Career Development

Grad Pathways @ UC Davis

Grad Pathways is the institute for professional development that serves all UC Davis grad students and postdocs. To help us succeed in our career path, Grad Pathways offers multiple workshops and seminars to acquire training in essential skills. These core competencies are:

• Success and socialization: This core skill is related to take a proactive role in your professional development, and seek orientation, advising and opportunities to develop your other core competencies. If you are in this page, then you are already strengthening this skill!

• Writing and publishing: No matter which career path we want to take after grad school, communicating ideas effectively through writing will be key to our success during grad school and afterwards. Fromm writing our dissertation, scientific manuscripts or science communication articles, good writing is a pilar to our scientific career.

• Presentation skills: In addition to well writing, giving effective presentations is necessary to share your work and collaborate with others. Giving good presentations at any level – to your mentor, to your colleagues, to a general audience – can boost our career. However, this is a skill that we are rarely taught, so it is necessary to actively look for training opportunities.

• Teaching and mentoring: Teaching is a key skill for everyone because it allows to learn and consolidate your knowledge. Additionally, teaching is a career path that several grad students want to pursue after their PhDs. If that is the case, you have to actively seek for opportunities to improve your teaching abilities during grad school. You can do this by pursuing TAships and instructor positions, attend teaching workshops and apply to teaching programs such as Professors for the Future (See below!).

• Leadership and management: These areas are often overlooked in Academia, but they are so needed! Excellent leaders and managers can increase the productivity of the team (or their labs) and the overall wellbeing of everyone. They can even have a long-lasting impact as role models and boost people's careers. No matter what we want from our career path, most likely we will need to lead people – from undergrads to whole corporations – so strengthening this competency will be extremely useful.

• Professionalism and ethics: Reflecting on ethical matters is fundamental to our future. At some point or another, we will find ourselves immersed in moral dilemmas, from small to big ones. To sort out those dilemmas, we need an ethical foundation.

• Career management: This involves to be able to self-asses our strengths and weaknesses, explore career paths, and apply for positions.

• Wellness and life balance: This is arguably the most important one of all the skills. Being fulfilled and content with our professional life and find a balance between our work and the other aspects of our life is ultimately what really matters.

You can learn more about these competencies in their website. Under each topic, there is a questionnaire to assess your strengths and identify points for improvement.

A great way to strengthen your skillset in the core competencies, is to attend Grad Pathways free workshops. They send an email every month with all the main workshops offered during that period and you can also check events related to each one of these core competencies in their online calendar.

Other career resources within UC Davis

• FUTURE: Career skills and exploration. FUTURE is a career exploration program that helps PhD students and postdocs prepare for a broad range of careers. Visit their website for more information and follow them in Twitter to get the latest news.

• Internship and Career center. The ICC hosts or sponsors hundreds of career-related events every year, such as internship and career fairs, a variety of workshops, employer information sessions, Visit their website to check incoming events.

• Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship brings together researchers in science, engineering, social sciences and humanities with faculty, MBA students, UC Davis undergraduates, experienced entrepreneurs, investors and corporate leaders to support technology transfer and commercialization activities. They organize events, business academies and competitions, and host the Leaders for the Future program.

MyIDP (AAAS)

And Individual Development Plan (IDP) is a framework commonly used in industry to help employees define and pursue their career goals. AAAS published (Science) developed an IDP framework tailored to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the sciences and made it a available for free online.

This tool includes:

• Exercises to help you examine your skills, interests, and values

• A list of 20 scientific career paths with a prediction of which ones best fit your skills and interests

• A tool for setting strategic goals for the coming year, with optional reminders to keep you on track

• Articles and resources to guide you through the process

To do this, you just need to go to their website and invest some time completing the form. An excellent exercise to help you guide your career path.