Last we spoke, we talked about the importance of establishing a network, and how to go about doing that. So, now that you have one, what do you do with it? We will be addressing that question on this edition of “Back-to-Back”. As before, two people with vastly different personalities (one entirely extroverted, the other introverted) will discuss their perspectives on the topic. 

I was warned that finding a college teaching position can take a very long time, and that tenure-track positions are even harder to find. It’s a message that was reiterated many times, but I thought my preparation and teaching experience would make my own job search a bit easier. After all, by the time I graduated, I’d accumulated over 100 contact hours of college-level teaching experience, including an adjunct teaching position at St. John Fisher College here in Rochester. So with a fair amount of teaching experience under my belt, a first author publication, and a freshly minted Ph.D., I figured it should be relatively straight forward to find a teaching position near my family in Colorado. I was wrong. What I failed to anticipate was the difficulty I added to my job search by limiting my search to a specific (and far-away) state.

When I first joined URBEST, with the intention of eventually doing an internship, I assumed I would be somewhere sitting at a desk, looking professional, and maybe doing some writing. It turns out, I was only correct in one out of three assumptions. This past August, I traveled to Kenya with support from URBEST and direction from Humans for Education.

The Annual URBEST Retreat and Career Workshop is an event to gather URBEST trainees, those who would like to be trainees, and those who would just like to see what all the noise is about. This year, we had a number of URBEST alumni come back to tell us about their scientific next steps: Jon Baker from J. Craig Venter Institute, Claire McCarthy from the National Cancer Institute, Katie Smolnycki from Fred Hutch, Corey Hoffman from BARDA, and Virginia Glazier from Niagara University. Included in our speaker lineup was our very own UR Derek Crowe, who shared his insights on scientific communication, and UR Steve Dewhurst, who shared what his students have taught him as a mentor. We also had Randy Ribaudo from SciPhD come in for his fourth URBEST Career Workshop, invited back by popular demand from students and postdocs alike. I think a lot of deep conversations were shared and -- based on the photographs -- some fun was had. Big thanks to the Advancement Team that organized our very own photographer Matt Wittmeyer for the Retreat and our URBEST sponsor and philanthropist Theresa Chen, who joined us all the way from Stanford, California. If you'd like to see what UR trainees are saying about the URBEST Program, read on! 

Almost all of us, as researchers, spend a good deal of our time thinking about grant proposals.  That’s because grant funding gives us the means to explore our ideas, and to do the things we think are important. We also all recognize that most grant applications will be rejected by the funding agencies to which we submit them.  So we become creatures of persistence. What’s discussed less often, is the actual experience of grant writing. 

Reading textbooks for courses, articles for the literature review portion of research papers, or even popular press publications about current events can be slow going, and we can come away without really being able to recall much of what we read despite putting in a lot of time. This month’s tip is to find a way to annotate your reading that works for you. By annotating, you are synthesizing as you read, which increases your productivity and your ability to recall information later for exams or as you are writing. Continue reading for some useful advice.

In my third year of graduate study, I decided to focus my research on nursing home care. Most researchers who do quantitative research of nursing home care in the US use Minimum Data Set (MDS) - a standard data collection instrument with more than 500 items that all nursing homes serving Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries are required to use for collecting and submitting residents’ health and treatment information. Although it’s called the Minimum Data Set, it is nowhere near small. As I joined my advisor, Dr. Helena Temkin-Greener, on a project focused on the quality of care for nursing homes and started thinking about my dissertation in the same area, she advised me that “from now on, you are going to eat, drink, and breath your data”.