STEMdentity

Finding jobs after graduate school is a huge transition period that isn’t talked about nearly enough. So I’m so grateful that my friend Dr. Afshan Khaleghi was willing to come onto the podcast to talk about her recent experiences - and successes! - in finding a non-academic job after graduate school. We talk about how she navigated how the “real world” views PhDs and how she engineered her way into quickly and easily getting recommended even by strangers for positions.

And! If you feel like you recognize some names in the episode…Dr. Khaleghi worked in FluxLab along with Dr. Nadia Tarakki, who recently appeared in a journal club episode about methane quantification methods from landfills!

And more on my own job journey

Find all episodes for Women In STEM here!

Song of the week: Tournament by Nation of Language

If you loved this episode:

• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity or LinkedIn at Anna Hodshire & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes! You can also reach out on my website!
• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities.

My guest today is Eric Mei, who is a PhD candidate in the department of Atmospheric and Climate Science at University of Washington. We’re digging into his 2026 PNAS paper Multidecadal preindustrial methane variability can be explained by noise in the source–sink imbalance. I’ll admit that methane work is still like cat nip to me - so appealing! But I don’t think about ice core research at all so this study was fascinating to me.

We also talk about how Eric transitioned over time from working with wastewater research to atmospheric signals and how he wrote such a fun and compelling paper.

Find all episodes for Journal Club here!

Song of the week: Anoana by Heilung

If you loved this episode:

• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity or LinkedIn at Anna Hodshire & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes! You can also reach out on my website!
• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

Welcome to a “special edition” of giving better talks: panels! And if you don’t think this applies to you…chances are good that if you stick around in one field long enough, you’re going to be asked to be on a panel or moderate a panel! Whether you’re the moderator or a panelist, there are some elements in common with giving a solo talk along with some unique elements. I find panels (both moderating and speaking) to be a lot of fun and a lot less pressure than solo talks. Let’s talk about how to be fantastic at both roles!

Find all episodes for Giving Better Talks here!

Song of the week: Visceral - ATOEM Remix by VAPA & ATOEM

If you loved this episode:

• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity or LinkedIn at Anna Hodshire & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes! You can also reach out on my website!
• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

It’s another episode on giving better talks! Science talks, conference talks, research talks, defenses of your Bachelor’s, Master’s, PhD, or Doctorate of Engineering work….all of these talks have the potential to invite your audience to come along with you and learn or to simply watch you in befuddlement and zone out. Let’s talk about getting better at talking :)

Find all episodes for Giving Better Talks here!

Song of the week: another Lykke Li double header!

Lucky Again by Lykke Li

Lucky Again Horse Meat Disco Remix by Lykke Li & Horse Meat Disco

If you loved this episode:

• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity or LinkedIn at Anna Hodshire & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes! You can also reach out on my website!
• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

This is a follow-up episode from last week’s delightful episode with Dr. Sarah Shaw. After we hit stop record, we fell to chatting about the couches in our lives - the things that somewhat matter but just don’t need to be done right away until the time is right. We all have a lot of couches in our lives. It’s ok to stop worrying about each of them all of the time. Some couches will fade away and others will get finished when you can get to it.

Song of the week: another double header!

I Follow Rivers by Lykke Li

I Follow Rivers - The Magician Remix by Lykke Li & The Magician

If you loved this episode:

• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity or LinkedIn at Anna Hodshire & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes! You can also reach out on my website!
• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

My guest today is the kind of woman in STEM that I infinitely appreciate and want to spend my time with. Dr. Sarah Shaw is an engineer, a mentor, a parent, until recently a student, and so many other roles. In short, she has excelled at doing a little bit of everything! She currently works as a Senior Engineer at the Aerospace Corporation and just wrapped up her PhD in Systems Engineering in Spring 2026. She additionally has a MS in Astronautical Engineering a BS in Mechanical Engineering, spent 11 years in the US Air Force, and then worked at Maxar as a program manager and Jacobs as a Space program manager. We talk about her experiences as a woman in engineering from nearly the start of her education and career, how she transitioned between each position, and how she worked on her PhD while maintaining her career and raising two young daughters. Dr. Shaw has some delightful advice that spans careers and gender identities, and I can’t express enough gratitude for her taking time out of her busy life to come talk with us!

And! If the name or voice is familiar - you're right! Dr. Shaw hung out with us before on the podcast in the Three Word Advice episode - check out more great wisdom from her there!

Find all episodes for Women In STEM here!

Song of the week: Heads Will Roll by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

If you loved this episode:

• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity or LinkedIn at Anna Hodshire & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes! You can also reach out on my website!
• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

Welcome to STEMdentity Journal Club! Every month, I find an exciting peer-reviewed journal article and interview one of its lead authors. We talk about their paper, their work, and their STEM identities.

My guest today is Liam Thompson, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Utah in the Department of Atmospheric Science. We’re talking about his 2026 paper “Contrasting patterns in urban energy and emission scaling” in Environmental Research Letters. I find this meta-analysis so interesting! It’s digging into how energy use and associated pollutants scale with increasing population in urban corridors, with some unintuitive results that we chat about.

What really caught my eye was that Liam did this work while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Oklahoma. As someone who only barely dabbled in research in undergrad, I am always impressed by anyone who pulls off an impressive research project, let alone publishes on it!

We also talk about work-life balance and finding undergraduate research opportunities!

Find all episodes for Journal Club here!

Song of the week: not a song but a legend: the late, great, incomparable Dolly Parton.

If you loved this episode:

• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity or LinkedIn at Anna Hodshire & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes! You can also reach out on my website!
• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

Writing. If you're in STEM, you likely have a number of writing tasks, including but not limited to academic journal articles, progress reports, final project reports, whitepapers, proposals, and applications. And it turns out, I love talking about big ideas like writing or getting better at talks or women in STEM in series! So this is the start of a new series, Getting better at writing in STEM. For this inaugural episode, let’s just focus on getting going. You’ve almost certainly been given advice for how to get better at writing, but is that advice always working for you? I will always encourage you to test out different ideas and see what works for you and throw out the rest! So in today’s episode I go through a handful of tips (Templates! Start on what seems easy! Block time!) just to get us off the ground on our writing project.

Find all "getting better at writing" episodes here!

Song of the week: Someday by the Strokes

Have ideas of other writing topics you’d love me to cover? DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity or reach out on LinkedIn, Anna Hodshire. You can also reach out on my website, stemdentity.com!

If you loved this episode:

• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

It’s the reminder episode you maybe forgot you needed: STOP COMPARING YOURSELF TO OTHERS BECAUSE YOU ARE AMAZING AS YOU ARE. Your unique set of interests, skills, and talents make you you, and no one else is bringing all of that to the table.

Ok, ok, it’s easier said than done but take a listen and let’s walk away with some concrete actions for reminding ourselves to get out of the cycle of negative comparison and into the habit of self-appreciation! Even world-renowned artists like Katsushika Hokusai of incredible pieces like The Great Wave off Kanagawa aren’t incredible at everything they do….like the workers’ hands in the Mitsui Shop at Surugachō in Edo.

Song of the week: It’s a double header!

Alarm by Wise Blood

Alarm (Chopped & Screwed) by Wise Blood and DJ Shuman Center

If you loved this episode:

• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity or LinkedIn at Anna Hodshire & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes! You can also reach out on my website!
• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

We all know the big picture: women make half the sky but do not make up half the global STEM workforce, especially in engineering and mathematics. Visibility matters: by being able to tell our stories and serve as role models and mentors for each other while receiving steady support from the incredible men that some of us get to work with, I believe that we can make a difference. So I’m using my podcast platform to explicitly highlight incredible women in STEM. Here I talk a little about some of my own experiences both good and bad, and I can’t wait to bring more women in STEM onto the podcast!

Links to the articles I cited:

Global STEM workforce: https://swe.org/research/2025/global-stem-workplace/

Women in the US federal STEM workforce: https://www.eeoc.gov/special-topics-annual-report-women-stem

American Society of Mechanical Engineers tips: https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/schools-can-help,-but-not-fix-gender-inequality

Systems engineering statistics: https://www.zippia.com/systems-engineer-jobs/demographics/

General and engineering US employment: https://swe.org/research/2026/us-employment/

Find all episodes for Women In STEM here

Song of the week: Pick up your Feelings by Jazmine Sullivan

Have ideas of women or organizations you would love me to interview? DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity or reach out on LinkedIn, Anna Hodshire. You can also reach out on my website!

If you loved this episode:

• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!