In this episode we will focus on tips to build and connect with your network especially during more informal get togethers that happen over the summer. We briefly discussed this topic in episode 108 and will dive deeper in this episode covering points including these below. We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

• Summertime is a great time to connect with your network through outside of work activities such as bbq’s, summer parties, informal events, etc 
• Tips to network based upon what kind of event you are going to and who will be there  
•  Tips for engaging with people especially if you are having a hard time in your job search
•  Tips for your elevator pitch
• Tips to engage in conversations
•  Tips to follow up
   

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!

Welcome to Propelling Careers Podcast episode 113. This is a continuation from episode 110, 111, and 112 - to cover more Questions that we received from the Festival of Genomics talk on Optimizing your CV in the Era of AI that we did in Boston recently. This will be the last podcast in this series – we are thrilled that we had so many questions that we were able to do 4 episodes. We again want to give a shout out again to  Jennifer K. Ocasio Adorno, PhD, at North CarolinaState University who wrote down all the questions that we got during the talk and Victor Guy, Life Sciences Event Producer, at Front Line Genomics who organized the talk and invited us to do it. We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

Networking & Referrals

• How does networking help with the application process?
• Do you need a referral or connection to network?

Career Transitions, Gaps, and Identity

• If you transitioned from another sector, should you include prior experience?
• Should you include career breaks? How do you explain gaps?
• If publications are under a maiden name, how should you indicate this?

International, Visa, and Early‑Career Considerations

• Resources for applying overseas—what to include in CVs/resumes?
• What about students applying during OPT?

Cover Letters & Supporting Materials

• Can cover letters make or break your application?
• If you have a link, how do you integrate it?
• Can AI or reviewers pick up on links?
• How important is an updated website or online portfolio?

Job Search Timing & Planning

• What is the most active hiring period?
• How far in advance should you start the job search (e.g., PhD to industry)?

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!

This episode is a continuation from episodes 110 and 111 - to cover even more Questions we received from the Festivalof Genomics in Boston - our talk was Optimizing your CV in the AI Era.  We want to give a shout out again to Jennifer K. Ocasio Adorno, PhD, at North Carolina State University who wrote down all the questions that we got during the talk and Victor Guy at Life Sciences Event Producer, Front Line Genomics who organized the talk and invited us to do it. We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

Tailoring, Fit, and Strategy focused questions

• What would be the strategy to get the interview?
• Do you need to 100% match the posted role?
• How flexible is your job title when tailoring an application?
• What impact does applying to multiple jobs within the same company have?
• How much does timing matter when applying?

AI in Hiring & Applications focused questions

• Thoughts on using AI to generate or reformat resumes/CVs?
• What happens if you opt out of AI review in an application?
• How do you deal with AI‑based interview systems?

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) & Application Portals focused questions

• Can you skip questions on the ATS?
• If your major is not in a dropdown, should you select the closest option?
• How long do systems store your information?
• Does association with the system depend on your email address?
• What happens when you reapply for a different job at the same company?
• Does it matter which email address you use?
• What’s the difference between ATS, Workday, etc.?

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 111. This is a continuation from episode 110 - to cover more Questionswe received from the  Festival of Genomics in Boston.   We want to give a shout out again to  Jennifer K. Ocasio Adorno, PhD, at North Carolina State University who wrote down all the questions that we got during the talk. In this episode we focus on these points below. We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

Structuring & Organizing Content

• Is there a standard order of sections or would you need to move sections around depending on the application?
•  Can education be listed different places based upon what you are trying to show?
•  Where should publications be listed in the resume?
• When you reorganize your CV for the job ad, do you work at a high level or add / modify / remove experiences?
• Where should you include core competencies? And how should you phrase these?

 Writing Effective Experience Descriptions

• How do you distinguish between research experiences with similar backgrounds and achievements?
• How detailed should bullet points be?
• Should you duplicate bullet points across experiences?
• How can you best convey wide or varied experience (e.g., consulting with multiple clients)?

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!

Jim and Lauren recently gave a talk at the Festival of Genomics in Boston on Optimizing your CV in the AI Era. Wecovered a range of topics on resume creation, development and branding and we had a lot of questions during our talk. One of the audience members, Jennifer K. Ocasio Adorno, PhD, at North Carolina State University took these down for us and we are super thankful for that!  We also want to thank  Victor Guy, a Life Sciences Event Producer, at Front Line Genomics who invited us to do our talk. This podcast will be the first in a few to cover all of the questions we received. We start with these below.  We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

Resume vs. CV: Length, Format, and Purpose  

• Would a resume always be a 1‑pager and more pages would be a CV?
• What is a good length
• Will a longer resume burden reviewers?
• Do you then include descriptions of each role? Isn’t that part of the interview?
• How long should the summary be at the beginning of your resume?
• How granular do you have to be about the dates (year; month, year)?

Skills, Expertise, and Non‑Technical Elements

• What is the importance of service, awards, and other experiences? Isn’t technical expertise most important?
• How do demonstrate well-roundedness, transferable skills, “fit”
• Is it worth including all techniques/skills on your resume when these also appear in dropdown menus inthe job application?
• Do you need to use exact phrasing from the role (e.g., “molecular genetics”)?

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 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!