PhDs at Work Podcast Michelle Erickson, PhD

Hanna Griff-Sleven, Program Director at the Museum at Eldridge Street, shares more about her career path and work at the museum, emphasizing the importance of remaining flexible.

QUOTES FROM HANNA

“Enough cannot be said about networking and connections. That’s true with any job; you have to get out there and get yourself known.”

“It was a stepping stone. I met people I needed to meet, and I was employed.”

“You don’t just get to do the job you think you’re hired for. You’re part of a whole team.”

“Having a PhD is a great thing. It’s not a liability at all, I think. It becomes a liability only when you can’t be flexible.”

“There’s all different kinds of teaching. Doing my public programs is one way of teaching the public about their culture.”

LINKS & RESOURCES

Museum at Eldridge Street

Henri Matisse The Cut-Outs

Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University

 

 We chat with David Hardtke, Senior Engineeering Manager at LinkedIn, about data science, the job search, and the work he’s doing to bring the two together.

QUOTES FROM DAVID

“You don’t want to hire narrowly focused people that only want to do one thing for the rest of their career. You want people that have enough intellectual curiosity to want to do something else after a couple of years.”

“We can use modern tools of data mining and machine learning to see what are the hidden patterns that predict success when looking and applying for a new job.”

“Finding good people is not a database query. It takes some ingenuity.”

“Sometimes you don’t want to take the most stable job. You want to take the job that makes you best for your next job.”

“In data science, the models and the math – the stuff that we love – is the same, but we’re solving real-world problems.”

“We innovate, we publish, we patent. Some of the fun stuff that you get to do when you’re an academic. But you can’t work on problems that take two years to solve, because there are demands placed on you by shareholders and public markets, so you have to pick problems that can be solved in six-month time scales , not two-year time scales.”

LINKS & RESOURCES

IceCube Telescope Finds High-Energy Neutrinos, Opens Up New Era in Astronomy

Wired

Dunning–Kruger Effect

Hirable Like Me: Interviewers favor applicants who remind them of themselves

Lauren Rivera

The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha

Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It

Peter Cappelli

GitHub

Kaggle

 

Pallavi Phartiyal, Senior Analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, shares her thoughts on science-based careers in public policy and how scientific research and the sharing of information supports our democratic system.

QUOTES FROM PALLAVI

“There is a debate within the scientific community – it’s not a new debate, it’s happened over the course of centuries – which is, how should scientists engage or not engage in public policy and advocacy? And does that do something to the credibility they hold if they step out of their lab?”

“Public policy and advocacy doesn’t have the luxury of the academic time frame. You have to be much more cognizant of everything that is playing out politically around you.”

“What is the role of informed citizenry in making our system of governance a strong one? And how do we provide data to strengthen that relationship between the public and the people who govern them?”

“Most of our founding fathers were citizen scientists. In fact, a lot of laws that they wrote were derived by thinking about Newtonian laws, for instance, the system of checks and balances.”

“Science policy is a career which is not very well defined. A lot of opportunities that exist, you have to seek them out. There is no set way to get there.”

LINKS & RESOURCES

Union of Concerned Scientists

The Science Network

The Science Network Workshop Series

Tips and Tools for Science Communicators

We chat with Adam Capitanio, Editorial Associate at Berghahn Books, about the issues surrounding open access in academic publishing and the benefits of a powerful PhD network.

QUOTES FROM ADAM

“Open access is the idea that scholars, academics, and university researchers should be able to make their work freely available and open to the public.”

“It’s a fine line to walk because academic publishers, particularly independent publishers, have to make a profit.”

“Open access as issue didn’t exist before the internet.”

“We need to be able to make peace with some of the disruptive trends that are going on in the industry.”

LINKS & RESOURCES

Open Access (Wikipedia)

Berghahn Journals Open Access Policy

Palgrave Open

Routledge Books Open Access

Aviad Eilam takes us behind the scenes for a closer look at the field of social media marketing and advertising.

QUOTES FROM AVIAD

“In most cases, from my experience, non-academic jobs are not that interested in your dissertation topic.”

“Many tech companies hire linguists with experience in natural language processing or computational linguistics.”

“Social media within big companies is usually just one branch of marketing.”

“Digital marketing is relatively young, and it’s constantly changing and evolving.”

LINKS & RESOURCES

Behind the Scenes of Oreo’s Real-Time Super Bowl Slam Dunk

How Oreo Won the Marketing Super Bowl With a Timely Blackout Ad on Twitter



Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

Our first podcast! We chat with Sean Carson, our first “Week in the Life” guest blogger, about the importance of being brave and how his training as a musician has influenced his approach to professional growth.

QUOTES FROM SEAN

“As a musician, you have to create opportunities for yourself. It’s not the kind of professional where things fall in your lap.”

“I try to put together series that mean something and that express something about what I’m trying to do, what the museum is trying to do, and that engage with the community in a different way.”

“Imagining that there is a certain, singular route to take to get to a goal is a downfall, because that’s rarely true.”

“Probably more than ever in history, who you know has become so important to what you do as a career.”

“Every job is temporary and nobody these days ends up getting a job they just stay at, working in one way, in one capacity, for one company or one institution for decades. That’s just not the reality anymore.”

LINKS & RESOURCES

Look and Listen Festival

Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive

Peninsula Museum of Art