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!

Welcome to Propelling Careers Podcast episode 85. Given the holiday season and the various networking opportunitiesthat come with it, we thought we would do this episode to provide advice for how to network during these various events/activities. We will cover advice for how to connect with your current network and build yours also. We hope youenjoy listening. 

• Be authentic as you engage with people
• There are many different events and opportunities to engage with and build your network
• Advice to prepare for different types of events
•  Networking can occur in various forms – in person networking, online, email, informal events, etc
•  Advice for how to engage with a potentially large cross-section of people
•  Thoughts on individual outreach vs general messages to your network
•  Other ways to engage your network - sending holiday cards / emails / annual summary email / notes
•  Leveraging LinkedIn to engage your network
•  Your elevator pitch  
•  Leveraging this time for informational interviews
•  Advice 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 we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!

This episode 84 is a follow up from the last episode, episode 83. In this episode, we share a few more lessons learned during the last few months of recruiting that Lauren has been involved with.  Jim and Lauren hope that you find these two episodes helpful especially if you are in a job search.  We hope you enjoy listening. 

• Timeline wise - things sometimes move really fast 
• If you cannot move quickly / start quickly, let the organization know
• Interview fatigue is real – how organization try to address it
• Candidates need to ensure they are prepared for interviews
• Questions candidates asked, and perhaps should not ask, during interviews   
• Candidate correspondence matters

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!

The last few months have been really busy for Lauren with the recruiting work that she does for entrepreneurial  life sciences companies.  In this episode, Jim and Lauren share a few lessons learned over the last few months, to help others who are on the job search (or who are in the process of hiring).  We hope you find the advice in this episode helpful and hope you enjoy listening. 

• So many applicants – advice to stand out
• Some orgs hiring a few people per role…. so not all “roles are posted”
• Advice to understand what job titles could be a fit and how to broaden what you consider
• Insights on referrals 
• LinkedIn outreach by recruiters

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 focuses on ways to help your network help you especially if you are in a job search. We put this episode together to provide advice to make it easier for people to help you and we cover tips including these below. For many people, this might be their first real job search so they might not have thought about these tips before. Even for seasoned people, this job market is different than previous ones, so they may find these tips helpful also. We hope you find the advice in this episode helpful and hope you enjoy listening. 

• Why are we doing this episode
• Be specific in your ask, Don’t be so vague
• Be open to feedback
• Have details in your LinkedIn profile
• Leverage LinkedIn to identify potential connections
• Provide info about your background to your contacts when making connections
• Revise Materials and Send ahead
• Don’t put time pressure on the person you are asking to help you 

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!