build key connections—one based on the science of human behavior, not rote networking advice. He’s delivered keynotes to the leaders of Fortune 500 companies and the future leaders of the United States Naval Academy. His TED talk has been viewed over 1.9 million times and he is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review.

Disharee Nath did her bachelors in Bio-technology from India, and then a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse NY, graduating Dec 2018. Towards the end of her PhD she realized that she wanted to go into communication-based roles. She joined Cheeky Scientist and made her job search a priority. Her current job offer came the day after her last day at graduate school. In February 2019, she joined as a Science Writer at the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). Her job lets her explore her inner creativity to explain science, and she says “I love every moment of it!”

Key Takeaways

1. Ditch your traditional definition of networking that makes you feel awkward and instead focus on investing in the network that you are already a part of.

2. Start by reengaging with your dormant connections. Reach out to people from your undergraduate days etc, just send them a short note saying that you were thinking about them. Don’t ask for anything.

3. There is someone in your network right now who can give you a job referral. You just have to do the work to warm up and re-ignite the connections you have with the people you already know.

How PhDs Get Hired Though Loose Connections: A Conversation With David Burkus

Isaiah: So can you help us understand why networking might be important and why it actually does work and matter even to PhDs?

David: Yeah, and here’s what I’ll say is the bad news is that you’re already in a network, but that’s also good news, right? So let’s say networking feels awkward, and that is true and there is solid research that even says that people who were asked to think about a time when they have to make a professional connection are more likely to have subconscious thoughts of wanting to get clean. So networking literally does make people feel dirty. I get it. The challenge I think for a lot of us is that we’re, we’re narrowing down our definition of networking. We think it means just making new contacts, meeting total strangers. Go into that cocktail party, doing the hand shake, pressing flesh, trading business cards, that kind of stuff. And I mean that feels awkward, but the good news is, is actually pretty ineffective to. I think a better perspective is that networking is anything that we do to understand and navigate the network that we’re already a part of.

So you are already embedded inside a network. And the way that I say and a lot of times is that the best frame of mind is you can’t grow your network, can’t improve your network, can’t build your network, all of those trite phrases because you don’t have a network. It’s not yours. You don’t own it. You exist inside of a network already. Your job is to figure out where you are in network and then how to go and be connected to the people that you want to be connected to. The best way forward to most of that is the people that you already know, or people that are one introduction way. So if those things make you feel sleazy, you have my permission to skip those events entirely from here on out. You just have to replace them with things that we know actually help people navigate the network.

Isaiah: I think warming up those dormant connections is a crucial first step. The second step you just alluded to was you said either gift giving or looking at the fringes. So where, where do we go next?

David: I would put the gift giving thing as part of that first step of rewarming. Right. And there’s other things that you can do to like it. So alumni, which is a great source. I actually tell a lot of people like if you already had great active on things like LinkedIn and Facebook, that’s awesome. We’ll have your list of connections and then scroll all the way down because most of those are sorted by frequently contacted to infrequent contact. Or if you use Gmail, if you’re like me, you never clear out your sent messages. Which means that there are sent messages from five or six years ago in there. So if you bothered to scroll all the way down, you’re going to see names and think , I haven’t thought of that person in forever. So once you have that sort of target list, it becomes a gift giving as a way rewarm them.

So what I like to do is actually you make out that list of what your targets are and then you just get in the habit of keeping an open mind, trying to keep them at the forefront of your mind. Can read an article that mentioned the company that they might work at where you read an article that reminds you of something that you talked to them three or four years ago. If you have nothing else, I will tell you this is the easiest way to jump start a conversation. If you have nothing else to do and you’re not a lot of money to give random gifts and lots of people send them an email that just says this, hey, I was thinking about you today and I hope you’re well, no reply needed and then just sign it now why does that work?

That works because only the most like awkward toxic people would be mad at you because you were thinking about them and wanted to send good vibes. The no reply needed sends a little signal that you don’t have an agenda. You’re not trying to recruit them into your network marketing thing. Like there’s no agenda here. You’re just, you’re just wanting to catch up it, etc. They will almost always reply like, and when I tell people to do this, eight out of 10 times, they come back to them and say, yeah, they totally, they replied and we had this great conversation, but people love to just hear that you were, you were thinking about them. If you act, if you’ve literally, we’re thinking about them instead of just thinking about them because you saw them on your LinkedIn list, right? Then it’s even better because you can tell them why and you can jumpstart that conversation.

Science Writer Career Track: A Conversation With Disharee Nath, Ph.D.

Isaiah: Why did you want to get into a scientific communications role? Why did you decide to leave academia?

Disharee: Yeah. So a year ago I was wondering the same thing, like what would I do, where would I go? And I’m a good point for me to start was to really understand what I wanted to do and what was I good at. So looking back, I did a lot of inner reflection and trying to understand what I liked. And I realize that the part of my PhD that I liked the most was when I was presenting at the conferences, at seminars or just having people over explaining my work to them. And I talked to my committee members about going to a communication space career and they really encouraged me to it. And, doing those reflections, I realized that was probably the place for me to go. And then I started talking to people who were in those positions to kind of consolidate my understanding of them and my eagerness and wanting to go into those roles. So it was, it was a learning curve for me also. And also getting over the mental block of not being a scientist at the bench, but I kind of knew like towards the latter half of my PhD that I didn’t want to be at the bench anymore. I just had it in my head. It took me awhile to kind of accept that and go there.

Isaiah: So I want to dig into the networking piece again. I know networking helped you in terms of your career. What did you do networking wise? What, what actually led to you finding the position?

Disharee: It’s funny me coming after the David Burkus today to talk about this because I did get my job through a friend of a friend. So that was, that was like when I saw it coming it was like wow. It was perfect. All right. So I actually focused a lot on networking and by networking I actually did what David was saying, to reach out to my loose connection. So I reached out to a lot of my alumni from my undergraduate as well as my graduate school. And I remember I reconnected with a lot of my friends from back in undergrad who are right now in the US in different industries. I remember one of the alumni from my current graduate school who helped me a lot with my resume, he is one of the reasons I got an understanding of how much I need to change my original before the job.

So I’m really grateful for it to those people. And the person that I got my job through, I have met her at my friend’s place once and my friend’s wedding a second time. I only ever met them twice in my entire life. And when I heard that she used to work at JoVe I reached out to her asking about the company and how she liked. She was an ex employee. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting a referral. It just wanted to know about her and her work and the company. It turns out she knew the director of my department and she connected me with him. So I got a director referral to get into the job that I am right now. Going in I didn’t think I was going to get a referral. That wasn’t even my intention. I just wanted to know more about the people in my network as well as the work they do and and led to where I am today.

** to hear the full interviews watch the full episode in the video above.

The post How PhDs Get Hired Through Loose Connections appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

PhDs Are Leaders & Managers May 06, 2019

Show notes

Skip ahead to:

03:40 Show Me The Data
13:20 James Robbins
27:30 Ewa Czekanska, Ph.D.
43:15 Evguenia Alechine, Ph.D.

Want to learn how you can not only get hired into a management position, but how to truly succeed in the role?

Learn how PhDs can become better leaders and managers to find success in industry.

In this episode, we are joined by James Robbins, Author, Speaker, & Motivation Specialist, who will discuss how you can learn to not only find your own motivation but how to motivate and inspire others. He is an expert at helping people become great leaders – exactly what you need to be to get hired into those management level positions you deserve as a PhD. We are also joined by, Ewa Czekanska, Ph.D., Life Science Sales Specialist at VWR. She will share inside tips about what it’s like to work in sales as a PhD and how you can pursue a similar career path. And finally we have Evguenia Alechine, Ph.D., Medical Writer, joining us. She will discuss how she made her transition into Medical Writing and what you need to know about successfully transitioning into a Medical Writing career.

About Our Guests

James Robbins is a rare mix of management consultant, change specialist, adventurer and motivational speaker. He speaks to audiences worldwide, helping them raise their performance to match their potential. He has been helping equip and transform leaders for over 20 years. In 2012 James wrote Nine Minutes on Monday; The Quick and Easy Way to Go From Manager to Leader. The book went on to be named the 2012 Business Book of the Year by Canada’s Globe and Mail. James’ style of teaching has set him apart as a master communicator, combining stories from his adventures with practical truths that help audiences make simple changes that stick. Audiences are both inspired and equipped during his time on the stage. While James loves planning new adventures, his greatest expedition is raising his three teenagers.

Ewa Czekanska, Ph.D. has a master in biology in Poland and then pursued her post-doctoral studies in cell biology and regenerative medicine at the AO Research Institute in Switzerland. After successful time as a PhD student, she moved to the UK to work as a post-doctoral research scientist at the Southampton University. During this time she worked on an interdisciplinary and collaborative research project while also experiencing teaching to medical students. Through this teaching experience she realised that her personal development was to be focused on working with people and being up to date with recent developments in various subjects of science, rather than specialising in one very specific subject. Then, she moved away from the bench and started working in a commercial role as a technical sales specialist in a company providing services for biotech and pharma (Oxford Genetics). Currently, Ewa is a Life Science Specialist at VWR International (part of Avantor).

Evguenia Alechine, Ph.D. earned her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has been working in the medical writing industry since 2015 as a freelance writer, editor and communications consultant. She is an active member of EMWA and co-editor of the Medical Writing journal. Evguenia is also the program leader of the Cheeky Scientist advance program Medical Writers Organization.

Key Takeaways

1. Leadership about more than being a manager, it’s about having a vision and getting people excited about what they are working on.

2. To grow your leadership skills, focus on people not on tasks.

3. Working in sales is not like the stereotype, there is lots of problem solving, relationship building and collaborative work that makes it a great position for PhDs.

4. The Medical Writing field is very diverse, covering everything from regulatory and technical writing to journalism and illustrations.

PhDs Are Leaders & Managers: A Conversation With James Robbins

Isaiah: What is the difference between a leader and a manager and how do you combine the two? How do you separate the two?

James: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of talk about those two terms. But, the reality is when people think of management, they think of the day to day execution. But, leadership’s more than that. It’s not just about getting things done and reaching goals and stuff. Leadership goes beyond that. There’s an inspirational component. There’s an investment in your people. There’s belief in people. There’s casting vision. Not just yourself, but pulling people along with you for the ride.

In other words, it’s like… Management, you’ve gotta be good at getting people to do tasks. But, the leadership component is getting people excited to do them with you. Yeah, like I said, it’s a challenge for a lot of people because it’s easy to get sucked into the day to day.

Isaiah: How do you become a good leader? Especially for the people that are watching this, we tend to kind of live in the weeds as PhDs.

James: Yeah. That’s a great question. You hit the nail on the head, in terms of the number one problem, to be honest, that it is hurting engagement. So, that’s my field, right? I go into companies and I help their managers take a shift into be more inspirational leaders and engage their staff.

Again, the problem is, it’s not that people don’t want to be great leaders, it’s just that they’re so busy. They’re overwhelmed with how much they’ve got to get done because they’re working managers. They have their job to do, but then they also have to lead these people.

We still are in the culture of somebody who does great gets promoted, and now they’ve got to lead staff. But, an incredible shift has to take place once you start leading people because it’s no longer about tasks anymore. Now, it’s about moving people. If you can’t learn how to move people, you’re not going to be successful as a leader and you just won’t make it. So, that’s the challenge for a lot of managers today.

Isaiah: What’s the best way to motivate others to hit task based goals?

James: So, it all starts with having a good foundation. You know, we hear about trust and leadership. But honestly even deeper than trust it comes from caring about your people. This is the main point I make to every audience I speak at is that it’s moving your leadership from transactional to relational.

So we understand transactional, right. We go to the grocery store, we give them money, they give us food. It’s a transaction, we’re fine. But, when it comes to dealing with human beings we’re all hardwired for this thing called reciprocity. So, that’s why I say if we go out for lunch and I decide, “Hey, I’m going to buy you lunch.” You’re going to feel like, “Okay, well only if I can get it next time.” It’s just wired into us.

So, the same thing happens in a workplace. When you can make sure that you’re caring about your staff, like when they really feel like, “Hey, my boss is invested in me. They know my spouses name. They know the name of my kids. From time to time they ask me about it.” Just even those little things right there it changes the dynamic of the relationship and it sets up reciprocity, increases trust. Then people want to work for you because they don’t want to let you down, and they don’t want to see you fail. So that’s an important part of it right there.

The second piece to this is helping people shift their thinking about their job, you know, if we really want to talk about motivation. I use the example sometimes of imagine that you’ve got two guys that have to mow their lawn, and on the same street. One guy doesn’t want to mow his lawn because he just doesn’t want to mow his lawn. But the HOA sends him this angry letter like, “Hey, we’re going to fine you if you don’t mow his lawn.” Well, in the end he mows his lawn. He’s motivated but it’s an external motivator.

Meanwhile, the guy living beside him he loves to mow his lawn. He loves the way it looks, he loves this feeling of being a good neighbor. He loves the smell of fresh cut grass. In other words, so he mows his lawn. So, you take a look at this, both guys get their lawn cut. In other words the job gets done, it gets executed. But who does a better job mowing their lawn? The second guy, right? Who blows grass all over the street and doesn’t care? Oh, it’s the first guy.

So, think about it, both were motivated. Both got the job done but not with the same amount of proficiency. What’s the difference? The difference comes down to one thing: how they think about the task. Because one guy had too, and one guy gets to. When a leader can go in and help his or her people shift how they think about what it is they’re doing, link it to something bigger. Link it to a goal, the mission, how it’s impacting people, how it’s impacting you. Something changes inside us as humans and we shift from an external motivator to an intrinsic one. Then everything changes after that.

Life Science Sales Specialist Career Track: A Conversation With Ewa Czekanska, Ph.D.

Isaiah: Why did you decide to transition out of academia way back in the beginning of your transition?

Ewa: Sure. So, it’s a very good question and I wish I knew that earlier on, what I know now about the insights that I’ve had. And that they happened much faster. But, everything takes time. As you said, I was really happy with pursuing the post-doctoral studies. Then I moved into the academia. From Independent Research Institute to academia. That was a big jump I would say, and big mentality switch. I realized I don’t really get this environment. I don’t really want to compete against my colleague who sits next to me, getting the grant. Being in a position whether it’s me or you. I didn’t understand why can’t we do something collaboratively.

There’s, unfortunately, too many peers, there’s not enough jobs. Not enough positions and there’s a lot of competition for the grants. So, that was something that was not suiting there. Also, I had a very great advantage that I worked with a technician who could do part of my job. I realized that actually I’m really happy not being in the lab rather than being with the people. So I think that was quite clear at the time that I should actually look for something else.

It was not easy, though, to realize this.

Isaiah: So what does your sales position look like currently? Can you talk a little bit about what you do, the relationships you build, the teaching, et cetera?

Ewa: Yes. So, in my current position it’s a little bit a mix between realized science, specialized sales position and account management position I have to say. This is because I work with customers in one account. Under the contract that the company wanted. So, we are in the phase of implementation and hence there is a lot of problem solving. A lot of meetings with customers, scientists and with suppliers as I’m still learning into the role.

It’s interacting with people in house, in company solving the problem. So helping me to close the opportunity. It’s also a lot of bio teaching as well because my role involves setting up seminars, exhibitions. Something that can help customers. This actually can be driven by them all they want. If they tell me what they want that’s great. If they tell me what they want help with, and that’s fantastic.

There’s also a lot of training for myself still. I actually went through some re-induction recently because I’ve been in the role for a bit more than six months now. It was a good time to go back and actually meet the people I’ve met in my first or second week of the company and go and talk to them with problems, or ask them the question. Like, from the real life of the job.

Medical Writer Career Track: A Conversation With Evguenia Alechine, Ph.D.

Isaiah: Why were you drawn to medical writing?

Evguenia: Well my first job was as an editor. Then I started doing more writing. After academia, what I noticed was that I enjoy so much doing the editing part. I used to do it a lot with my colleagues, just reviewing their papers, their PowerPoint presentations, posters. I always had a very strong eye for detail so I was always nitpicking, okay, so there is like two spaces here. There is a comma missing here. I also, when I was writing my thesis, it was clear to me I enjoyed more the pure writing part and not so much writing about my own results. I didn’t see myself as a typical academic researcher but I did like the little bit of creativity and literature research of my PhD.

After that, it took me some time. It was not straight forward out of academia, but I realized that Medical Writing was exactly what I wanted to do.

Isaiah: Do you see a lot of diversity in the types of positions? Not just the titles but in the work structure? Small companies, large companies, freelancers, et cetera?

Evguenia: Yeah. Again, you have such a variety there. There are big companies that can hire you either to work office space or even remote but working for big companies. You have startup companies that hire a lot of scientists to do their writing. This can be more like scientific writing towards the technological side of things. Or maybe like medical writing or of course editors. Then there are so many people who are working as freelancers for themselves or starting their own companies. Even these people they may end up working for these big companies as well. You can be a freelancer or you can have your own company and working for Big Pharma if that’s your thing, or maybe doing regulatory writing. There are like so many ways that you can go around it. There’s no, it’s definitely not like the typical one size fits all. I think people who want to get into medical writing, they first need to get a clear picture what they want. Like what’s their typical or ideal day in their lives? Do they enjoy working in big teams, managing the teams or more like following orders and being told what to do. Having the flexibility of working on their own or they maybe need to work in an office. Because of this so many options, you can get into anything.

** to hear the full interviews watch the full episode in the video above.

The post PhDs Are Leaders & Managers appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

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