Career Development Meeting

Boyer Hall 6th Floor Conference Room

Tuesday 20th June, 2006

Chair: Sehat Nauli (SN)

Attending: Marcus Kaufmann (MK), Catherine Millar (CM), Graham Davies (GD) & Yungok Ihm (YI)

Election of new Vice Presidents

The election time and date will be discussed at the next SoPS Executive Committee Board Meeting to occur on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006. SN has agreed to serve as VP of the Career Committee until December 2006

GD mentioned a couple of things related to the SoPS in general. There are varying amount of resources available for Postdoc Society at the various UCs. UCLA is probably right in the middle. GD would like SoPS to have more resources/budget to plan events but also to have a backbone staff that would take care of the logistics of events such as providing food etc. In order to achieve this, the SoPS will have to write a letter convincing UCLA administration that a separate budget hast to be set aside for SoPS. All members of the Career Committee will work on writing a draft to give to GD as soon as possible.

Brown Bag Lunches

Two BB Lunches are planned for August and September.

In August, SN will coordinate with Earl Weinstein from the UCLA Technology Transfer Group for a lunch between 12-2p. Dr. Weinstein got his Ph.D at MIT working on micro RNA and is currently working with UCLA scientists interested in starting companies or licensing their technologies to other companies.

In September, MK will plan a lunch with Eric Scerri, a Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Dr. Scerri studies how chemical concepts could be explained through Physics as well as how certain aspects of Chemistry is being taught.

Events

Two events are planned for Fall 2006.

A seminar discussing various aspects of time management for postdocs and faculty. This event will be organized by Maggie Wang with the help of SN. GD suggested a potential speaker, Prof. Sandra Schmid from The Scripps Research Institute. Maggie/SN will contact her before our committee next meeting.

A seminar on writing will be organized by MK. MK contacted Michael Alley at the Univ of Virginia, who wrote a book on scientific writing. As it happened, Prof Alley usually gives daylong workshops on writing. Given the cost associated with flying him to UCLA and hosting a 1-day event, this is probably not going to happen anytime soon. He did suggest a few names of potential speakers to MK and MK will investigate which ones would be available to come before our committee next meeting.

There were some discussions about what future events will be interesting. YI mentioned that she's mostly interested in events exploring academic careers. Based on our Committee's experience in the past, the most well-attended events were those about academic careers for example: the Hiring Committe, Surviving as an Asssistant Professor etc. Less attended events were those exploring optional careers such as the Careers in the Liberal Arts. Despite the decreasing number of postdocs getting jobs in academia (from ~60% in 1960s to ~20% now), that still seems to be the type of jobs that everyone prepares for. The committee will discuss in the future possible ways to inform postdocs about some statistics regarding employment in academia, as opposed to industry and government as well as some other places.

Suggestions through email
Julie Akana sent an email to suggest future events that the Committee should consider:
1. Non-traditional career paths such as science writing, editing, project management
2. Perfecting your resume
3. Networking
4. Working a career fair