Career Trends: Building Relationships

Relationships with colleagues will be important throughout your scientific career. Building and sustaining these relationships is the focus of the latest booklet from Science Careers, the free career resource from AAAS.

Learn more about relationships with your advisers, mentors, collaborators, and the rest of your network. This booklet can help you use communication skills, collaborating, informational interviews, and online social networking sites to guide you through your career. Line your career path with the tools to succeed.

On the Importance of Friendship in a Scientific Career

For individuals starting a scientific career today, the stresses and complexities of science are certainly more intense than 40 years ago. But the opportunities to build friendships are there if one takes the time and makes the effort. When such an opportunity arises, I implore you to go beyond a mentor-student, role-model, or colleague-to-colleague relationship and build a lasting friendship. Such friendships will enrich and support your career. Friendships formed and continued early in your career have a strength and value that more than justifies the effort.

Defining Your Unique Talents

Career coach Sital Ruparelia had a post last month on his blog about defining your unique talents. Ruparlia defines unique talents as your natural abilities plus your unique way of expressing those abilities.

By identifying these unique talents, Ruparelia says, you can start defining what makes you different and better from other job hunters, which can help your resumé and cover letter stand out. And after landing a job, you can use the same approach to identify your unique contribution to your employer, something that will come in handy when it's time for performance review and salary-raise negotiations.

Job Hunting During the Holidays

- Party hearty, with networking in mind. "Go to every party you can so you can get out of the house," Tahmincioglu says. She quotes the director of the office of career services at Eastern Connecticut State University who advises accepting as many party invitations as possible to reconnect with people you know and connect with people you don't. It is not a time be picky. In this economy holiday events put on by professional, community, or political groups -- or individuals -- can put you in contact with people you may not otherwise meet. Use the opportunity to let these people know who you are.

- Give and ye shall receive. It's the season of giving, Tahmincioglu says -- a reminder that networking is a two-way street, that helping other job hunters builds reciprocity and develops trusting relationships with others in your network. Dick van Vlootten spells out in detail how this works in a 2004 article in Science's Next Wave, the predecessor to Science Careers.

Funding News: 11 December 2009

Research funding
Student and institutional support programs
GrantsNet Express
Deadline Watch
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New Research Funding Programs