Tag: ScienceCareers

New Policy and Advocacy Job Sims!

Featured ~ thiwin

Exciting news! We’ve been working with science policy and advocacy professionals on a few new job sims. Check these out!

Science Policy: Develop a Course – this is based off a course for graduate students and postdocs at UCSD. It’s dynamic and helps develop a lot of skills and language in policy. If you’re interested in building a similar course at your university – definitely check this one out.

Advocacy: Power Mapping – rooted in the civil rights movement, this job sim helps you to map the players. Knowing who holds influence and in what way helps you to ask better questions, talk to a broader network and anticipate challenges. Use this one for graduate student and postdoctoral advocacy on campus, too.

Policy: Writing Legislative Science Notes – Missouri Science and Technology fellows write legislative science notes to inform congressional members. Community members write science notes to shed light and inform different types of organizations about what’s important to them. High schoolers are writing science notes to learn about science policy and how engaged citizens of all ages have the power to engage with their lawmakers.

Job Sim BINGO

~ thiwin

Did you know that we now have a science job sim for each career area in the myIDP? If we were playing that game, where you’re trying to cover all the pieces on the board, we’d have Bingo!

myIDP is an online career planning tool where individuals answer questions about tasks they like to do at work and tasks they think they’re good at. Then, individuals get to see how their responses match with different career areas. Doing the myIDP self-assessment helps you identify possible careers of interest. Then a likely next step is reading about career areas online. One of our goals in creating this online job sim library was to be the next stop in your myIDP journey. InterSECT gives scientists a chance to try out these different careers.

You can now test out a specific task for each career area. With each job sim, you can:

  • perform tasks that professionals in that field would perform (selected tasks are typical, entry level tasks for PhD-level professionals)
  • get a better understanding of processes involved in certain tasks (like what it takes to lobby your congress person or how you go about triaging papers as a journal editor)
  • find and examine different types of information (do you like to work with student evaluation data, policy data, business financials, clinical trial information, etc.)
  • create different work products

Collaborators at several universities worked hard to create these simulations for you. Thanks to all our collaborators! If there’s a task you’d still like to see, let us know.

Finally, we are working on completing a job sim for all the Humanities and Social Sciences job families, so stay tuned.

-Thi

Happy Anniversary to InterSECT job sims!

~ thiwin

We are celebrating! It’s been a year since we posted the first simulations on InterSECTjobsims.com, and three years since the first job sim was developed. We are celebrating the amazing community of graduate students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and professionals who have contributed to this project. Individuals have tried out the sims and given feedback, and developed and submitted new job sims to the library. Professionals and employers have given informational interviews and taken the time to read and vet the simulations. I was a little nostalgic, and also curious about the data, so if you are, too, take a look at our journey below.

Summer 2016 – Started interviewing PhDs in diverse science-related careers and prototyping job sims.

Fall 2016 – PhD students and postdocs beta tested the job sim experience, complete with the self-reflection sheet and SMART goals check list.

Summer 2017 – Completed the development of 10 science job sims in 6 career areas. Collaborated with individuals at 6 universities. PhD students and postdocs started creating job simulations to contribute to the online library.

Summer 2018 – Launched intersectjobsims.com!

Fall 2018 – ScienceCareers published an article about the job sim library. InterSECT job sims was selected for presentation at two nationwide conferences on graduate education.

Spring 2019 – Partner with ImaginePhD.com, a career exploration resource for humanities and social science graduate students, and started creating job sims for their job families.

Summer 2019 – One year since launching this online library! In the last year, 12,000 users from 100+ countries have checked out this career exploration tool.

We now have 8 humanities-focused simulations and 35 science simulations from 23 different authors across 11 institutions. And there are more on the way! Special thanks to the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for the initial grant funding through the Career Guidance for Trainees, and UC San Francisco’s Office of Career and Professional Development for partnering on the beta testing. Thanks also to ImaginePhD.com for support and Washington University for continued support.

For me, it’s been a wonderful experience to see a community of students, postdocs, staff, faculty and professionals…and InterSECT job sim explorers…come together and contribute to this online library.

-Thi

InterSECT Success Stories

~ thiwin

When I’m introducing the idea of job sims to grad students or postdocs, I share stories about different ways grad students or postdocs have used and benefitted from the experience. One of my favorite stories is about a postdoc who completed a job simulation and found it useful, so she developed one for this online collection. To develop the sim, she talked with industry professionals, synthesized the informational interviews and wrote a draft. We worked with her to edit the final version, and published it on the website. She had a product to share, a concrete example to add to her resume, and co-copyright for her contribution. She updated us later that she talked about the experience in an interview to demonstrate how she can quickly gather knowledge in a new field, and explained that she is confident she can pivot in her career from an academic postdoc to an industry position. She got the job. I love this story because it demonstrates how InterSECT job sims can be a place to explore career options, and also a place to gain experience to in preparation for your career transition.

To read more stories from graduate students, a postdoc, and a research associate, check out the Science article about InterSECT: “Like virtual reality for careers: A new online resource helps scientists explore job options.”

-Thi