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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-12-17
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHItLGBPsJ8
nine years old was a very defining age for me not because I was super adorable and had great pajamas but because in the third grade I learned about the human organ systems I learned that we have lungs that takes big gulps of air and that our bloodstream carries oxygen from the lungs to the rest of our bodies so that we can walk talk and do karate
or whatever it is that I'm doing so and I didn't give too much thought to this lesson at the time but later in the day I was at recess and my classmates and I were having a race from one end of the field to the other when the race started I took off running as fast as they could because you know that when you're in third
grade being the fastest kid in class is like winning the Nobel Prize so there was running at lightning speed and I noticed that I was bringing really heavy and all of a sudden something clicked I had this huge libeled moments and I stopped in the middle of the race and I was like I'm breathing really heavy because I need more oxygen and my blood is caring
that's my legs but it can run really fast and win the race well of course I didn't win the race because I was just standing there thinking about all of these things but this is a really important moment for me because they realize that they're all these things going on around me and inside of me that I had never given any thought to before but they
were just waiting to be discovered and that was the moment that I fell in love with science that level of science eventually led me here to Stony Brook university where I am pursuing a PhD and molecular and cellular biology when I started here at Stony Brook I envisioned a grand plan for myself which was to get my PhD do a few years a postdoctoral training and
then got a job as a tenured professor at a university and I believe that this would lead me to my ultimate goals of career success and happiness and that I would be able to change change the world and it seemed like a pretty simple and straightforward plan to means but during my second year graduate school I became familiar with the academic life style and I realized
that that plan just wasn't going to work I put down my pipe hats on a sled I can't do this for the rest of my life this isn't going to bring me the fulfillment that I'm looking for and it's not going to let me change the world and the way that I want to change it but I really struggled to admit this because I thought that
it meant that I was a failure and that I didn't belong in science I reasoned that since I didn't want to go on to become a professor and run my own research lab that I shouldn't even bother getting my PhD so I must quit I most gave up on that dream and at this point I reached a a mid PhD crisis and I was waking up
most days thinking what am I doing with my life why am I here and having that scientists identity taken away from me I started trying to think of alternatives that I could do instead like become a beekeeper watch I seriously considered for awhile but what ultimately kept me here was that passion for science that for me started in the third grade I just wasn't ready to
give up on that yet so I continued on with my studies but I still had all of these fears and insecurities circulating around in my mind and eventually I gathered up the courage to start talking about it with some of my classmates and doing research online and I learned some interesting things I learned that I wasn't the only one feeling this way and that many of
my classmates and guided students across the country felt exactly the way that I did we were all really passionate about our field of study but we knew that that academic track wasn't for us we weren't sure what to do with these two conflicting ideas but I'm I was too I was comforted to know that that I wasn't the only one thinking and feeling this way I
also learned that the desire for peach dis to leave academia is really only half of the issue turns out that universities award seven times more P. H. D.'s than the number of available faculty positions and this is a fact that I had never heard it while I was applying for school or of the entire time that I've been here but the result is that students spend
years getting their peach dis and postdoctoral training and then they can't find the faculty jobs that these degrees were originally geared for so where does that leave me and all of these other students who either want to leave academia or want to stay but just can't find a job what I slowly realize is there's an entire world of opportunity outside of the academic world and it's
actually so large and it's more like a universe and I had never really heard much about before and I was really fascinated so I tried to read as much as I could I read one story for example about a physics PhD who now works at the metropolitan museum of art hoping to chemically analysed the artwork and another story about a linguistics PhD who's now the social
media specialist at Rosetta stone so in reading all these really cool stories I realize that the career opportunities for P. H. D.'s in this non academic universe is really limitless not was totally exciting to me and it led me to another epiphany which is that a peach the isn't a one way ticket academia but it's really more like a passport that can take you anywhere you
want to go use have to choose their destination and pack your bags accordingly so once I realize this I felt really revitalized and I had regained the motivation to pursue my studies again with some energy because I knew that there was a path for me and I just had to figure out what it was around this time I start having lunch with a classmate and friend
of mine like me Jennifer knew that the academic track wasn't for her but we shared a common interest in trying to figure out exactly what our paths might be so over lunches we would talk about our interests and passions and goals that we had for ourselves and then we each took a self assessment test which is a lot like a personality test that you would find
in a magazine but the one that we took was geared for scientists and how does rank our daily activities on a scale of zero to five and when I took the assessment and I got the results back I wasn't too surprised to find that I had given zeros to things like grant writing and budget management which are really integral parts of the academic life style so
I was reassured that that life really isn't for me but I was really surprised to see that I had given five so things like talking to the public about science or getting up on stage and giving a presentation to a hundred people because I have a hard time just getting on the phone ordering a pizza so when I told John about this she said you know
Nadia you are really good public speaker and all of a sudden I was like yeah I know and then when Jen took the assessment she realized that she had really strong writing skills and that she really liked being in the middle of scientific discoveries nice that you know John you really like going to conferences and exchanging ideas and she was like yeah I do says so
what I think we both realize is that sometimes you need an outsider's perspective to help you realize things about yourself our next step was to try to figure out careers that matched with the skills and interests we had just identified John found her passion in scientific journal editing and I found mine in science communications and public outreach once we had identified our dream jobs we knew
that we have to do a little better preparation work in order to get ourselves there and make ourselves really good candidates so we started getting outside of the lab so we could get experience and build up our skills and test those interests that we had identified so we started doing things like freelance writing and taking communications classes and judging science fairs and all really really fun
things and after all of these efforts we both reached a place where we could identify our career aspirations and set goals for ourselves to actually achieve them reaching this point was really pivotal because I experienced a huge boost in self confidence and now I'm waking up every day really excited to come to campus and do all the things that I'm doing because I know that I'm
on the right path and I'm going somewhere that I actually want to go and really becoming the person that I want to be and that's really powerful so when I look back at this progress that Jen and I made over the year I realized that we had stumbled upon something very valuable because the current structure of peace you training doesn't really dedicate time or resources to
career development or preparation of any kind academic or otherwise and yet there are so many students who really need and want this and we know how important it is to prepare for a post graduate career prior to graduation so when I thought about this I realized that I had the view the ability to change the US that I could do something about this so I designed
a career development program for graduate students based on the principles of peer support an incremental progress I named it the peach Steve career ladder program because the latter facilitates small steps and supports you as you climb to the top the program has two main objectives which are to help students identify their career goals and help them prepare for those goals so choosing your destination and packing
your bags to get there these objectives are separated into nine stops and each of the steps builds upon the previous one so that students who participate in the program are actively progressing in their career development they're actually getting somewhere %HESITATION Jen and I are currently piloting the program with a small group of graduate students from our department we meet once a month to accomplish one step
of the program at a time and the first few steps are about self assessment so taking the the tasks and figuring out your skills interests and values and then finding careers that match with those characteristics now not every student will obviously find their perfect match right away but part of process is for Europe figuring out what you don't want to do as much as what you
do you want to do so to help this along we do informational interviews which just means of reaching out to a professional in the field of interest and asking them what their daily activities are what the challenges of their job are what they really like about it maybe even what the salary is and that gives students an insider's perspective and help them decide if that would
be a good fit for them the interesting thing is that in our pilot group were all from the same department we all study cell biology but we had such a huge range of career interests for example sales and marketing K. through twelve teaching biotechnology academia science writing and we got to learn about all of these careers together once everyone had chosen a career of interest that
they felt that they could follow through with we went on to the preparation stage so we made a list of skills which were required by our career of interest and then we thought about ways that we can enhance those skills though again getting out of the laboratory setting and getting experience and %HESITATION building up your skills I have to say that this was probably the hardest
part of the program because graduate students tend to get tunnel vision and they're just focus on their thesis graduating and getting out getting out of there when they finally do that then there'll looking around like okay now what so we had to convince our classmates to put down their research for a little bit and get outside of the labs and we were able to do this
luckily we had one student who landed an internship and another group of students who formed a newsletter and are now writing about the research going on on campus the final steps the program teach students how to translate those skills and experiences that they've just obtained on paper and in person so that when that dream career comes around they can actually achieve that by the the goal
is that by the end of the program students have a clear path in front of them and hopefully they experienced that same boost in self confidence that I did I pilot program is almost complete and we're gonna re run it again in two thousand fifteen with a new group of students luckily the director of our graduate program recognizes the value of the latter program and is
integrating it into the peach tea training which I think is really awesome and I'm so proud and I can't wait to see how it benefits students in the future so when we asked the pilot group for feedback and what they liked about the program one of the biggest responses was just having a time and place to talk about and think about career development and students also
really appreciated the group sharing model so coming together to exchange information and ideas and get feedback and get advice and we realize that we all had small pieces of information but their own when we came together to combine them it really form something significant and we are able to learn so much more than we could if we were going through the process on our own now
I may be biased because I started the program but I think one of the greatest advantages it's it's simplicity and that requires very little for start up we really only needed a meeting space the ambition to start the program and the dedication to each other and to ourselves and I think that makes the latter program a simple bottom up approach to career development that any graduate
student at any university can attain so if you're in the audience are listening and you can identify with my story I encourage you to grab a group of friends and go through the career development process together and I really encourage you to do that because I think you'll be surprised by the results and %HESITATION if you wanna follow the model that we used you can find
it online and maybe I am you're in the audience are listening and you're not a graduate students maybe you're feeling a little bit uncertain about yourself for your future well I hope that you can still be inspired by the latter program either directly or indirectly and %HESITATION this is my advice to you first think the port find a friend or family member is someone that you
admire and ask them to support you as you go on this journey because as I mentioned sometimes you need an outsider to help you realize who you are second take the time to going on the journey really think about who you are what you want out of life think about passions that you may have forgotten about or take the time to discover new ones and third
the ambitious take risks do things that you never thought you could do like give a Ted talk or jump out of an airplane and I guarantee that when you get to the edge of your comfort zone you'll realize who you are and finally the Braves don't give up don't quit you may not be able to see the path that's there in front of you but just
