Propelling Careers

This is the third in a series of podcasts focused on the tip of the iceberg topic - we are trying to highlight all the work that goes into what people only see as the tip of the iceberg.  In this episode, we focus on the interview.  On the surface, you may see a great interview or good interview responses, but what is helpful to see and appreciate is what is under the tipof the iceberg.  We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

During interviews, the people at the org who interview the candidate, see the candidate’s best qualities.  As the candidate goes through the interview process, the interview members are trying to assess not just the shiny parts, but what may be under the water line to understand motivation, interests, etc.

Interviewers often ask follow up questions to try to understand what is under the water line such as these below.

• What have you enjoyed most about your work or career so far? 
• What are you most proud of? 
• How did that make you feel?
• What did you choose / take that approach?
• Did you make it a team effort?
• What did you like most about that work or X approach?
•  What was most effective about your approach?
•  Would you do anything different if this scenario happens again?
•  What was your first reaction when the change happened?  
•  Asking about why you made this career choice ?

References could be helpful to understandthings below the water line that made you who you are.  

 Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould launched this podcast in 2024, when Jim was the Director forPostdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School.  Jim is now the Executive Director of the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. We 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!

Propelling Careers Podcast episode 121 is the second in a series of podcasts focused on the tip of the iceberg topic.We are trying to highlight all the work that goes into what looks like the perfect thing. In this episode, we will cover image, branding, and networking.  On the surface, you may see a perfect image or brand or ease in networking but what people don’t often talk about is all of the work that led to what you see at the tip of the iceberg.  We hope you find thishelpful and that you enjoy listening. 

• Perception does not equal reality
• You may need to put hundreds or thousands of hours in to get really good at something

What you see: the polished person at the networking event who looks so confident 

What you don’t see

• the hour spent before hand psyching themselves up to go out and network
• setting goals to help them navigate the event
• them after the event decompressing….
• The prep for conversations

What you see: the polished person at the networking event who seems to network with ease talking with all sorts of people and looking like they enjoy it

What you don’t see

• the 100+ networking events that this person attended before this one where they honed their skills 
• The hours spent practicing opening lines
• The hours spent working on their elevator pitch
• The many networking discussions that did not go well, but they learned from them 
• etc 

What you see: the really crisp elevator pitch 

What you don’t see

• the document they have on their computer with 30+ different elevator pitch versions 
• the endless practicing
• the time they took to tailor the pitch for the networking event you saw them at
• situational awareness

What you see: The person giving a talk that seems too good! 

What you don’t see

• the 50 versions of the slide deck…
• all the feedback they got from people 
• the hours practicing
• the drafting and redrafting of the talking points…

What you see: the beautiful picture perfect picture on LinkedIn  

What you don’t see

• the 100 pictures they had taken to get the 1 perfect shot. 
• The hair and makeup done beforehand
• The personal stylist who picked out the perfect outfit  
• The hours of exercise to get in shape for the picture 

What you see: a wonderful LinkedIn profile

What you don’t see

• all the time to build and tailor the profile

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould launched this podcast in 2024, when Jim was the Director forPostdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School.  Jim is now the Executive Director of the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. We 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 120. This will be the first in a few series of podcasts focused on the tip of the iceberg topic - we are trying to highlight all the work that goes into what looks like the perfect thing - the resume, or the interview answers, or the career choice.  On the surface, you may see a good choice, a perfect resume, etc, etc, but what people don’t often talk about is all of the work that led to what you see as the tip of the iceberg.  We hope you findthis helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould launched this podcast in 2024, when Jim was the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School.  Jim is now the Executive Director of the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. We 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 last episode, 118 we mentioned that having a personal board of advisors is helpful.   For this episode, we thought we would go over what a personal board of advisors is,  how youmight create one and why this is important since we realize that not everyone may be aware of this term. We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

• Why have a personal board of advisors 
• What is a personal board of advisors 
• Who should be on the BOA
• What type of advice / background are you looking for? 
• Build rapport first
• Allow evolution:
• Set a meeting / check in cadence
• Keep it reciprocal
• What a Personal Board Isn’t

Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Executive Director of the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, 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 two myths that we hear often. One is Leadership skills are only important for people in formal leadership positions - like being a manager of people and the second one is that failure is a sign that I don't belong. We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

• Leadership is not only for people in formal leadership positions
• Leadership can occur at any career stage.
• Leadership is a behavior, not a title

• There are many way to show leadership that is not managing people directly including:
• leading collaborations
• leading interactions with vendors
• leading new initiatives 
• organizing initiatives 
• setting up processes for various
• research and non-research activities
• mentoring people
• shaping culture
• promoting ethical research practices
• influencing teams and decisions
• leadership roles in associations

• An important leadership quality is creating an environment where people can thrive.
• Another important Leadership quality is being able to learn from failure   
• Failure is not a sign that you don't belong 
• Failure can be a great opportunity to learn
• Many orgs embrace failure, especially innovative ones
• Some else’s success does not means that you are failing (or falling behind)

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 focus on myth busting including these points below. This is one of our favorite topics.  The myth busting is one of the reasons we started the podcast. We like being a source of truth for people seeking relevant and real time career advice.  We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

• Good science speaks for itself
•  My mentor will manage my career
•  I need to have my entire career figured out now
•  Professional development can wait until I'm almost done your graduate school or postdoc or paper or etc
•  Employers only care about technical expertise

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 116. In this episode we will focus on how to sell yourself without being salesy - this topic has come up multiple times in many of our coaching discussions so we thought we would do this episode to provide advice. We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

• it’s important to be Truthful (about challenges and accomplishments)
•  it’s important to be authentic
• It’s important to be excited and proud
•  It’s important to be facts and evidence-based
•  Some cultures are not comfortable talking about themselves   
•  If you don’t talk about your skills and experiences, people won't know.
•  Instead of trying to convince people you're valuable, show them how your experience connects to what they need.
•  Lead with curiosity
•  Tell stories instead of listing qualities
•  Focus on outcomes
•  Be confident without exaggerating
•  Make the information you share relevant
•  Think of your communication as not about selling yourself, but more as making it easy for someone to understand the value you bring.

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 focus on tips to do effective informational interviews.  In the last episode, 114, wetalked about networking tips. Since one way to follow up from networking could be an informational interview, we thought this episode would be timely in case any of our listeners have informational interviews after their networking. We cover advice including these points below. We hope you find this helpful and that you enjoy listening. 

• People may have more time over the summer to connect for informational interviews
•  When you reachout to someone for an informationalinterview, give an idea of what you are looking to learn.  For example, are you looking to learn about career advice, about their specific job, about the general market, etc
•  How to approach a warm invitation vs Cold Call
•  How to structure your reachout
•  Be flexible with mtg time and logistics
•  Have Questions prepared 
• Ask if you can help the person you are speaking with too

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 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!