So what is Mentoring? Mentoring is the verb describing the action of a more senior person in a given area of expertise entering into a relationship with a more junior colleague for the purpose of advising and fostering advancement of the less experienced individual. As individuals during our training, we can and should seek out […]
Mentoring has recently become a commonly used buzzword within academic science. Everybody should have it and everybody should have experience providing it. Even NIH now strongly encourages well-structured mentoring plans for postdocs and PhD students in grant applications, and these plans are as important as the science in fellowship applications. There are many organizations that […]
March 24, 2014 at 2:33 pm
by Juliane BUMC has started a mentoring program for postdocs. As part of this mentoring effort, Joanne Kamens, executive director of Addgene, gave a very interesting talk about how to be a good mentee. It is a lot of work; to get the best out of a mentoring relationship the mentee has to be proactive […]
March 22, 2014 at 5:22 pm
by Juliane I am almost done with reading the postdoc guidebook. This last part is about research. Let’s see if this covers more than RIMS. Brownie points for mentioning the training courses, some links need updating and most trainings are now online, so the only a few times a month restriction doesn’t apply for lots […]
March 10, 2014 at 5:00 pm
by Juliane The next part of the postdoc guide book might be the most important part. Finding services; this part tells us about the great services BU offers its employees. I am not being sarcastic here, BU is actually a great employer, they just like to hide a lot of their offers on obscure websites […]
By Juliane The next part of the postdoc guide book deals with housing. This is a topic very close to my heart, because when I moved to Boston everybody in my lab was either too political correct or too uninterested to tell me that apartment hunting in Roxbury isn’t something a single woman should be […]
February 27, 2014 at 4:19 pm
By Juliane I started looking at the postdoc guide book, and I am surprised how much information there is for postdocs, we just have to find it. It is also slightly out of date, being compiled at published in 2011. It hasn’t been updated since then. We got settled and are now equipped to deal […]
February 19, 2014 at 5:43 pm
by Juliane I started reading the postdoc guide book here. Since then I have found out that I can just google postdoc guide book BUMC to find it and don’t have to follow the links on the GMS postdoc website. Much easier this way! The next part of the guidebook is called getting settled. There […]
January 31, 2014 at 3:56 pm
by Juliane There is a very comprehensive document for postdocs kindly provided by Yolanta from the office of postdoctoral affairs. It is accessible from the OPA website. I don’t think many postdocs have read it, so I decided to read it and write about it. This document is surprisingly comprehensive, or at least long (34 […]
December 12, 2013 at 1:38 pm
by Juliane As a postdoc it is sometimes hard to maintain enthusiasm. When I started in science I was super-enthusiastic, everything was new and interesting and I learned fascinating stuff every day. I sometimes wish I was still like that. Over time I noticed that there is another side of lab work: failed experiments, hours of […]