Making plans beyond the elusive professorship

May 2, 2016

Meghan Murphy
907-474-7541

By Meghan Murphy
Public information officer
College of Natural Science and Mathematics

Graduate students or postdoctoral researchers set on becoming professors need a Plan B.

“Most Ph.D. recipients will not become professors,” said Richard Boone, a professor of biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “There’s such a big mismatch between the production of Ph.D.s and available tenure track positions. There’s about a 10-to-one mismatch right now.”

Boone recently took a break from his UAF duties to work several years in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Graduate Education. While there, the need for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to broaden their skills and focus on career planning became clearly evident.

“I think graduate students generally don’t consider career development until they’re close to graduation, and that’s when the panic starts setting in,” Boone said.

He added that many postdoctoral fellows nearing the end of their appointments start to realize that they need a better understanding of non-academic career pathways and of how to increase their competitiveness in the job market.

To meet this need, Boone arranged a workshop on career planning for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the fields of science, engineering, technology and mathematics. He asked Philip Clifford, the associate dean for research at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to be the leader.

Clifford has given more than 200 workshops that center around myIDP, an Individual Development Plan that he and others created for scientists about five years ago. His team collaborated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science to make myIDP a web-based resource.

The workshops help participants kick-start their career planning process, which they then continue through the online IDP. He said the process is involved, but well worth it.

“It takes diligence to thoroughly explore potential careers through reading articles, attending other career sessions, and doing informational interviews with professionals in career paths of interest,” Clifford said. “But this process will ultimately allow early career scientists to make informed decisions and set goals to help them attain their desired careers."

The workshop

Clifford was skeptical that anyone would come to the workshop on a beautiful, sunny Saturday.

“The response was fantastic,” he said. More than 50 participants attended on April 16, 2016, representing fields like space physics, bioremediation, mycology, petroleum engineering, ocean sciences and indigenous studies.

Master’s student Molly McDermott said while she still wants to become a biology professor, she’s increasingly aware those positions are few and far between. She said she attended the workshop to explore all her career options and to pause from academic life to gain some perspective.

“It is so easy to get overwhelmed by thesis research projects and to focus solely on what needs to happen this week, month or next three months,” she said. “This workshop was a great chance to take a step back and ask, 'Where is this work taking me? What changes do I need to make to be satisfied?’”

As part of the workshop, McDermott and her peers assessed their values, interests and skills and then explored careers that embody the confluence of all three. They also looked at what broad-based, transferable skills needed further developing, like negotiating or effectively communicating.

“Dr. Clifford gave us some very useful tools and a good framework to start planning our career paths,” said McDermott. “I found the skills assessment and goal-setting exercises particularly helpful.”

Given the positive feedback from the workshop participants, Boone said, he would like to see more professional development trainings for all students across the campus, including undergraduates.

Barbara Taylor, an associate professor of biology, echoed the sentiment. She is one of the principal investigators of the Biomedical Learning and Student Training program, which provided financial and logistical support for the workshop.

She said the workshop complemented BLaST’s mission to provide professional development opportunities for students as part of its overarching goal of learning how to attract students from diverse backgrounds into the biomedical research workforce. She said she foresees future collaborations with Boone and others around campus.

“Is this the start of something? Yes it is,” she said.

Support for the workshop also came from IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence, Alaska Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, the Department of Biology and Wildlife, the Institute of Arctic Biology and the UAF Graduate School.

 Interested in learning more about myIDP? Visit http://myidp.sciencecareers.org.

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About myIDP
The online myIDP provides assessment tools and serves as a step-by-step guide to planning career goals related to STEM fields. Each user establishes an account and can track their progress and print out their plans. MyIDP will guide you through four major steps:

Step one: Assessment
Proficient or deficient? Likely or never? Unimportant or essential? These low-end, high-end rankings are part of several online questionnaires that help graduate students and postdoctoral researchers clarify their interests, values and competencies.

Step two: Career Exploration
After taking the assessments, the online IDP reveals careers that contain the tripartite sweet spot — the place where people are most proficient, would likely be interested in the job duties and feel the work is meaningful. Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers explore these careers through online resources and interviews with professionals from a variety of careers. At the end of the process, students and researchers whittle down their career choices to a plan A and a Plan B.

Step three: Set Goals
Once students and postdoctoral researchers know where they’re headed, they can then set goals to get there. This includes looking at their assessment to see which skills related to the chosen career paths need improving.

Step four: Implement the plan
Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers work toward their career goals and establish a team of mentors, some of which may be outside of academia.

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Research reported in this publication was supported by an Institutional Development Award (IDeA) and the Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under grant numbers P20GM103395 and RL5GM118990 respectively. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the official views of the NIH.