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Feb

2012

The Last Psychiatrist: Love Means Not Letting The Other Person Be Himself

The problem isn't the relationship, the problem is you.
drive for novelty- "rather than chase new experiences they close off from the outside world and dream them. They don't end relationships, they stay caulked to the inside of one, unmoving, ungrowing, apathetic; while their minds and DVRs are an imaginarium. The few things they do choose to jump recklesslsy into are obvious go-nowheres: one night stands (for the married man); making a movie; daytrading. They're easy to attempt, and easy to blame on externalities when they inevitably fail. They don't break up with the girl, they ignore her until she breaks up with them."
All opportunities are open to anyone who wants to work, a new car, a big house, a career. But no one told the men that those things were for their families, not for them, that none of this would make them happy, and, indeed, would make them realize how little their lives are really worth-- unless they understood that their lives had value only if it was of value to someone else. So for a while they chased sex, affairs, or took up an out of the house hobby (e.g.golf). Something to give them the temporary illusion that they were free, and that the world had possibilties

thelastpsychiatrist.com/...means_not_letting_the_oth.html

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psychoanalysis insight career marriage

in list: how to be an adult & be great at it too, BUILD SOCEITY: psychological law

Feb

2012

Marty Nemko: A Gentler Approach to Job Intervewing

"“What is the best part of the job" “What is the worst part of the job?” and “What makes someone successful in this job?”"

martynemko.blogspot.in/...t-offered-solid-advice-on.html

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career

Feb

2012

8 Job Search Tips From the Co-Founder of LinkedIn

" don’t try to be the greatest marketing executive in the world; try to be the greatest marketing executive of small-to-midsize companies that compete in the health care industry."
your aspirations are themselves shaped by your actions and experiences.
Plan A is what you’re doing right now. Plan B is “what you pivot to when you need to change your goal or your route to getting there.” Plan Z, meanwhile, is your fallback plan.
Look at Professional Networking as Dating - long term perspective
To motivate yourself for network building, think of the fact that your happiest memories were probably with someone else. Building relationships is the thrilling if delicate quest to at once understand another person and allow that person to understand you.
Pursue Breakout Opportunities: remain curious about events that happen in your everyday life. “high quality” people on board and the opportunity was a lead role in a major network drama. found DVDs were light and cheap to ship. made some remarks that caught Viola’s attention and the two set up a meeting.
Not everyone will appreciate your great idea, but if you really believe in it, you can put up with a lot of adversity.

mashable.com/...reid-hoffman-linkedin-job-tips

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career

Jan

2012

What You'll Wish You'd Known

www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

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starred academics insight career

in list: how to be an adult & be great at it too, BUILD SOCEITY: pedagogical education system

If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.
don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply, don't give up.

What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion
24 more annotation(s)...
- If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.
  
  I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
- "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities." But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets.
- don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
  
  It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
- Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you supposed to know that as a high school student?
  
  Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out.  Look for smart people and hard problems.
- The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important.
- The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
  
  Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries.
- Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.
  
  If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
  
  If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.
- high school students aren't capable of getting anything done yet. But I don't think this is true. And the proof is that you're bored.
- Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness. [5]
  
  You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.
- most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a lot.
  
  So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it was a mistake. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I smelled a major rat. And so I just gave up. Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?
- It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
- Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
- What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.
- Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.
  
  Curiosity turns work into play.
- One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them.
- They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
- If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here?
  
  It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about.
- Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience.
- The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it.
  
  Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)
  
  It may be just as well not to do a project "for school," if that will restrict you or make it seem like work. Involve your friends if you want, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes. Friends offer moral support (few startups are started by one person), but secrecy also has its advantages. There's something pleasing about a secret project. And you can take more risks, because no one will know if you fail.
  
  Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you learn.
  
  Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations.
- A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.
  
  The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
- There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life.
- Adults care just as much what other people think, but they get to be more selective about the other people.
  
  I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgement.
- If you want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction.
- Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it has no competitors. High school isn't evil; it's random; but random is pretty bad.

Jan

2012

How to Do What You Love

www.paulgraham.com/love.html

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starred insight career

in list: how to be an adult & be great at it too

it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later.
The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.

If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong.
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- To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.
  
  So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.
  
  I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow. But it probably wouldn't start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven't had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.
- You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4]
  
  This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
- Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
- If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task.
- Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.
- When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really like.
  
  The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living.
- Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think—because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it—finding work you love does usually require discipline.
- Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.
  
  Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.
  
  "Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.
  
  Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible. [6]
  
  It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations.
- would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."
- A young architect has to take whatever work he can get, but if he does well he'll gradually be in a position to pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this route is that it's slow and uncertain. Even tenure is not real freedom.
  
  The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you work for money at a time. At one extreme is the "day job," where you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what you love in your spare time. At the other extreme you work at something till you make enough not to have to work for money again.
  
  The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.
  
  The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over obstacles. The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are walls of varying heights between different kinds of work. [7] The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music. If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you have more freedom of choice.
- If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.
- So unless you're fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job career. That was probably part of the reason I chose computers. You can be a professor, or make a lot of money, or morph it into any number of other kinds of work.
  
  It's also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like. Conversely, the extreme version of the two-job route is dangerous because it teaches you so little about what you like. If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll quit and write novels when you have enough money, what happens when you quit and then discover that you don't actually like writing novels?
- The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.

Jan

2012

Marty Nemko: Changing Careers in Midlife and Beyond

They bring their weaknesses or bad attitude with them to the new career. So look inward and ask yourself, "Honestly, am I likely to be so much happier and more successful in my new career that it's worth the time, money, and hassle of starting over?"If so, great. I have indeed seen people become happier in both their professional and personal life from a career change--even if it means a decline in status.

I'd like to combine my law degree with an interest in health care.
I'd love a job working with my hands, especially outdoors.
I'm not an artist but I like working with aesthetic products: fashion, decor, art.
I've very social so any professional job where I work on teams would be fine.

look at short job training programs offered by your professional association, a community college. fundraising, project management, sales, iPhone technician, piano tuner, home stager, bookkeeper/tax preparer, irrigation designer/installer, locksmith, auto body repairer, baker, bus or truck driver, massage therapist, nanny, and database administrator. Not only are such programs a source of fast training but often of job leads from your instructors and your fellow students.

if you're a self-starter and cost-conscious, you may wish to start your own business. Rather than be a guinea pig for some untested idea, it's far safer to replicate someone else's successful business in a different location. Visit the few busiest ones and incorporate their best features into your own, of course, in a busy location.

Decide you don't need a career change, just a career tweak. Might you be happy enough if you did the same work but for a different boss? Different work for your current employer?

martynemko.blogspot.com/...ers-in-midlife-and-beyond.html

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career

Dec

2011

Marty Nemko: Communicating Honestly... without getting your head chopped off

" High or low energy, intellectual or simple, emotional or fact-centered, nurturing or tough-love, closed-ended vs. open-ended questions, give advice or be a facilitator of their thoughts, etc. Showing you care is among the most important things you can do."
Going for their dream will likely fuel them to do the work needed to get there. Even if they don't succeed, they probably will have learned more and accomplished more from having tried.
Avoid arguing -briefly acknowledge them without starting a conversation about it, e.g., "I understand," and move the conversation to somewhere you'd like it to go.

martynemko.blogspot.com/...conference-workshop-today.html

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communication mentee collaboration confidence starred career

To keep the conversation moving where you want, give the person two or three choices, all of which you're okay with.

To minimize defensiveness, use California couching: "I'm wondering if it might be a good idea to do X. What do you think?"

When you're annoyed with a client, it's safer to say "I" than "you," for example, "I'm getting confused. Can we slow down?"

Be time-conscious. There are tools that can enable you to make a difference in just a few minutes. For example:
1. Ask the student if s/he's better with words, numbers, people, working with her hands.
2. Give her two disparate career choices within that category.
3. Based on which one she prefers, offer choices you think will be more on-target.
4. When she seems to like a career, ask her where it scores on The Meter from 0-10. If it's less than a 10, ask her, "What keeps it from being a ten?" Then propose a better-fit career.

Don't expect them to agree to do what you ask--planting a seed may be all you can reasonably expect.

Sometimes, all you can do is give them a resource: someone to talk with, a website, an article, book, etc.

Oct

2011

Rands In Repose: You Are Underestimating the Future

"You are underestimating the future. You are fretting about the now; worrying about little things that don't matter. You are wasting precious energy obsessing over irrelevant details. You don't believe that a better future is out there and can be built, that it can exceed people's expectations, because you're spending so much time considering the truth of the present and the seemingly important lessons of the past." -steve jobs

www.randsinrepose.com/...nderestimating_the_future.html

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attitude career starred

Steve Jobs: 'Death is very likely the single best invention of life' | Technology | guardian.co.uk

you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
stay hungry.stay foolish

www.guardian.co.uk/...steve-jobs-pancreas-cancer

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attitude career

Sep

2011

Study Hacks » Blog Archive » The Calculus of Remarkability

" To become remarkable, tackle the most ambitious projects you can complete.
To get the biggest returns, you need to also invest in increasing the maximum level of ambitiousness you can achieve.

Part of this latter goal is simply dedicating the deliberate practice required to become excellent."

calnewport.com/...the-calculus-of-remarkability

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career productive presentation writing strategic

Sep

2011

Finding a Job in tough times

www.martynemko.com/...-networking-doesnt-work_id1612

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career

Feb

2010

Skip the Raise, Ask Your Boss for These Perks Instead - Negotiation - Lifehacker

lifehacker.com/5463294

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humor career

Oct

2009

Skills Search

online.onetcenter.org/skills

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career

Aug

2009

Benefit from blogging without spending tons of time | Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist

2hrs/wk
[Specialization is the goal, but be wary of too much or too early. If your specialty is marketing on Mars, you'll be the only person in your field, but you probably won't get paying gigs. Even a reasonable specialty can go awry if you limit yourself before you know enough.]
get known by blogging on a specific topic, so you can make yourself irreplaceable & can ask for flexibility at work.
you can show your potential by broadcasting your ideas.
your passion, commitment is evident & you become appealing.

blog.penelopetrunk.com/...-without-spending-tons-of-time

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career

in list: NETWORKING

if you can't afford two hours a week for networking, your career is in trouble. But here are three more benefits to blogging — these are goals you should have for your career anyway, and they're goals you can reach by blogging only a handful of times a month
pick a topic and stick with it. And just the act of doing that is good for you because specializing is good for your career. After all, you can't be known for something if you are not specializing in something. And once you are known for something you have a lot more leverage to get the kind of work you want to be doing.
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- if you specialize you are not so easily replaced, so you can ask for more flexibility at work.
- With a blog, though, you show people your creativity. Got a lot of ideas? Good, because there are a lot of days in the week for you to fill on that blog. And instead of you running around the office complaining to people about your stifled potential, you can show people your potential by broadcasting your ideas.
- the most appealing people are those who have passion and commitment.
- if you are a blogger, and post at regular intervals, you don't need to tell people about your passion and commitment

Aug

2009

5 Things to do when you're unemployed. Hint: It's not job hunting. » Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist

blog.penelopetrunk.com/...loyed-hint-its-not-job-hunting

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to-do career humor

in list: NETWORKING

worked for free for my boyfriend’s company for a couple of hours a day. That way I didn’t actually have a gap in my resume; a resume doesn’t show part-time or full-time and it doesn’t show pay or no pay. So volunteer
when people asked me why I left my job, I told them about how I gave myself time to fulfill lofty goals as a swing dancer.
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- Put your ideas out into the world and connect with people that way. This is why you want to be hired, right? For your ideas. So show them. The reason that people who blog have great careers is that bloggers are always thinking about issues in their industry. Show that side of yourself to people.
- whether or not your company does well, you’ll be able to talk about it in an interview as a huge learning moment that will deflect from any problems at your last job. The company that never got out of your parent’s basement can sit on your resume as professionally as a stint in the Fortune 500. It’s all about how you write the bullet points: talk about accomplishments and learning.
- you know what you’re aiming for, but you need to talk about it with everyone – parties, at the gym, on the phone with friends. When they ask how you’re doing, talk about what you’re doing like you are in the job interview
- You control what you do with your time and you can make it useful. Talk about that. There is no reason to talk about why the last job didn’t work

Aug

2009

Finding a Partner for Your Ph.D. - Science Careers - Biotech, Pharmaceutical, Faculty, Postdoc jobs on Science Careers

check faculty -publications number & significance, honors, recognitions, research achievements in website.

sufficient faculty in the area desired by the student, stipend, coursework suitability, exposure to important seminars, megalabs, participation in academic/organizing courses.

for a student with a clear goal, best resource is a prof at current undergrad instut.
for one with no clear goal, pick a larger institut with varied programs / rotations help exposure/match to group culture & interaction with potential mentors.

evaluate program: list of institut offering that degree (from websites/books),review each faculty students graduates cost location accredition culture stipend, ranking/opinions of professors, visit top 2-3 programs to talk to current students (streng, weak, faculty descrip & accessibility, coursework, classes, adeq funds equip, surroundings, campus&leisure activities, difficult standards/failure reasons, req attributes, further refs, outgoers placements, contrast with other instituts), then apply based on your suitabilities.

sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/...science.opms.r0900075

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medcareer career enquire MedicalResearch

in list: MEDEDU, NETWORKING

A doctoral degree can sometimes take six or more years—and there's no guarantee
Completing a doctoral degree has much more to do with the right match of a graduate program to a given student than it does with personality characteristics or even the academic preparation of an individual student
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- You have to know yourself, and you have to really know the kind of climate you need to ensure that you grow and develop in your intellectual and professional life
- most important criteria for selecting a graduate school should be the quality and commitment of the faculty
- quality of the faculty include the number, impact, and significance of scientific publications, in addition to any honors and recognition received, he says. If a PubMed search on a potential academic adviser pulls up only a few publications in recent years, or if the publications are all in specialized or archival journals, then this may indicate that the faculty member has a limited interest in research, and perhaps spends more time as an administrator or in teaching activities. Likewise, if the faculty member's institutional or lab website does not clearly describe the lab's achievements or convey a sense of excitement about the research or future directions, then this, too, may indicate that selecting a more active lab might provide a more productive and satisfying graduate school experience.
- A key question with respect to match, also, is whether the faculty available at an institution meshes with a student's particular research interests, Stewart says. "You can have a fine program across the board, but it might not have a sufficient number of faculty members in a specialty area desired by the student.
- For students with a clearly defined idea of what they want to study, perhaps the best resource will be a professor at an undergraduate institution who currently serves as an adviser or mentor. A student who has worked with a professor in a lab during undergraduate studies and wants more of the same may ask for a recommended professor or program of related research at another institution.
  
  However, not all students have a clearly defined path when they go to graduate school, so one strategy for a successful match is to pick a larger school, with many different types of programs and qualified faculty
- Some graduate science programs offer the opportunity to perform research rotations in various laboratories and with different professors.
- A new lab rotation each quarter allows students to learn more about the research pursued by the group and gives a student the opportunity to test the 'culture' in the group before making a decision," Burchat says. "The rotation system also allows the adviser to interact with the student before making the very significant commitment to mentor and support the student for her/his graduate career, and helps promote better matches between student advisees and faculty advisers and research areas
- what is the average number of years it takes students to complete the program? since each year spent in graduate school represents tens of thousands of dollars of foregone income. In the sciences, many Ph.D. programs offer a tuition waiver and a stipend in return for committing to an intensive schedule working in a laboratory and passing up other employment. Graduate programs will typically state this information on their website.
- coursework required—does it closely match a student's interests? Does the school draw important seminar speakers within a field of research, and how often do these events take place? Does a student have the ability to participate in the academic life of the department and campus, such as by serving on faculty search committees, inviting seminar speakers, organizing student-led courses and seminars, participating in graduate student organizations?
- increasing number of research universities are building large, open 'megalabs,' where investigators share space and supplies
- The first step is to find a list of schools that offer the degree (and specialization) sought. "There are any number of books, websites, and even some professional organizations that offer this information." The second step is to spend time researching each graduate program, starting with each program's website. "Review what they say about themselves, their faculty, their students, and their graduates. Look at costs, location, accreditation, culture, financial assistance, and anything else the program says about itself." The third step is to review any rankings or outside reviews and solicit the opinions of professors regarding the programs. The fourth step is to visit the top two or three programs and talk with current students about their likes and dislikes about the program to get a sense of the university and its surroundings.
- One tempting approach is to look at the online rankings and apply to the top schools in your intended area of study. Online rankings, such as those from Newsweek and US News and World Report, "can be useful but not totally reliable
- One-size-fits-all definitely does not apply for graduate schools—there is no 'best' program—what's great for one person might be terrible for another
- 10 questions to ask
  
  …a current student
  
  What do you see as the strengths of the program?
  What do you see as the weaknesses of the program?
  How accessible are the program faculty?
  What are the research facilities like—does there seem to be adequate funding, supplies, and equipment?
  If you had it to do over, would you select this graduate school again? Why? Why not?
  What are the surroundings of the school campus like? Are there leisure activities, good housing, and other amenities?
  What is campus life like—do you have an opportunity to become involved and/or take on leadership roles?
  Do you feel that there is an adequate level of financial and academic support to complete your studies?
  How competitive and difficult are the academic standards here?
  Is there anyone else I might talk to who could help provide an accurate picture of the program?
  What are the major strengths of this program?
  What are potential weaknesses of the program?
  How would you describe the faculty?
  Are the classes team-taught or taught by one individual?
  How would you describe the academic environment here compared with other schools?
  What attributes does a graduate student need to be successful at this school/in this program?
  Do you see any common characteristics in students who have quit their doctoral degree programs here—if so, what were they?
  What research facilities are available and how adequate is intramural and extramural funding for the labs?
  What have recent graduates of the same program done with their degrees?
  What unique features are offered by this school compared to other similar schools?