Mind the gap - a career blog bridging the gap between academia and industry
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Myths and prejudices related to your job search
‘Only those who are not successful in academia move to industry’, or ‘when I move to industry, I will earn a lot, but others tell me what to do, and I cannot develop myself any further’ on the one side, and ‘those scientists life in their own world, will we even be able to communicate with them?’ on the other – these are some myths and prejudices challenging those looking for their next job. How can you deal with these?
PSI Alumni Careers: Gesara Bimashofer – from PhD at NUM to Consultant at APP Unternehmensberatung AG
The PSI Career Blog features PSI alumni and their career paths to highlight the versatility of the PSI community, and inspire the young generation. Today with Gesara Bimashofer, who is telling us about her journey from a PhD at PSI to being a consultant at APP Unternehmensberatung AG in Bern.
PSI Alumni Careers: Eric Wasson Burns – from PhD at NUM to Associate in the Climate Team at Deep Science Ventures
The PSI Career Blog features PSI alumni and their career paths to highlight the versatility of the PSI community, and inspire the young generation. Today with Eric Wasson Burns, who is telling us about his PhD experience at PSI, and the transition to his current job as associate in the climate team of Deep Science Ventures.
Will I have to start all over again when moving away from academia?
‘If I change to industry or the public administration, does that mean I have to start all over again?’ is a question that is often asked in career counseling sessions one way or another. Clearly, after having invested so much time and energy in your education and your research project, the last thing you would want is starting from scratch. But do you really have to start all over again when you change career direction? And what is so bad about a fresh start?
From the outside, you see a successful scientist – but what is behind?
Do you sometimes get frustrated when you scroll through social media and see the new positions your contacts are about to start and the grants or prizes they are awarded? Do others’ success stories make you feel small and incapable? Is it true that everyone else is super-successful while you are struggling, or what is behind the others’ success?
PSI Alumni Careers: Marco Taddei – from Postdoctoral Researcher at ENE to Associate Professor at the University of Pisa, Italy
The PSI Career Blog features PSI alumni and their career paths to highlight the versatility of the PSI community, and inspire the young generation. Today with Marco Taddei, who is telling us about his postdoc experience at PSI, and the transition to his current job as associate professor at the University of Pisa, Italy.
From ‘should’ and ‘have to’ to ‘being excited about’ and ‘looking forward to’
Happy New Year! I hope you are having a good start to 2023, and that this will be an exciting, successful and happy year for you. At this time of the year, many of us like to think about everything we have to do, or everything we should do better than last year. But is there a better approach?
How to be happier at work
Do you know this feeling of sitting in the lab, totally bored because you are just doing the same measurement for the umpteenth time, thinking that nobody needs to study for 5+ years to do what you are doing right now? What about the feeling of having put a huge amount of effort into your paper writing, working late to get everything ready in time – only to get it back all red from your supervisor’s corrections? Or having a reviewer (who clearly doesn’t understand your study) state it is not new or original enough, or not getting any response for ages? Add to this an instrument that breaks down just before your last measurement, a PC that crashes just before the model finished calculating, and you have a great recipe to frustrate a scientist. This blog post helps you get rid of the frustration and be happier at and with your work.
What happens during career counseling?
‘What are you going to do with me now?’ or ‘I didn’t really know what to expect’ are sentences I often hear at the beginning of a counseling session. Not knowing what will happen can make us quite nervous, and for some this nervousness is even a reason to say ‘my questions are not that important, I don’t need counseling’. I congratulate each and every one of you who had the courage to come to a counseling session. It does take courage to expose yourself, not knowing what will come. For those who were secretly wondering what happens behind closed doors in my counseling room, let’s have a look at what career counseling is about.