STEMdentity

Applying for a new job is a part of growing in your STEM career! ... and yet most of us do it so rarely that each application can feel overwhelming and stressful. I’ve had the opportunity to review many applications for several different job postings both at a large institution and at small businesses. Today’s episode is all about how to connect your job posting to the human on the other side of your application packet, from following the 1” margin rule (seriously! it's not worth shoving in a couple more sentences!) to making a personal connection that makes your reviewer excited about the possibility of you joining their organization!

Song of the week: Life is Possible Again - Gogol Bordello

Want to work with me? Have ideas for new episodes or collaborations? I’d love to chat! Schedule by clicking here or DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity!

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

Does this sound familiar: you need to start a paper but you stare at the blank page and then keep writing and deleting the first sentence. Or you have a draft that you need to pass onto your team for feedback but really it would be much better if you just stayed up for a few more hours and obsessively edited it. There are a lot of scenarios in our STEM work that put us in freeze or perfectionism cycles. I’ve been there and still find myself there more often than I’d like! So today I’m sharing one simple framework that helps me shake off the freezing or perfecting to keep moving forward.

If you want to hang out and do the 30 day challenge… let’s do it! If you want, tag me on Instagram at @STEMdentity or LinkedIn at Anna Hodshire and I will repost and celebrate the heck out of you! #nextmessystep

Song of the week: Running to Pain by Kelsey Lu

Want to work with me? I’d love to do a free, 30-minute intro call with you to discuss your top blockers at work and start to come up with actionable steps towards your most STEMtastic STEMdentity. Schedule by clicking here or DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity!

If you loved this episode:

• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity or LinkedIn at Anna Hodshire & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes!

Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

It’s graduation season! And graduating means transitions and transitions means people giving you advice, whether you asked for it or not. That being said, some advice is truly excellent and I’m excited to bring you advice from three STEM professionals who all graduated from the Colorado State University Systems Engineering program: Dr. Sarah Shaw, Dr. Art Villanueva, and Brian Johnston. They were recently challenged on an alumni panel that I had the pleasure to attend to provide 3-word advice to the audience and I’m quite excited to reshare that excellent advice here!

Check out Dr. Villanueva's books here - his first book, The Gardener and the Machine and his brand new book, The Only Speech You Will Ever Need, both books on my summer reading list!

Song of the week: Dancing is the best revenge by !!! and Lea Lea

Want to work with me? I’d love to do a free, 30-minute intro call with you to discuss your top blockers at work and start to come up with actionable steps towards your most STEMtastic STEMdentity. Schedule by clicking here or DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity!

If you loved this episode:

• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity or LinkedIn at Anna Hodshire & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes!

Music by me at @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 Dr. Louis Rivoire, who is a research scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. We’re discussing his 2026 Communications Earth & Environment journal article, “Tracking jet streams as Lagrangian objects”. But of course, as always, how people get to where they are in their STEM journeys is just as interesting to me as the paper itself and we dig into Louis’ personal journey!

Along with the publication, Louis pulled together an excellent commentary piece intended for broader audiences, “Are Jet Streams Just Fast Winds”, published in Springer Nature Research Communities. If jet streams and Lagrangian objects are a little or a lot foreign to you, this is a great place to start!

Song of the week: Stayin Alive by Say Lou Lou

Want to work with me? I’d love to do a free, 30-minute intro call with you to discuss mental health and ways you’re feeling stuck at work to start to come up with actionable steps towards your most STEMtastic STEMdentity. Schedule by clicking here or DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity!

If you loved this episode:

• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes!

Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

No matter where you are in your STEM career stage, chances are very high that you are someone’s mentee and you are also someone’s mentor, or you’re about to start mentoring. These relationships can go extremely well - and it’s also really common for them to run into bumps or roadblocks. What can you do when these challenges arise?

I’m excited to welcome Dr. Jeff Pierce back onto STEMdentiy for part 2 of our conversation, this time on mentor-mentee relationships. Even though we mostly focus on these working relationships within an academic setting, many of the lessons learned can be applied to many types of STEM careers!

And - if you missed part 1, go back one episode and check out our conversation on mental health!

We talked in the episode about Individual Development Plans (IDPs). I didn’t find one template I liked the best online, but there are several good options that I recommend you explore!

Learn more about Crucial Conversations here.

Jeff’s song of the week: Changes, Pts. 1 & 2 by Neil Frances

My song of the week: Soulful Strut by Young-Hold Unlimited

Feeling like you need to put more into your mental health but not sure where to even start? I’d love to do a free, 30-minute intro call with you to discuss mental health and ways you’re feeling stuck at work to start to come up with actionable steps towards your most STEMtastic STEMdentity. Schedule by clicking here or DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity!

If you loved this episode:

• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes!

Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

Mental health: we all know we should be doing “something” to take care of it, but it’s often easy to put mental on the back burner amidst our busy lives until we’ve forgotten about it for too long and realize that the kitchen is starting to burn down.

Someone I really admire for realizing that his kitchen was in full flames, taking accountability and action, and coming out the other side stronger is my graduate advisor, Dr. Jeff Pierce. Jeff has had challenges on and off with mental health but has done major updates over the past few years to keep himself healthy and happy at his job of being a professor in STEM. Jeff is a caring and kind mentor and has been generously sharing his stories of his ongoing mental health journey with students and colleagues alike. I’m so grateful to have him on today and for next week’s part 2 of our conversation on mentor/mentee relationships.

Jeff’s song of the week: Love Takes Miles by Cameron Winter

My song of the week: Maggot Brain by Flea

Feeling like you need to put more into your mental health but not sure where to even start? I’d love to do a free, 30-minute intro call with you to discuss mental health and ways you’re feeling stuck at work to start to come up with actionable steps towards your most STEMtastic STEMdentity. Schedule by clicking here or DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity!

If you loved this episode:

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

You’ve probably heard the advice, “You should be reading a peer-reviewed journal article every day of your life!”...and if you’re like me, you’re thinking things like, “Every day? Like even weekends? And my whole life? That’s a lot of really boring reading!”

So I explored reading a journal article (almost) every single day for 30 days (yes, even weekends), but I added in the secret sauce that most people don’t add to their advice: it can be a paper on…anything. I learned about beavers. I learned about reconstructing historical records of bioluminescent milky seas. I learned about albatross names. And it was glorious. So yes, let’s talk about how this advice may not have been working for you in the past and how to instead make this advice your own. Because it turns out there is a lot of magical, fun, creative science lurking under the pile of “must-read” open tabs you have open on your computer.

Song of the week: Sushi and Coca-Cola by St. Paul and the Broken Bones

Feeling creatively blocked at work? I’d love to do a free, 30-minute intro call with you to discuss your top issues and start to come up with actionable steps towards your most STEMtastic STEMdentity. Schedule by clicking here or DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity!

If you loved this episode:

• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes!

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 Dr. Zoe Jewell, who is Adjunct associate professor at Duke University USA, Associate Academic at University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, and co-founder of the nonprofit WildTrack, Inc. along with her partner Dr. Sky Alibhai. Dr. Jewell has been doing incredible field work all around the world and today we get the behind-the-scenes of her 2026 Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution journal article “A non-invasive footprint technique for accurate identification of cryptic small mammal species: a sengi case study”.

Check out WildTrack, Inc.’s awesome website: https://www.wildtrack.org/

Get involved with their tracking projects!

Song of the week: Ride on by C.S. Armstrong

Want to work with me? I’d love to do a free, 30-minute intro Work Audit call with you to discuss your top blockers at work and start to come up with actionable steps towards your most STEMtastic STEMdentity. Schedule by clicking here or DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity!

If you loved this episode:

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

Grad school: other than being short for graduate school, what is it like anyways for STEM fields? It’s actually surprisingly common for people to go to grad school without much idea of what it will entail. I was definitely one of those people - all I knew is that it was probably school-like and that it seemed like the thing to do when I looked around and didn’t like the job options that I could see with my undergraduate degree.

Even though each experience will be unique, there are some commonalities that we can talk through. Plus - once you’ve decided to apply, I walk through some tips for applications!

Song of the week: Don’t Make Me Love U by Lizzo

Related episodes - for stories from international students, see

Doing what you love within career changes with Dr. Julieta Juncosa Calahorrano

From science to science policy as an international scholar with Dr. Zitely Tzompa Sosa

Also check out any episode that starts with “Journal Club”!

It doesn’t matter where you are in your school/career stage: building your team who can help you be successful is essential for long-term success. I’d love to do a free, 30-minute intro Work Audit call with you to discuss your top blockers at work and start to come up with actionable steps towards your most STEMtastic STEMdentity. Schedule by clicking here or DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity!

If you loved this episode:

• Give a follow and share with a friend! Let’s build a community of badass, heart-centered STEM pros!
• Follow me on Instagram at @STEMdentity & feel free to DM me anytime with questions or ideas for future episodes!

Music by @excess_sass - I’d love a follow!

Graduate school can be a murky path with either no clear exit ramp or too many exit possibilities (aka Jobs!) after graduation. Sometimes those options are clearly discussed within your degree program formally or informally and sometimes they’re not. A common option for graduate students getting a PhD is to get a postdoctoral position afterwards, especially if they want to stay in research. What’s less talked about are some of the challenges of moving from school to a postdoc that can happen to anyone in any STEM field transition.

Dr. Julieta Juncosa Calahorrano generously shares both her experiences within her own school to postdoc path, as well as some of her journey as an international student and a Fulbright scholar. While you might not be going to a postdoc after your degree, you still may resonate with many of the experiences of moving from one environment to another less structured environment with more responsibilities! Julieta has done such a beautiful job approaching each challenge with grace and has managed to stick with her research passions throughout it all.

Song of the week: From the corner to the block by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Juvenile, and Galactic

Want to work with me? I’d love to do a free, 30-minute intro Work Audit call with you to discuss your top blockers at work and start to come up with actionable steps towards your most STEMtastic STEMdentity. Schedule by clicking here or DM me on Instagram, @STEMdentity!

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If you loved this episode:

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