Humanities | Blogging Beyond Academia

By Elizabeth Mahood

We’re all about the hustle here at Blogging Beyond Academia. I’ve read, written, and edited posts about everything from honing your communication skills to what it’s like at a startup. However, for all our posts about career exploration and skill-building resources, we’ve left out one key element of getting a job: the job search itself. COVID-19 has put job searching on the forefront of the minds of many,
especially those of us finishing at our current positions. In response to this, I’ve gathered advice from researchers recently awarded positions in industry as well as in academia. Although this advice is coming from researchers in my field (plant biology), their advice is applicable across broad sciences and humanities. Additionally, the tips below are important to consider even if your current appointment isn’t ending soon – being a strong candidate takes lots of prep, and searching for the perfect job can take longer than you might think!

General Tips:

Start “Early”: This first tip is probably the piece of advice I heard most often. People in industry commented that it took them 9-12 months to land their current position, and it sometimes took longer than that for people in academia. Part of “starting” is letting your network know that you are looking for positions, and doing this early means you are less likely to miss out on opportunities advertised only through your network.
Prep Yourself: To get your dream job, you have to be a great fit. While a big part of this is aligning your materials to the job position (more on this later), an equally big part is making sure your skills and experiences turn you into the ideal candidate (read: do your prep work). One pro tip is to copy / paste job applications into a text editor (such as jobscan), and determine which words are coming up the most –these are likely to be the skills recruiters or committees want you to have. Another newly-minted-pro’s tip is to follow people on Twitter or LinkedIn whose careers you want to mirror, as their posts could be highly relevant to your job search and they may even drop openings of interest to you. Bottom line: having a Career Development Plan and sticking to it through your current position is key to landing your next one.
Keep Communicating with your PI: Seriously applying to jobs can (and probably will) mean increased attention to managing your research timeline. It’s super important to keep your advisor informed through this process so they can support you through it.
Use Twitter to Your Advantage: tweet about your papers or accomplishments to publicize them and tweet about other people’s research to show that you are involved and knowledgeable about your field.

Tips for Industry Positions:

Don’t be Intimidated by Postings: Industry job postings will describe the qualifications of their dream-come-true candidate. Oftentimes, their applicants won’t have every box ticked – so it’s ok if you don’t either. In these scenarios, it is really important to highlight your ability and interest to learn the skills you don’t have. As a side note, this can depend on what type of industry position you apply to – startups are less likely to hire someone who pitches themselves as “eager to learn” than they are to hire “an expert”.
But Definitely Take Postings Seriously: As we highlighted above, job postings will state key qualities that employers need or want their candidates to have. These qualities should be first and foremost in your application materials – and they can change from one company to the next. A pro tip is to have a “backbone” resume handy that you can tailor to fit each company you apply to. Read the company’s website to see what terminology and values they put front and center, and incorporate those into your application materials.

Tips for Academic Positions:

Distinguish Yourself in the Interview: This came up often when talking to people recently awarded faculty positions. The key area you have to do this in is your talk – you must present research that is exciting, aligned well with the position, and appears easily fundable. Additionally, to make a lasting impression on the search committee, you should familiarize yourself with their research. This will show them that you are curious, involved and collaborative – traits they want in their future coworker.
Distinguish your Application Materials: With many positions getting a slew of applications, it’s critical to make yours stand out. The search committee will spend a lot of time looking at your papers, but if your papers don’t encompass all of your work – i.e. let’s say you’re also good at programming – make sure you have Googleable evidence of this, as it can set you apart from other candidates. Additionally, if the position description has a clear picture of their ideal candidate, make sure to include their key criteria in your application materials. If the position is less clear or more broad, however, feel free to shape your application materials in whatever way that puts your best foot forward.

I’ll end this post with a few resources for anyone thinking about getting their next position. The first is particularly related to COVID-19: a live list of companies actively hiring, freezing, or firing employees in response to the pandemic. For others that are still shaping their current position, Cornell has a multitude of resources to check out. Cornell Career Services has templates for cover letters and resumes. The Graduate School has several institutional memberships that are free for students and postdocs. The Office of Postdoctoral Studies, Future Faculty and Academic Preparation, and Careers Beyond Academia are always available for individual consultations and questions. Additionally, for those interested in academic positions, check out HigherEdJobs for listings. For anyone wondering how to start concretizing their research interests into a written document – a good place to start is with your “personal brand”.

Finally, a couple resources: for researchers in the life sciences PlantPostdocSlack is a great resource (for job postings and resource sharing) for any postdoc whose research is broadly associated with plants. Consult fellowship listings like ProFellow for professional development (and additional ways to fund your graduate research) or JHU Funding Opportunities databases that list early career and postdoc opportunities. I hope this post has been helpful for you – and always remember to reach out to Careers Beyond Academia if you have any job search strategy questions, or want more resources and advice!

By Patricia Tolbert, M.Sc.

Have you ever taken a course in a totally different field, not to fill a requirement but because it interested you? I did and I recommend it! In most universities, a STEM undergraduate degree comes with liberal arts requirements, but in graduate and postdoctoral studies we are asked to forego this portion of our education in pursuit of our respective expertise. However, time and again the importance of liberal arts education has been argued—if you have not yet considered this issue, check out Chad Orzel’s article in Forbes: Why Do We Teach ‘Physics For Poets’ But Not ‘Poetry For Physicists’? or this one in Science: Ten Important Reasons to Include the Humanities in Your Preparation for a Scientific Career.

Last spring, I found myself in the incredibly unlikely but fortunate situation of having a lighter workload and, throwing caution to the wind, signed up for an introductory course in the art history department (before you ask: no, my advisor didn’t know I was doing this). I have no background in art or in history but felt this was as great of a departure from my chemistry coursework as I could possibly find. So, I set out to ask myself not what those outside of STEM must understand about science, but what I might gain from understanding a little bit of something on the other side of the academic spectrum. It took a surprisingly short amount of time to realize how unconventionally relevant the course would be.

Twice a week I would slip outside of Physical Sciences Building, try to remember to take my lab goggles off my forehead, and trek to VISST 2000: Introduction to Visual Studies. The class took place on the ground floor of Klarman Hall, although there were occasional expeditions to the arts quad or to the Johnson Museum. I initially felt as if I was not supposed to be there, or as if I had snuck into this class (imposter syndrome is real and it’s everywhere)! Whenever I told someone in the class that I was a graduate student in chemistry, I expected a surprised laugh, but I never got one. Everyone taking visual studies had found their way there through an unconventional path. The ambiguity of the title of the course and the reputation of the eloquence of the professor, Dr. Andrew Moisey, drew in a surprising number of engineers and life scientists; everyone was eager for a brief digression.

The Cornell course catalogue describes the course: “Visual Studies seeks to define and improve our visual relationship to nature and culture after the modern surge in technology and knowledge…” This manifested itself through readings ranging in subject matter from fascism to typography, from architecture to nature documentaries, Marxism to fashion, surveillance to optometry, with selected readings from philosophy, art, history, social criticism, journalism, film studies, and other fields scattered throughout.

In a lecture in late January we discussed the functionalities, limitations, and remaining mysteries of the model of the eye and the first cameras. We questioned our relative objectivity, something scientists are notorious for disregarding. We even dissected the phrase seeing is believing: we took it to mean that vision is merely the brain’s best guess at reality, and that one’s visual experience is defined by their previous experiences and predispositions. Thinking about this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my microscopy experiments and the conundrum of different people seeing different results within the same image. Microscopy, in theory, should be the single best way to understand the biology of a specimen because it is based directly on our vision, the sense we tend to trust most. Yet, as convincing as a microscopic image capturing the subcellular location of a protein may seem, it has its limitations and still needs to be backed up with further, quantifiable data to be publishable. And so: seeing is believing, but only until further data suggests otherwise.

During one week in February, my class met in the Kroch Library of Rare and Manuscript Collections to discover the university’s collection of 19^th century anatomy and physiology texts. This collection includes an original copy of Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia, in which he first coins the term cell in the biological context we now know it. I believe that every biologist on campus should see this—it is a cornerstone of our field. Fueled by this text, my class discussed how often complex scientific concepts are necessarily reduced into simplistic imagery to facilitate a more condensed understanding. How much do the biologists of today have to learn from the founders of our discipline? To what degree has the minimization and abstraction of scientific findings into graphical abstracts and textbook figures altered their interpretation and significance?

The breadth of the ideas presented in Introduction to Visual Studies is extensive and thought-provoking in ways I can only begin to describe here. This experience has been invaluable to me. It has been humbling, eye-opening, has inspired within me a new brand of curiosity, and, perhaps most importantly, has given me a renewed perspective of my career as a scientist. The idea of ‘question what you know’ is one that is universally applicable and ties together the pursuits of those that study STEM and the humanities. Cornell’s motto is “any person, any study.” There is no shortage of magnificence in its resources, faculty, or courses and these should be exploited at any cost. Cornell’s Careers Beyond Academia program encourages all its participants to explore their interests and engage in communities and events outside their degree concentration. I’d strongly encourage everyone to consider enrolling in or auditing a course beyond your research and degree requirements and to explore your interests outside of your discipline. Graduate school can be a bubble if you let it be, and it is important to be able to see yourself and your discipline in a greater context.

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STEM graduate student sneaks into art history course: a case for a liberal arts education beyond undergrad