Career Dev Seminar-1/3

As I told yesteday, I have just attended the first session of 3-Parts Career Development Seminar. It was quite phenomenal and enough convincing for me to change my attitude on career development.

In the class, I focused on how to show off myself to others who I have not met. It is an intense and extended version of elevator pitch. The whole concept is "make yourself look bigger and stronger!" as if a typical super alpha male phenotype you can see in some top-notch PIs. And I am sure it has been helping them a lot.

Assume you are talking to business people never care any detail of your research topic, but you need to convince them to fund you...! Or you are interviewing for your job with someone who never understands your work. Sounds whole nightmare. I found I do not have any skill on this... I am sure I can be great when discussing science with people in my area, but I need totally different set of skills to be interpersonal. Yes, interpersonal is not just talking something bra bra. I found this is my bad habit. I tend to keep talking and enjoy sounds of my English. You need to be clear and consise.

Have these categories in your mind with your answer.
A. What are your success stories. Have 4 of them with quantifiable results.
B. What is your leadership skill
C. How can you desribe your interpersonal skills
D. What is your vision
E. What is your passion

I wil show some tips I learned. Also, let me answer B-E.
- Use "I am" rather than I'm. Then, you sounds stronger.

- Answer to B-C. Always, always keep these sentenses in mind. When you describe your style as a scientist, these are typical and most useful sentenses. May sound odd when talking to scientists, but others than scientist want to see you like this.
I am a leader and visionary.
I have an excellent communication an interpersonal skill.
I am a researcher.
I am extremely analytical.
I am an excellent planner and implementer.

- Answer to D. Vision. It is different from your research vision. People want to see how you make a decision by flow chart in your mind. Vision is a process of implementation. So, typical answer is like this.
"I am a visionary person who grasp a big picture first, then translate it in verbal by listing bullet points. I usually formulate the bullets by discusing with colleagues and prioritize." Actually, "verbal" is a good term. English is quite verbal language and prefers to describe every single thing in words. Though you are a visionary person always having image in your mindmap, people eventualy want to see you describe it in language. The best example is grant writing. Any idea should be verbaly described.
Then, you can talk about your research vision like "My research vision is to cure hematologic diseases by making blood stem cells for patients".

- Answer to E. Passion. This is what makes you wake up every morning and cheer you up to work every single day. It should be based on innate motivation which would stand for decades. And you need do proudfully and consisely describe this to others. I may not be studying blood or stem cells in 50 years, so do not have to say any specific sh-t. Mine would be "Improving human health by advancing science and technologies". Yes, I can say another version of mine "tackling with fundamental questions in biology", but I chose the former one because other attendees were saying something "questions in fundamental science". I tried to dfferentiate.


Well, let me go back to science tomorrow, my old comfortable house.