What do you mean by SUCCESS? Getting a job with a B.S.? Getting a job with an M.S.? Getting a job with a Ph.D.? Getting into graduate school? Getting a postdoc, temp. asst. prof, or tenure stream position? getting a non-tenure track teaching or research position? Getting a technical job? Getting into professional school (i.e., Law, Medical, Dental, veterinary, etc.) Getting financially compensated to the level you feel is adequate? Having flexibility of time and effort?
Success is a nebulous term. Education is a gateway that can open doors that are otherwise closed. however, it will not overcome a bad attitudes, ignorance, or hard-headheadedness. IF you are perceived by your peers as a generally toxic individual, or in someway difficult to get along with, you will find a job difficult. If your grades are low, you need to do something about it. What do you? Raise them by retaking classes or taking advanced courses in same subject. IF your attitude is crap, what do you do? Get coaching on how to be a better co-worker. Then, put it on your CV (there are plenty of these training courses) (it is pretty easy to get negative when you are stuck in a job-seeking rut) You lack teaching experience as a PHD? Get teaching experience, or go get a teaching certificate so you can demonstrate classroom management skills. I did this by accepting adjunct positions at community colleges. I also substitute taught in K-12. It wasn't long and I was doing extended substitute teaching, and I was the preferred substitute on most teacher's lists. You might find you like it, I did and would today be a highschool teacher had I not been admitted into a few PHD programs at the same time. Your generalized test scores are too low? Take a class, examine the test and find out your weak areas, then strengthen them. I did this by getting a word list. I also realized after taking the Biology GRE that I didn't know squat about molecular biology, so I enrolled in recombinant DNA and then molecular genetics. The jobs are advertising skills you don't have? Get them. After my MS I enrolled in grantsmanship (public admin), rastor and vector-based GIS, and some entomology courses. The first year I was in my PHD I took animal ecology, environmental chemistry, environmental instrumentation, immunology. (Because these were almost universally asked for on federal job applications back then!). I also started dual enrollment in an MPA (abandoned upon entry to PHD) and M.ED. You have advanced degrees but no or few publications? Publish your data. Take the time to write it up and do it. Keep publishing. IF you have no lab and no resources, do things you can do with no lab and no resources. A person who publishes typically keeps publishing. A person who doesn't publish, typically does not suddenly start publishing. (This is a perception you shoudl be aware of). You have all the above but are not getting interviews? are your reference letters getting old? Are your references dependable? (This is seldome the problem, very seldom!!). Are your references appropriate? (your highschool swimming coach is not a valid reference for a professor of ecophysiology!!!). IS your CV accurate, complete? Do you have multiple versons of your CV: 1) teaching version for teaching schools (most regionals, lower profile liberal arts colleges, and lecturer vacancies). 2) CV for research vacancies, 3) CV for doctoral programs, 4) CV for BS programs, 5) CV for Comm. College vacancies, 6) CV for consulting or industrial positions, 7) CV for federal jobs, 8) CV for state jobs. Different cover letters are needed too! Where are you applying? If all you apply to are top tier vacancies, your adds are not good. Most vacancies are at regional state universities, not research schools, if you are talking about PHD level teaching. If you are talking about MS level, most vacancies are at highschools, not community colleges! There is basically no difference between teaching high school, community college, and freshman-sophomore BS students. Seriously! The problems are the same, the answers are the same. My personal experience is that workload is least at community colleges, Then, workload grows in this order: highschool, BS-only programs, MS granting programs, doctoral programs, MD/DDS programs. (yes, teaching one course a year in an professional doctoral program is way more difficult than the others. WHy? Clicks are worse, the dishonest students are brilliant in their dishonesty, your classroom is filled with type-A personalities! DO NOT PIGEON HOLE YOURSELF! DO NOT FALL TO PRECONCEPTIONS, PREJUDICE, AND OTHER ANGLES THAT ARE IRRELEVANT. DO NOT APPLY TO PLACES YOU KNOW YOU WILL HATE. IF you have a few pubs, no citations, no funded grants, you are very unlikely to get a job at Harvard as a curator! IF you have piles of papers in Science and a track record of grants, you will find it hard to get hired at a small community college. If you are from New York City, educated, in Los Angeles, and postdoced in Beijing, the question will come up in committee reviews as to why you are applying and how you would possibly be happy in rural location where entertainment is church socials on saturday. The opposite is also true. What can you teach? If all you can teach is ecology and animal behavior, I challenge you to survey institutions and see just how many of those vacancies there are. if you are a vertebrate person, make sure you can teach A&P. Thanks to allied health, the demand for this is extreme. Further, there is a desire by the American Medial Association to push Human Gross Anatomy out of the medical curriculum, requiring it for admission. (This should be really popular at small schools with limited ability to house cadaver labs, huh?). If you take a graduate-level anatomy course and graduate level physiology course (especially human or comparative in both cases) you are going to position yourself to get a job, even if it is one that is tedious, in academia. My PHD advisor demanded we could teach A&P when we got out because of this. This single piece of advice kept me employed when job markets were tight. I even got to teach anatomy and physiology in medical school, dental school, and graduate nursing. Not sure if that was a privilege or new form of torture, but it was worth the experience. There are tons of ecologists who can't teach anything but ecology. Generally, from year to year there are tons of AP vacancies at every level of academia, and relatively few ecology vacancies. Ecology vacancies are further problematic because of the inappropriate overlap with environmental biology/science and the frequent need for specific specializations (i.e., population, spatial, global, behavioral). So, if you are a spatial ecologist, you probably are not getting hired for the behavioral vacancy, right? However, AP is AP. Its generic. SO, you can apply for almost every vacancy. At my last medical school/dental school/pharmacy school position I was hired because I was the "only applicant who could teach both anatomy and physiology, and I actually had anatomy and physiology research published." They needed someone who could cover both, and this is insanely common! Further, there is a pure probability issue of getting hired for any job. If you are getting interviews, the only thing that can torpedo you is yourself. Sometimes, its subconscious "I would rather drink draino than work here" vibes. Sometimes, its your own personality. Sometimes, you are simply too research or teaching focused for the faculty. Sometimes, they just "like" the other person better. Consider this, if you get three interviews where there are three equally talented and desirable candidates (Pretty typical frankly!) Then, your probability of getting a job offer for all three vacancies is: 0.33 x 0.33 x 0.33 = 3.6% The probability of getting two of the three is 0.33 x 0.33 x 0.66 = 7.2% The probability of getting one offer is = 14.4% So, the last thing you should be thinking is... Which one do I like better? The largest failure in job seeking I have witnessed is being too picky and applyign for too few vacancies. At 14%, you gotta have a ton of interviews. Because what isn't in that calculations is how you mesh with the faculty! I am going to guess most of us will mesh good enough to get an offer with 75% of departments. However, 0.75 * 0.144 = 10.7%!!! You can do little to control these things on an acadmic interview. IF you have an especially "unique" personality, it might torpedo you every time. IF you have an odd personality, make sure one of your references can buffer this by stating something like "candidate has a odd sense of humor that becomes remarkably likeable once you are familiar with the intelligence behind it." Following on the above, I found that if I apply for only the vacancies I believe strongly that I will get interviewed for, I will get phone interviews at about 30%. I am talking positions with almost perfect overlap (in my view). Why so low? Well, there are people who on paper better fit the location, the job, or have better connections. Frankly, there are people who are just BETTER than me! (A LOT OF THEM BY THE WAY!!!), the same is true of that 4.0 Harvard PHD graduate who has umpteen publications and dozens of classes taught! Its a really big food pyramid, and if you are unemployed, you are at the bottom... way at the bottom. Then, there is the job description itself. The faculty may want one kind of candidate while the dean wants another. The advertisement may not communicate unknown desires. I saw one guy get axed at one school because he did not want to teach immuno, and voiced the fact. Another person got passed over because she thought she could teach anything they offered her to teach. Another was too similar to other faculty, another was too lab oriented, another too field oriented. But, considering my 30% rate. My worst success rate was in the midst of the bubble burst. A lot of those jobs were readvertised over the next three years, many were just cancelled. That year, I got three phone interviews out of 50+ applications. In my last job search, I literally put out over 150 job applications in a year. It was a VERY unique season and I qualified for vacancies based on organismal focus, environmental slant, background in A&P, background in statistics, background in GIS, etc. etc etc. Guess what? I still held that 30% clip, got a few offers and took the one I thought would be best. So far, it has been. If you apply for five jobs, you better be damn good or damn lucky, or damn connected to get an offer. This applies to every level too, not just PHD faculty positions!! (Maybe you have so much $$ you can send a letter to the Dean saying you want a faculty position and will build a building with laboratory with your own funds for the school, then place a large multimillion dollar endowment in the school's account that will be used to pay your salary and research expenses? Ok, if you could do that, you would not be reading this!). have you shown immature behavior at meetings or online, or have your communications gave the impression of such because of hurried responses, etc? Clean it up. They will look and they will find it. I would not call attention to it, but I would be prepared to explain how you no longer do this! Employers, above everythign else, hope to avoid new problems with a new hire. The last thing you want to do is hold a sign with an arrow pointing back at you that says "you will regret hiring me!" Believe me, this is the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more underneath, no amount of reading or advice can reveal it all. If you sit down and write a list of the things that are really good about you, and the things that are really bad about you. That will be a great starting point for figuring out what you need to do. Of course, you could just have a friend do it. Be forewarned, you might walk away ticked off! :) On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 10:41 PM, Meghan Bohn <mboh...@hotmail.com> wrote: > As an older recent graduate looking to transition from animal keeping to > something more conservation/education focused, I'd like to see some success > stories as well. 😊 > > Meghan > > Meghan Bohn > Animal Keeper, Peoria Zoo > ------------------------------ > *From:* Ecological Society of America: grants, jobs, news < > ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU> on behalf of Jason Hernandez < > jason.hernande...@yahoo.com> > *Sent:* Friday, June 29, 2018 11:32 PM > *To:* ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU > *Subject:* [ECOLOG-L] Those rare success stories... > > Now that the academic year has ended, the big wave of seasonal field jobs > has abated, as have the inevitable posts by graduating students hoping to > find one. And I have to admit, I have gotten a little jaded. I put myself > in the shoes of one of those young people... > > ...Tropical rainforests have had a lot of exposure for many years now, it > is no surprise when a young person is inspired to pursue a career in > conservation, with hopes of making a difference in the tropics. But as you > search for opportunities, what do you find? Every opportunity in a tropical > environment is a volunteer position or an unpaid internship. Some cover > your expenses; some expect you to cover your own airfare; some even charge > you a fee. But, you rationalize, it's an investment in your future; you > will gain a new skill set and valuable experience for your resume, make > contacts in the conservation world for your network.. So you take the > unpaid job. You have a wonderful experience, you learn a lot. But then you > begin to notice that every season, it is the same. Every position in the > tropics is unpaid. If you were an organization with limited resources, why > would you pay someone when there is a steady stream of idealistic young > people eager to work for free? As the young person, how many of these > unpaid jobs can you afford before you have to give up and go mitigate > wetlands for a strip mall developer, or count dead bats on a wind farm? > > It can't possibly be that way for everyone. I am interested in the stories > of young people who succeeded in pursuing this dream sustainably. How did > you make it happen? > > Jason Hernandez > -- Malcolm L. McCallum Aquaculture and Water Quality Research Scientist School of Agriculture and Applied Sciences Langston University Langston, Oklahoma Link to online CV and portfolio : https://www.visualcv.com/malcolm-mc-callum?access=18A9RYkDGxO Google Scholar citation page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lOHMjvYAAAAJ&hl=en Academia.edu: https://ui-springfield.academia.edu/MalcolmMcCallum/Analytics#/activity/overview?_k=wknchj Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Malcolm_Mccallum/reputation?ev=prf_rep_tab <https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Malcolm_Mccallum/reputation?ev=prf_rep_tab> Ratemyprofessor: http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=706874 *Confidentiality Notice:* This e-mail message, including any attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message. “*Nothing is more priceless and worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed. It is a many-faceted treasure, of value to scholars, scientists, and nature lovers alike, and it forms a vital part of the heritage we all share as Americans.* ” *-President Richard Nixon upon signing the Endangered Species Act of 1973 into law.* "*Peer pressure is designed to contain anyone with a sense of drive*" -* Allan Nation* "...Every time they kick your teeth down your throat in this business, and believe me, they will, you get right back up and say that to yourself. Hey, it worked for me and the boys!” John Lennon *1880's: *"*There's lots of good fish in the sea*" W.S. Gilbert *1990's:* Many fish stocks depleted due to overfishing, habitat loss,and pollution. 2000: Marine reserves, ecosystem restoration, and pollution reduction *MAY* help restore populations. 2022: "Soylent Green is People!" Charleton Heston as Detective Thorn 2022: "People were always awful, but their was a world once, and it was beautiful.' Edward G. Robinson as Sol Roth. The Seven Blunders of the World (Mohandas Gandhi) Wealth w/o work Pleasure w/o conscience Knowledge w/o character Commerce w/o morality Science w/o humanity Worship w/o sacrifice Politics w/o principle
