In this episode, Jim and Lauren provide advice for how to let things go so that you can get out of your own way during your career search. We decided to do this episode since many things can lead to candidates getting in their own way such as fear of the unknown, fear of rejection, fear of being an imposter/not being good enough, lack of control, fear of not being “ready”, fear of closing doors/opportunities, not having a process, and more. We cover points including these below. We hope you find this episode helpful and that you enjoy listening! 

• Let go of your application materials - don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good
•  Let go of control in your search - lean into serendipity 
•  Let go of things outside your control
•  Let go of a bad job

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, Jim and Lauren cover advice for how to do a job search in an area different than where you are living now and cover these points below.  This topic has come up a lot inrecent discussions so we thought we would break it down to provide advice.  We hope you find this episode helpful and that you enjoy listening! 

• Why are we doing this episode 
•  What’s the first step: Engage your network
•  Set up location-specific job searches
• Leverage networking groups with multiple chapters in different locations 
• Utilize AI 
• Engage with the local (state/country/regional) biotech association
• Follow news sources
• Turn on location preference in the job search preference on LinkedIn
• Remember, there are many remote roles, so keep this in mind when you are searching

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 93. This is a 2 part podcast series following episode 92.  In this episode, we cover red, green, yellow and beige flags regarding identifying mentors / managers including these points below. As we heard in the last episode, there is a lot of nuance around this topic that we will cover.  As we mentioned in episode 91, your manager / mentor is reallyimportant.  We hope you find this episode helpful and that you enjoy listening! 

• the manager/mentor is very hands off
• the manager/ mentor is very hands on 
• the manager/ mentor gives you many ways to increase your visibility - wants you to present your work often, wants you to engage in different things to increase your network - collaborations, consortia, peer reviewing, co-organizing a panel at a conference, consulting for a startup out of their lab, serve on a few committees, etc. 
• the manager / mentor is not very organized and kind of all over the place… 
• the manager. mentor is new - so you are the first person they are hiring 

 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 cover red, green, and yellow flags regarding identifying and working with mentors / managers. There is a lot of nuance around this topic that we will cover. We cover scenarios including these below. As we mentioned in episode 91, your manager / mentor is really important to your career development, happiness and success.  We hope you find this episode helpful and that you enjoy listening! 

You are looking to join a lab or a company where the manager / mentor is really high profile

The mentor/ manager is not from your background - such as, they are an immunologist and they want to hire an AIperson (you) to join their group   

The mentor is someone who drives people really hard - has high standards and wants to only publish in nature, cell, science….  - 

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!

This episode will follow up from episode 90 and will focus on myth busying and amplifying good advice for career planning and navigating your career including these points below. Jim and Lauren appreciate all of the advice our network has shared for us to cover in the last episode and this one  We hope you find this episode helpful and that youenjoy listening!   

• Your manager matters more than the project you are hired for
• Find good mentors and if you get along well with people, stay in touch with them throughout even after your moved on
• Accept roles you don’t yet feel fully ready for and trust that you’ll grow into them.
• Be authentic. In your applications, your interviews, and in your workspace. You will be miserable if you spend your whole career hiding.
• During job search, stay away from [discussing / disclosing] drama. Keep things at high level if you had a bad experience.
• If you had a bad experience focus on what you learned through it
• Make mistakes, learn from your mistakes, never make the same mistake twice

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 our first myth busting episode of 2026.  We will also amplify good advice also. In this episode we will focus on advice for career planning and navigating your career covering these points below.  We have a lot more advice that we will go into in future episodes.  We hope you find this episode helpful and that you enjoy listening! 

We want to shoutout everyone who provided advice for this podcast.  we put out a call to our network for good and bad advice people have received and we received a lot of advice! It was really insightful to see so many pieces of good and bad advice… 

• Good career advice Jim and Lauren have received
• Bad career advice Jim and Lauren have received
• Advice people have shared regarding career planning
• If you move from academia you can never return - not true!
•  You should be passionate about your career
•  Hockey analogy: skate to where the puck will be, not where it is
•  Keep diversifying your skill set and explore different areas. It helps keep you sell-able and sustainable
• Be a sponge, be humble, be adaptable through change
• It is important to always try to see the big picture.
• Being able to tailor your communication to the audience is extremely important

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 89. We hope everyone had a nice holiday and new year.   Jim and Lauren are looking forward to 2026. For our first episode in 2026, we thought we would dive right in and talk about trends we are seeing that may influence 2026.  We hope you find this episode helpful and that you enjoy listening! 

•  Some organizations are still hiring
• Standing out as a candidate is still hard
• Casting a wider net is important in this current market
• Not all roles are broadly posted 
• A few factors affecting the life sciences industry include funding uncertainty, SBIR/STTR funding expired in sept 2025 and has not been renewed yet, and Give kids a chance act has not been passed yet, which incentives rare disease research
• Lauren will be at JPM next week, week of Jan 12th, in San Francisco to keep a pulse on our sector
• Episodes that we plan on doing / topics that we want to talk about in 2026

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!

As 2025 comes to an end, Jim and Lauren put together a wrap up episode to reflect on 2025 and look forward to 2026. It was helpful for both of us to do this episode to realize how much we did in 2025 and also recognize that there is still so much to cover as we look forward to 2026…..   We want to thank you all for listening and we look forward to the 2026 Propelling Careers Podcast Season! 

• Audience demographics, gender, age, and location – we now have listeners in over 50 countries!
•  Top 10 episodes by listens since podcast started
• Jim and Lauren’s favorite episode and why
• Hardest topics we did in 2025
• Favorite question in 2025
• Surprises in 2025
• Lessons learned in 2025
• Goals for 2026 

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 the spirit of continuing with the reflecting theme that we have had over the last few episodes, Jim and Lauren planned this episode to give advice for how to use the holiday “slowdown” to help you as you set goals for 2026 and strategize for how you will accomplish or at least make progress on these.  We hope you find this episode helpfuland we hope you enjoy listening. 

• Why are we doing this episode: 
• Self reflection
• Do a Gap analysis
• Reflect on feedback received
• Do you have unfinished/incomplete goals?
• Do you have ongoing or evergreen goals
• Relevance to Ultimate goal (career, etc)?
• Goals come in different forms and timescales
• Develop a or update your skill development plan

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!

Given the holiday season Jim and Lauren put together an episode about giving thanks.   We talk about different ways you could give thanks as well as what we are thankful for. We hope you enjoy listening!. 

• Why should people focus on giving thanks
• Advice for how people could give thanks
• When to give thanks
• What are we thankful for professionally and personally 

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!