This newsletter is distributed the last Thursday of the month and contains a variety of resources, links, and reflections on graduate-level career & professional development, higher education, and an occasional detour into neuroscience topics, the area I formally trained in as a graduate student and postdoc.
Missed the inaugural newsletter from January 2021?
Our beliefs and mindsets play a powerful role not only in how we move through the physical world but also how we respond to it. Similarly, how we think about ourselves and our prospects can affect our careers and life outcomes.
This important piece published in The Chronicle for Higher Education touches on the challenges of reaching and students in an age where alienation, anxiety, and a sense of hopelessness about the future are rampant. It emphasizes the importance of engaging students in applied, immersive learning experiences and addressing "wicked problems" through collaboration and an understanding that solutions often come through earlier failures.
Entrenched yet seldom discussed values are holding much of higher education back from successfully meeting the challenges we now confront. This piece takes concepts from Jim Collins’s classic book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t, and discusses how they relate to colleges' ability to reinvent themselves for a modern world.
Programs Worth Promoting
National Postdoctoral Association Events & Resources
The NPA's SmartSkills program returns in 2023 featuring webinars on a variety of topics related to postdocs' career and professional development and well-being.
And check out the NPA's Resource Library for more guides and resources including a guide to the postdoc timeline, mentoring, and more.
This FREE 12-week online training program will demystify the grant writing process and show you how to write your most competitive research proposal—ever.
Learn the strategic moves that will help you transform your research grant into a powerful competitor, with 6 video tutorials and weekly guidance delivered straight to your inbox. Every other week, you’ll be invited to attend a live Q&A call where you can get your grant-writing questions answered by Sarah Dobson, a research grant consultant who’s helped PIs bring millions of dollars in research funding in fiercely competitive environments like NIH and CIHR.
Meaning and purpose are core to human flourishing. In this post I discuss the importance of finding autonomy, mastery, and purpose in our work and lives and how this is more important than ever as a result of COVID's impact on all of us.
