The ivory tower is shrouded in mystery for many laypeople, students, and even new faculty. The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars From Graduate School Through Tenure, by John Goldsmith, John Komlos, and Penny Schine Gold (University of Chicago Press, 2001), aspires to give graduate students and junior faculty a candid introduction to an academic career. Drawing ...
Biogen Idec - http://www.biogen.com Cell Signaling Technology - http://www.cellsignal.com Isis Pharmaceuticals - http://www.isispharm.com Johnson & Johnson - http://www.jnj.com National Postdoctoral Association - http://www.nationalpostdoc.org The majority of postdocs carry out their fellowships at universities, but large numbers find their first job in industry. The transition can prove difficul...
A bill being debated in Spain's Parliament would give more leeway to universities in hiring. Some academic leaders are pleased, but others say it could be a step backward. (Link courtesy of Science magazine)
U.S. universities foster "a culture that fundamentally discriminates against women," says a new report by the National Academies on the status of women in academic science and engineering.
NAPLES - Italian academics last week rallied outside Italy's higher education ministry in Rome to show their disapproval of the government's plans to eliminate tenure and increase teaching loads. The rally was the latest in a series of protests against a reform plan the government says would provide much-needed flexibility but which faculty members fear could drive away the country's best young b...
Why on earth would any sane person want a job in Higher Education? Certainly not for an attractive salary or an easy life! So, there must be something about the calling to academia that fulfills a particular vocation. Academics, like universities, traditionally have two roles: to push back the frontiers of knowledge and to educate the next generation of academics and professionals. However, befor...
From a health perspective, the academy and women would seem to be a bad mix. Anecdotal evidence suggests that academic women experience more health problems than men. Thinking back to my graduate school days I recall the bizarre range of illnesses that my female colleagues and I suffered from: strange rashes, neck and back problems, rheumatoid arthritis, breast infections, asthma, lupus ... and t...
This is the third article in a series on obtaining a green card without labor certification. When we analyze a client?s chances to qualify for a green card, we first try the Alien of Extraordinary Ability and the National Interest Waiver categories, because these two categories permit the scientist to petition the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) while avoiding both employer spon...
With several years of postdoctoral study under their belts, today's new science faculty members are, in purely scientific terms, better trained than any previous generation of newly independent scientists. But academic science has, in recent decades, become a much more complex endeavor, and the scientific community has been slow to adapt. Today's faculty must know research, but they must also hav...
High job satisfaction and rising salaries may be in the future for those young life scientists who stick at it long enough to become senior researchers and research administrators. These are among the findings of the AAAS 2001 Salary Survey of Life Scientists, the largest employment survey of U.S. life scientists ever conducted, which is published this week by Science . The AAAS membership office...
Okay, Okay. Given some of our recent discussions and articles on the Next Wave, it may seem odd to you that we are reviewing this site. But the fact of the matter is, there are SOME jobs out there for those of you who want to be professor types. And since there are some it means that somebody will get them. So if you're aware of the academic job market situation and are still willing to take your...
Are universities turning into businesses? This was the provocative question asked at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Spring 2001 Policy Conference, held 7 May 2001 in Bethesda, Maryland. "The university is very much a business," declared Ray White, chief scientific officer of DNA Sciences. More and more higher education institutions are establishing technolog...
Reposted from Science magazine, 20 May 2005 Harvard University plans to spend at least $50 million over the next decade to create a more diverse academic community in all disciplines, including throughout the sciences. President Lawrence Summers announced the outlay this week after receiving two reports commissioned in February following his comments about the ability of women to do science, whic...
The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) is considering new ways to make academic careers more attractive to excellent young researchers. Last week, a commission presided over by Jürgen Mlynek, vice president of Germany's major research funder, recommended extending opportunities for postdoctoral scientists to apply for independent positions to all research fields and funding programs. The reaso...
Recently, Canadian-born Cambridge professor Nancy Lane toured Canada as part of the British High Commission's lecture series marking the 50th anniversary of the "double helix" discovery. Lane spoke about the experiences of Rosalind Franklin, the woman scientist whose X-ray photos made it possible to crack the code of the DNA molecule's double helix. Franklin was barred from daily meetings with he...
Prior to the establishment of the Chicago Linkage for Minorities in Biomedical Sciences (CLIMB)¹ at Chicago State University (CSU), few of the transfer students from the Chicago City College System (CCC) graduated from CSU with a baccalaureate degree in the sciences. But after the program's inception in 1993, the graduation rate for CLIMB transfer students increased: 56% of CLIMB transfer student...
Young scientists from Germany and beyond are being invited to apply for nearly 100 earmarked research posts. Just a few short weeks ago research minister Edelgard Bulmahn's controversial reforms of the academic sector were passed by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's cabinet. Already three major institutions have announced that they will start hiring immediately for the newly created "junior professor...
DIY, PART II DIY, PART III DIY, RESOURCES Did you enter into academic research with a particular career path in mind? If not, you are certainly not alone! Did you gain your present position by careful thought and planning, or was it serendipity? In today's climate of limited (and, therefore, targeted) funding for research, it is necessary for contract researchers to know what it takes to build a ...
