Welcome to Propelling Careers Podcast episode 109.  We talked in our last podcast about a few ways to leverage the summer slowdown and one of these was to disconnect and unplug with intention. Therefore we thought we would do a specific podcast just to focus on this topic covering points including these below. We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening.   

• Use normalizing language: it matters what you call it and how you phrase/frame 
• Normalize rest as responsible science
• Redefine “rest”: Not all rest is passive.
• Step away from work intentionally
• Gentle re‑entry (so the break actually helps)
• Start your morning media free.
• Set bounded unplug rules (not all‑or‑nothing)
• Find your creative outlet
• Allocate time for your mental health through meditation and breathing
• Journaling
• Limit your screen time
• Trade your phone for a book or some other activity
• Get physical exercise

 Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listenersnavigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

The start of summer marks a turning point in the year.  This can be a great time to reflect and refocus and recharge. In this episode, we focus on tips including these below, to help you leverage the summer time, especially if you are in a career search.  Often, the summer is less busy with work meetings, conferences, and other work obligations, therefore you may have more time to focus recharging andreflection. We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoylistening. 

• Reflect on what work gave you energy and joy
• Reflect on what work consistently drained you  
• Reflect on when you felt most useful
• Reflect on what you procrastinated on even when you had time to do the work
• Disconnect/unplug with intention
• Pay attention to moments of curiosity especially during downtime
• Connect with your network - outside of work activities and for fun
• Engage in Informational interviews since people you want to connect with may have more time over the summer toconnect
• Work on your resume - does it truly reflect who you are and where you want to go?
• Work on your LinkedIn profile - does it truly reflect who you are and where you want to go? 
• Post a few times on LinkedIn to let your network know what you are up to
• Learn something new

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In many of Jim and Lauren’s coaching discussions, the topic of building a target list to identify organizations of interest comes up. This seems to happen regardless of the original focus of the coaching session. Since so many people are not sure how to build this. By developing a target list, you may increase your chances of identifying opportunities.  We have covered this topic as part of a few episodes, but we have not done one just on this topic, therefore we decided to dothis episode specifically on this topic.  We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

• Why are we doing this episode: 
•  What do you mean by target list
•  The target list advice can be used to build a list of organizations, as well as a list of titles and also a list of people to connect with
•  Why is this important
•  Strategies to build your target list
•  Once you have your target list, how can you use it

 Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

Jim and Lauren have had many discussions recently where people we speak with just feel overwhelmed in their job search / career navigation.  Therefore, we thought we would do this episode to try to give advice for how to overcome the overwhelming feeling.  We cover points including these below. We hope you enjoy listening. 

• Set small goals
• Take an inventory of what you have access to: 
• Don’t do your search alone
• Try to cross things off your list
• Keep track of progress
• Focus only on what you can control, keep it simple
• Be intentional
• Protect and replenish your energy

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In this episode, we will talk about a few more of Jim’s recent talks at MGH, AAI’s IMMUNOLOGY 2026 conference and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.  The talk at Beth Israel was Jim’s talk, “Self-work to Network”  and the talks at MGH and activities at AAI Immunology 2026 focused on resumes and CV’s.  We hope you enjoy listening. 

Questions from Jim’s talk at BIDMC include:

• I feel my self-worth, but as a postdoc, it's one of the most underappreciated (especially financially) jobsthat we are a part of, Do you have insights?
•  What types of elevator pitches should we be preparing for different situations?
•  How do you build connections that last and build without bothering/burdening them?
•  How do you build your reputation and increasevisibility?
•  How can we showcase ourselves to the non-scientific audiences?
•  I have a very broad network, but it's tough to stay in touch with everyone, do you have any advice?

Resume advice  

• For how to make a strong first impression.
• To showcase YOU and your skills/experience.
• To tailoring your resume and CV to the job
• Formatting advice

 A few questions that came up from the MGH andAAI activities

• How much effort do I put into LinkedIn?
• How to Networking efficiency?

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In episode 102, the topic of defining success came up while we were discussing Jim’s recent talk at Wheaton College.Since this is such an important topic, and one that can be very personal and individualized, we decided to do a podcast focused on defining success. We hopeyou enjoy listening. 

• Why we feel this is important 
•  How do you know where you’re going if you never define the destination?
•  What is important to you personally?
•  What is important to you professionally?
• Keep in mind, what Success looks like might change over time as your career and life develops 
• Separate happiness from success
• Separate self worth from success
• Define what success looks like for you - what are your guiding principles 
•  Build in accountability
•  Celebrate success otherwise it feels like you’re constantly chasing

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listenersnavigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In this episode, we will focus on a few more of  Jim’s recent talks. He has been busy over the last few weeks talking at places such as Wheaton College, the 3rd Annual New Mexico Postdoc Research Symposium and MGH. During this talk in New Mexico, Jim covered these points below.  We hope you enjoy listening. 

• What were you talking about at the 3rd Annual New Mexico Postdoc Research Symposium
• What is the talk “From Self-work to Network: A Postdoc Adventure” about
• Normalizing difficulty and resolving conflict
• Building situational and self awareness
•  Inventorying superpowers, subtle powers, and transferable skills
• Reframing your story
• Networking and outreach

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In this episode, we will focus on one of Jim’s recent talks. He has been busy over the last few weeks talking at places such as Wheaton College, the 3rd Annual New Mexico Postdoc Research Symposium and MGH. We are looking forward to this discussion and we hope you enjoy listening. 

Point Jim Covered during his talk at Wheaton College  

• Know Thyself: What leadership strategies help create a strong and collaborative culture in research teams?
• Leadership & Culture: privilege, diversity, leadership style, psychological safety
• Fostering/creating Culture and group dynamics
• Handling pressure and uncertainty
• Motivating and engaging employees
• Conflict resolution

Lessons learned Jim talked about

• Don’t ask anything of anyone without being willing/able to do it yourself
• Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good 
• Don’t do it alone if you don’t have to; Ask for help, share the load/accountability
• It’s almost never about the work, it’s about the people doing the work…check in with them
• Remember, you have agency, power, and choices

Career Advice He Covered

• What advice can you share about navigating the grad school process after college?
• What are some challenges graduates face after completing their PhDs, and how can universities better support them?
• What advice would you give students about building careers that are both successful and personally meaningful?

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

In this episode, Jim and Lauren focus on advice relating to building your personal brand on LinkedIn. In Feb 2026 Lauren gave two talks at the Transition to Industry Event organized by the Torrey Pines Training Consortium including one on building your brand on LinkedIn. This podcast covers questions that she received during this talk including onesbelow.  This event was developed for early career scientists who are thinking of transitioning to a career in industry. We hope you enjoy listening. 

• What should I do with my profile if I am not actively looking for a job at the moment 
• For mid-career professionals who are quietly exploring industry roles, how do you balance visibility with discretion?
• Does it matter how many connections a person has on LinkedIn?
•  Is the summary/about section absolutely necessary in LinkedIn? 
•  I’ve noticed these LinkedIn research summaries highlight recent or most current roles. How would you incorporate skills learned in past experiences (undergraduate or prior) briefly in a personal summary
• How important is using a work banner or emojis in a profile? What is actually necessary for a personal brand? 
• Could writing your hobbies into the LinkedIn profile sometimes also come off as unprofessional?
• Do you recommend listing certifications related to things you are interested in on LinkedIn? Will it give you a leg up?
• How often do recruiters contact grad students and postdocs? I've heard it's more common at higher levels
• Does the recruiter see our job score? 
• Do recruiters see How many jobs we applied for
• Can recruiters see how many responses we got back?

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

 As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

Welcome to Propelling Careers Podcast episode 100. We cannot believe we have made it this far… One source I foundindicated that 6.25% of all podcasts make it to 100 episodes. Another source I found said about 5% - regardless, a small amount of the entire network of podcasts make it to 100. We are really proud that we have been able to developmeaningful content to help our listeners navigate their career journey over the last 25 months.  When we started, we were not really sure where this would go - we just wanted to put good, truthful, honest content out there to help people. Since Feb 1, 2024, people have been listening and giving us positive reinforcement. This has helped motivate us to continue and we really appreciate this.  

 During this episode, we also will reach another milestone - we will have our first guest! Our first guest is Joey, my nephew, who painted the picture that is our podcast logo.

• Lets talk about  celebrating milestones
• Keeping momentum
• Creating goals
• How goals and milestones are different
• Feedback from our listeners has kept us motivated
• Episodes that we have gotten a lot of feedback on include episodes that are part of a series as well as these below
• Ep 82 help me help you
• The interview red, green, yellow, beige flag episodes 19-23 and also episode 97, 67, and 68
• Ep 73 the 26 steps in a job search process 
• Ep 33 and 34 networking advice
• How to navigate the current landscape 
• Ep 58 getting your game face on
• Ep 81 proactive tips for mentoring relationships

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.

As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!