Editors' Note: This month Next Wave introduces a new columnist, Kathie Sindt. You may have heard of her already; she's the Kathie from our "Ask Kathie" forum. Her new column, Career Choices, will appear the first week of each month. As you walk into the room, your host introduces you to someone you have not met. After idle chatter about the weather, the question arises, "So, what do you do?" Quic...
I have a suggestion for your New Year's resolution: Live each day to the fullest. I know that might not seem like advice appropriate for a career-advice column. Let me tell you a story and offer an explanation why I think that it's important advice for anyone thinking about his or her career. Over the past few weeks, I've been struggling with what to write for this month's column. Like many peopl...
The debate around the table intensified. The recently interviewed candidate had a specific skill the research team wanted to add to their group, and a fantastic pedigree they thought would add to their credibility as they applied for future funding. However, half of the team lacked enthusiasm. They worried he didn't have the general knowledge necessary to work with the rest of the team for a comm...
Are you an INTJ? Do you value prestige, family, and security? Do you like bench work or management? Can you teach a class or manage a budget? If you are already familiar with questions like these, then you have probably done some self-assessment: the process of evaluating your values, personality, interests, and skills. Or in other words, you have been learning about yourself. Self-evaluation may...
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" You probably remember being asked that question when you were a child. If you answered, "I don't know," then the adult who asked the question most likely responded by listing a series of occupations and asking you to consider them. Have you ever listened to college freshmen getting to know each other during the first week of school? A common question is,...
My graduate advisor was a good career coach. Okay, so are some of you laughing because you think I am joking? Stop laughing; I'm serious. While it would take me a book to explain my justifications for that statement, he really did do the right things. I appreciated some of those things at the time and only realized the contribution of many others much later. The idea for this column comes from an...
The other day, in the grocery store, I faced a dilemma: Should I buy the Valencia or the navel oranges? The Valencia oranges looked perfect, uniformly orange in color with no blemishes. The navel oranges had some green spots and blemishes. But the last time I had a Valencia orange, it had seeds in it. The navel oranges wouldn't have seeds, and they might have some of those fun minisections in the...
Many people imagine that a "counseling session" takes place while one lies on a couch and a counselor asks deep, probing questions. They imagine returning week after week to analyze their personal problems in depth. While this stereotypic picture of counseling is true for some types of counseling relationships, it is an unlikely scenario in career counseling. And although you may find a couch in ...
One approach to career counseling, advocated by theorist John Krumboltz, incorporates the theory of "learning experiences": that we learn about occupations, and how to select a career, by drawing on our direct experiences or modeling what we see in the lives of people around us. This means that analyzing our own experiences is valuable--and that learning about the experiences of others can also b...
On a recent road trip to visit an old friend, I spent three-and-a-half hours in my car listening to nothing. No company, no music, no talk radio. Nothing but road noise. During the first hour, I felt stressed about work. I had left behind undone projects, rapidly approaching deadlines, and a disaster area of papers in my office. But by the end of the second hour, I was happy, relaxed, and definit...
It's that time of year--New Year's resolutions are already being broken. Our self-improvement goals are either falling by the wayside or losing momentum. My resolution, for instance, was to write this column on weekdays and not spend my weekends working on it. Although I've already broken my resolution (it's the weekend), I'm hoping I can help you get back on track if your resolution for 2003 was...
How did you respond the last time someone asked you, "What are you interested in?" Did you comment about the cutie in the lab down the hall? Or did you discuss the research goals of the grant proposal you just wrote? What did you say the last time someone asked you about your skills? Were you at a potluck discussing your awesome carrot cake? Or were you at a job interview describing your laborato...
August is always a time for me to review the past year and to set goals for the next. Since I work at an academic institution, for me, August is the end of summer and the beginning of the school year. It's a time to look back at the past and plan for the future. Last year I used several columns to encourage you to look inward: to explore your values, your passions, and the type of work environmen...
Safety goggles, dirty lab coat, and pocket protector. Sloppy jeans and T-shirt. Awkwardness at parties, except when talking about their research. Difficulty making eye contact and connecting sentences coherently in a casual conversation. It's an unfair stereotype, and it's largely untrue; but there are, indeed, more introverts with weak verbal communication skills in scientific research than in m...
I have a friend who isn't 100% thrilled about his job. After whining about it for a couple of months--he is not generally a whiner--I told him to quit whining and DO something about it. After a bit of self-reflection, he told me "No. This isn't the time." He has decided that summer just isn't the time for him to worry about his professional life. He wants to take it easy this summer. He has made ...
The weird faces I see when telling my current classmates I have a Ph.D. in pharmacology are quite entertaining. Most of them express disbelief. I think my decision to seek a master's degree in career counseling was less of a shock to scientists than to those I meet along my new occupational path. My decision to "get out of science" was not a quick or an easy one. My last year of graduate school I...
