Helium

You'll hear about how to build a research group through careful recruiting, listening to students and letting go of what is out of your control. Greg dives into the way he mentors students from the day they arrive in his group, he also discusses how he recruits graduate students to join his group and how he has worked through bad fits before. His purpose is produce the best students because they will go on to have a bigger impact in the world than any of this publications. The unifying theme through all of this is his listening to students, other faculty and industry members. This way he gets a handle on the whole landscape of the graduate student career recruitment through placing them in their next gig (whether that be a consulting position or a postdoc).

Maren Wood and Jen Polk from Beyond the Professoriate joined us to talk about how mentors can open doors for graduate students and enable them to explore alternative career paths. The key for them is eliminating the default career mindset in academia. Your students can pursue other careers after their time with you and go on to have impactful careers. Want happier graduate students? Have open and honest career discussions with them.

Mentoring is a big part of the conversation in this second half of our interview with Thomas Seager. The conversation also spanned scales from the day to day practical to broad visions of defining personal metrics for success and the fundamental purpose of research, engineering, and the personal growth and mentoring needed to reach our potential.

What are the incentives and measures of academic success? What are your measures of success? Do these align or will you need to decide what is important to you? We had Thomas Seager on for episode 12 and he shared a ton of insight into the history and future of the university. If you are an early career researcher, or someone who plans on working with universities over the next 5 to 20 years this episode is thought provoking. We had so much fun speaking with Dr. Seager that we had to split this conversation into two parts. The second part is coming your way next week in Episode 13.

Listening is fundamental to what we do in academia, we take the information and progress of others and build upon that. Yet, listening is never formally taught as a skill. It is assumed that listening can be learned like we learn to walk. With his book Deep Listening Oscar Trimboli is on a mission to change this approach to learning listening. In this interview he describes the five levels of listening and helps us understand how they can be put into practice.

Caren Weinhouse was starting a new position at Oregon Health & Science University. Before she left her postdoc she wanted to capture a graduate student snapshot of what good mentoring looks like. Caren began by listening to Anthony and Jessica, and brought the mentality that each graduate student, within their time in a research group, can really offer insight about what speaks to their perspective, what makes them feel supported. This episode will alter your approach to mentoring.

Gary McDowell and Becki Lijek from the Future of Research joined us for conversation about better practices around peer review processes. We learned about the Future of Research (Gary is the Executive Director). FoR is now focused on getting better data on early career researchers. This means getting a handle on how many postdocs are out there and where they are going. Their goal is to give more transparency to the whole process. They also share many insights about the struggles of early career researchers (e.g., postdocs) and how that should play into mentoring them. They are running a survey on peer review with early career researchers. The survey link is in the show notes.

Professor Nina Vance from the University of Colorado joined us to talk about the thought process of becoming a professor. She describes her tortuous path, how she finally overcame imposter syndrome and convinced herself that work-life balance was possible in academia. We also asked her how she creates a good group culture, how she weaves creativity into her work and the air quality science she is working on right now.

Sarah K. Peck joined us for a show about the realities of time management. Sarah has some great advice about learning what to let go from your life and what to hang onto. She is ruthless, but it is something we all need to hear if we have big dreams for our lives and work. She also told us about how she runs a mastermind program for people who want to surround themselves with others who are focusing in a similar way. This is not something well-known in the research community, but these groups can make a big difference to reaching your goals. We also talked a little about the problems mothers can face in the workplace and startup word.