Syracuse University Gradcast

Time to dive into the mindset of the person who may hold your job or internship in their hands! Former recruiter and current career development specialist Tracy Bauer, G’15, offers tips on what recruiters think and how you can think like a recruiter in your job search. 

Join Dan Olson-Bang, Ph.D., and Tracy Bauer, G’15, for their take on how to succeed in a new position once you have accepted an offer. We’ll go over questions to ask, things to remember, and ways to impress from the start!

Sometimes a graduate student's career path really stays with you, and that's the case with Carli Flynn, Ph.D. Carli and I worked together on two career trajectories--first, she was a postdoc at RIT in the Golisano Institute for Sustainability, before she shifted gears to become a consultant for McKinsey & Co. Listen as Carli tells us about her work, about adaptability, and about why being a graduate student in the sciences is really about entrepreneurship. 

Dan Olson-Bang, Ph.D., and Tracy Bauer, G’15, tackle some of the most common myths they hear from students and provide alternative ways to approach the job search in a more strategic way.

Listen to some of your frequently asked questions about the job search answered by Dan Olson-Bang, Ph.D., and Tracy Bauer, G’15. We talk about some common anxieties about being employable, how to balance your job search and your academics, and what to do when you’ve been rejected from a job.

Katina Rogers, Ph.D., author of Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Duke UP, 2020) gives a little background on the talk she gave during the initial publication of this episode, Scholarship for the Public Good: Expanding Definitions of Academic Success. Katina also shared her path from a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Boulder to her current work at CUNY Graduate Center, including her work in the Futures Initiative.  

Scholarship for the Public Good: Expanding Definitions of Academic Success

Doctoral education opens doors to engaging and often unexpected pathways, with opportunities for significant public impact—an essential element of reinvesting in higher education as a public good. In this talk, Katina Rogers, author of Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Duke UP, 2020), will consider how building a university that is truly worth fighting for means thinking more expansively about what constitutes scholarly success—not only to support individual career pathways, but also to work toward greater equity and inclusion in the academy. Rogers will talk about her own pathway and her current work with the CUNY Graduate Center, including the Futures Initiative that aims to design new structures for higher education. 

Glenn Wright, Ph.D., joins Dan Olson-Bang, Ph.D., as they discuss one of the best opportunities to hone your research communication abilities: the 3-Minute Thesis Competition. 3-Minute Thesis is a research communication competition hosted by over 900 universities in 85 countries worldwide. It challenges graduate students in all research programs to present a compelling oration on their dissertation/thesis and its significance in just three minutes, in language appropriate to a non-specialist audience. 

Glenn and Dan talk about the competition, how to be effective, and most of all, what prizes you'll get if you win! Register to enter the 3MT each semester it's offered. 

Alumnus Akshay Bagde, G’20, (Information Management, iSchool and now Cloud Support Associate at Amazon Web Services) answers questions about how he secured a position in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and what he did prior to graduation to create success. Akshay shares what he focused on in his job search, how he balanced his academics and job search, as well as advice for current students and for those starting a new role remotely.

People talk about "transferable skills" that PhDs possess all the time. But what are they, and do you have them? If you're not in a technical field, what "skills" do you have? And what do we mean by "Beyond?" This episode is here to help you wade through the quagmire and to show you how you already are a match for jobs--regardless of the skills they name. 

Dan Olson-Bang, Ph.D., and Tracy Bauer, G’15, answer questions on references and letters of recommendation, such as, What is the difference between letters of recommendation and references? Who should I ask to be a reference? How many should I have ready? When should I ask them? References and letters of recommendation can be a maze whether you are a master's or PhD student, and we hope this episode will offer some much-needed clarity.