Presenting oneself
– some “do’s” and “don’ts”
Why the range of
experience matters
What biology
careers are there?
Let’s
start by being realistic: a major reason for finding short-term (summer) jobs
is to earn enough money to be able to afford to continue your education. I
would suggest however that no job is valueless
in terms of the experience it gives you. You may be dealing with the public as
a receptionist, or handling money as a cashier or retail-salesperson, or doing
computer-work as a clerk – all of these are valuable types of practical
experience with extension to a career in science, especially if it involves
teaching, grant management, or grading of students, respectively, as you read
off that set of jobs in the first part of this sentence. Employers would want
the same kinds of skills and character-traits in their workers that admissions
committees would want in prospective graduate students, so don’t downplay your
“non-academic” job experience, just present it in terms of the useful skills
you acquired. On your resumé, for each such job experience, lead with
the skills you used rather than with the company name or the job title.
Most
undergraduate students are accustomed to seeking, acquiring, and holding down
non-academic jobs (indeed, most have done so since early high-school days). If
you hope to advance as a scientist, you will eventually need academically-focussed job experience as well.
There may be more than one way to accomplish this; the purpose of this page is
to share some ideas I have collected over the years, and ideas my students have
passed along to me, in hopes that you will benefit from them too.
Even
without considering jobs, there are other ways to get experience. For
example, there are practical-research-work
courses (at UBC, quite a few in the 300- and 400-levels),
involving hands-on research projects, laboratory exercises with extensive
formal writeups, field excursions with writeups, and/or major library-based
papers – all of these would provide valuable (marketable) skills. In your
resumé, always refer to such projects or papers as such, then
parenthetically list the courses in which they were assigned – people
considering you may not know what your courses entailed, and if you list only
the number and name of a course you may be selling short the experiences you
gained therein.
An
often-overlooked type of experience is travel,
especially if it involved lengthy periods living and working overseas. Many UBC
students have benefited from their experiences on academic exchange, and
several of my acquaintance have gone on to graduate school and medical school
in part on the strength of a character-building exchange experience. Even if
you have limited and/or domestic travel only, this is still good: any
experience away from home points to maturity and diversity.
Don’t
underestimate the value of volunteering.
Paid employment is often, but not always, harder to come by than volunteer
work. Both categories are valid and worthwhile, provided they are more than
mere “glassware-cleaning”, or fetch-and-carry, positions (that is to say, a
creative-work volunteer job may be more significant than a menial well-paying
job).
Job
openings are usually advertised in some way, but being in the right place at
the right time tends to be how applicants get into the positions! Increasingly,
positions are advertised on websites (see below), but many are still posted on
paper on noticeboards, or even offered by word-of-mouth personal referrals.
When offers are posted, regular perusal of the appropriate sites will ensure
that you see them, but because offers sometimes don’t make it to the posting
stage, it is also useful to network with likely employers/supervisors, and also
with other job-seekers (especially those with whom your interests do not
too closely coincide!).
Web:
make a list of bookmarks for sites of interest. These might include departmental sites at universities (biology,
zoology, botany, evolutionary biology, forestry, agriculture, plant-science, animal-science,
horticulture, and so forth – the terminology is not consistent from institution
to institution), which often have entire Job Opportunities pages, or
Newsletters for announcements including job postings; government departments or ministries (at
federal/provincial/state/municipal levels) covering environment, education,
fisheries, health care, national parks, wildlife, conservation, local
parks-boards, and so forth; and other
institutions such as aquariums, zoos or wildlife reserves,
wildlife rescue organizations, animal-protection services, and
science-education facilities.
Check
these sites frequently, and see if any of them offer you email notifications
when jobs are opened for application.
There
are also many job-finding sites available, such as: http://users.netonecom.net/~mlj/mlj/links_jobs.html
; any such site that offers the ability to search by job type or field may
prove useful, although many jobs may be geographically out of your reach! There
are lots and lots of job-seeking sites, too many to monitor, so perhaps ask
friends who have found good ones to make a recommendation.
In
person: a more constrained choice, but you may see a wider range of
offers, including some not considered important enough for formal posting. At
universities, for instance, there are often dedicated
boards for postings. (Ask departmental secretaries if you can’t
find these specific boards.) It may also pay to regularly patrol university corridors
where large numbers of postgraduate students have office space; they may post
items locally rather than at a central departmental location, and grad students
often have a good idea of what jobs may be upcoming in their labs.
Networking:
often the most effective way, but may be hard to establish. Take the example of
a university. You need to cultivate a range of sources, including current and former instructors (especially
tenured faculty with research grants!), graduate
students (especially those who have been your TAs, and know your
work), departmental staff (lab managers, administrators, technicians, and
secretaries), and student colleagues.
Being known personally will not necessarily make you a better candidate, but it
will make you a more memorable one. The more people who know you are
seeking jobs, and who know at least a little about your qualifications, the
more likely it is that someone in your circle of contacts will hear about and
pass on leads.
To
an extent, networking requires a certain kind of
personality. You have to be enthusiastic, self-promoting, and
perseverant, but at the same time not too obnoxious or pushy or desperate in
your presentation.
Not meaning to sound
too cold-blooded about it, you should not hesitate to utilize any
other contacts you may possess when seeking positions. Perhaps a family
member or friend works in a veterinary practice, or as a teacher or school
administrator, or for a government department. Even if such a person cannot
offer a position directly, she or he could still be a source of very useful
advice. (If you feel guilty about leaning on people, don’t be – everyone else
is going to take advantage of their contacts, and people in such positions will
be surprised if you don’t ask them for advice!)
No
one is surprised to receive unsolicited phone calls or email messages inquiring
about jobs, and those offering positions will of course be expecting to receive
such contacts. It is not very
good form, however, to mass-email every member of faculty in an academic
department asking if they know of any positions. It is also not recommended to accompany unsolicited
messages with extensive attachments. If a person is interested in knowing more
about you, she/he will ask for further information!
It
is a useful practice to do more than just say “hello” – a one-page version of your resumé (better get
used to calling it a CV, a curriculum vitae, if you want to be an
academic), including your contact info, a brief summary of your educational
standing and skills/qualifications, and a statement concerning your objectives
(what sort of work, for how long), would be a suitable amount of information to
offer at first.
You
may be forced to make many “cold” contacts, introducing yourself without prior
acquaintance. This is OK, but it is better to be introduced by
someone known to your target-person (such as being introduced to a potential
supervisor by one of her/his graduate students, to whom you were known through
teaching). The other advantage to this approach is that you may learn more
about the potential supervisor by talking to her/his students first… maybe you
will be more sure that the supervisor will be a good employer thereby.
It
benefits you to have as wide a range of work- and academic-experiences as you
can. This is true whether you are applying for a job, or for postgraduate
study. If you are offered a position doing something that isn’t
endlessly fascinating to you, don’t reject it out of hand. Here’s a specific instance: A former student
of mine is currently employed as a researcher with the British Antarctic
Survey, studying penguins in the Southern Ocean. When she was a newly-graduated
student hoping to study the behaviour and ecology of marine mammals, she was
offered (and accepted) a summer job which involved collecting and analyzing
faecal samples (“droppings”, if you will) from fur seals. That was all
the job entailed, for the whole summer, basically. (Imagine the smell in
hot weather.) But it exposed her to a new study species, at a new facility,
where she was able to make several useful contacts and to establish herself as
a reliable and meticulous worker. The job sounds (and apparently was)
disgusting at best, but she doesn’t regret taking it. Now she has a much more
significant job, and excellent future prospects.
Building
a job dossier involves a progressively easier “grind” – the first position or
two, even if only remotely connected with your interests, will be very hard to
get, and will take much angst and effort… but once these positions are
on your list, the next will be easier, and the next easier still. Each
position, especially if the set varies interestingly, reinforces the
applicant’s breadth of skills, and gives the next employer or supervisor
confidence in the applicant’s flexibility and learning-capacity.
Think
of it through a non-academic example:
you are the manager of a restaurant – if you were offered a choice of two
applicants with similar total amounts of work-experience for a position as,
say, a table-server, which of the following would you want? A person who had
done ten table-server jobs and no others, or a person who had done two
or three table-serving jobs, some food-preparation jobs, some office jobs, and
some retail-sales jobs? Which worker would likely be more adaptable? Which would likely be a more engaging person for patrons to talk
to? Which would be more flexible in
helping out in other jobs at the restaurant when staff might call in sick, or
the business change? You get the idea. Be the widely-experienced person whenever
you can.
Academic
careers as such – university or college faculty
positions – are of course not very numerous, nor indeed are they
necessarily the most attractive careers in biology. In any case they are to be
achieved exclusively through the graduate-school route, as outlined on this page
of my advice-pages.
Beyond
the teaching/research hybrid that constitutes a faculty career, there are other
biology careers. Jobs that involve mainly research
would be found in some instances on the government
side, in one or more of the departments or ministries listed in the section above concerning where to look for
shorter-term jobs. Many corporations or other
companies would have their own in-house research staff, and many
others would contract for their research through consultancy-companies,
which would hire free-lance researchers to satisfy the specific requirements of
the work. Non-profit organizations,
such as conservation and wildlife-protection bodies, research foundations,
international organizations like the UN, and so forth, would also either
employ, or contract for, researchers project-by-project. Practical research
jobs exist in medical-testing laboratories
(doing blood work, urinalysis, and so on), and jobs involving biology
background (though not actual research) exist in other
technical fields (such as pharmaceutical technician).
Jobs that involve mainly education, in addition to the obvious category of teaching at the “K-12” level in public or private schools (requiring an education degree or diploma from a recognized university or college), many people with a biological background work at least part-time at educational institutions like zoos or museums. There has been in recent years considerable growth in so-called “ecotourism”, and many tour operators employ expert guides to accompany travelers on ocean cruises, safaris, mountaineering holidays, diving trips, and so forth. University-trained biologists would likely be strong applicants for such jobs, although the work would not necessarily be predictable or continuous. Science journalism, too, has become an attractive option for many graduates, and at no time in history has the market for publications about science for a mass audience been better than it is today.
Updated 25 December 2005