Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Jobs and Living Re: [ECOLOG-L] A Graduate S tudent's Guide to Neces sary Skills for Landing a Job
Hi, Thanks for this message and all the previous ones (I just joined some days ago). I finished my PhD in Plant Ecology almost one year and a half ago. I had two published papers, lots of contacts, lots of conferences, quite a lot of experience, have worked hard during the last years... and needed a break cause I was not sure whether I wanted to do science, even though I was 31. Months before defending my thesis my boyfriend and me planned to go to New Zealand for a gap year, from where I came back to Europe just three weeks ago - because I realised I want to work in Science. Now I am looking for a job in Czech Republic and even before reading this emails I realised two skills are missing in my CV: GIS and molecular biology. I worked with statistics for many years, worked in the field, did herbivory experiments, gained experience also from outside academia,... but now I see that even though I have a PhD it will be difficult to find a job... or at least funding. Because even though they are interested in me in a University, I need to have my funding to get there. So if you do not think on that before finishing the PhD you will see yourself in the next year writting proposals and trying to get funding (which is also a good experience). But now, where do we study GIS and molecular biology when we are not in University anymore? do we put all our energy in looking for a job and finishing papers or do we invest our time and money in learning GIS? Have a really nice day, Inés On 17 February 2013 23:13, Wayne Tyson landr...@cox.net wrote: Ecolog: It's just interesting that the number-one skill required for ecology is GIS. Now I know why I was such a failure! Well, on second thought, I guess I shouldn't place all the blame on the absence of GIS skills (and the absence of GIS at the time). I sucked at statistics too--but what the hell, statisticians need jobs too, no? So after I got out of the military, I took Business Administration and a few courses of Public Administration, but the latter I had to learn mostly on-the-job--no college can prepare one for the absurdities of administration and management in bureaucracies, government and private. I took business law. 'Nuff said. I was no chemist, molecular biologist, or microbiologist either, so I hired them when I needed them. The smidgen of those subjects I knew about was often enough to get by without them, but I sure do wish that I had had more of them, and WAY more geology. Margaret Mead once said that the most important thing to know is what you don't know. That concept took off any pressure to be an APC (all-purpose capsule), to know EVERYTHING, and worse, to BELIEVE it. Ever notice how many people DO know everything? But SHOULD your objective be focused entirely upon getting a job and fighting your way up the pyramid? Well, you'll need a job, of course, but if that's all you're focused on, that's all you'll ever have. Academic training can be a valuable thing, but it's only a START--even at the Ph.D. level. (Howls and screams.) You have to get to the point where everything seems to fall into place, and you come to UNDERSTAND how things work. (See Breaking Through, The Ed Ricketts biography by Katherine A. Rodger, and The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman. The Log From the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck (and Ricketts) is also a great read, as is the entire book, The Sea of Cortez by the same author(s).) Read widely. Experience widely. Don't waste your life; do what you're passionate about. Have expectations of yourself if you want, but don't waste your life having expectations of others. If you're not passionate, get an MBA and get rich. WT The worst kinda ignerance ain't so much not knowin', a 'tis knowin' so much that ain't so? --Josh Billings They tell us we are wasting time--but we are wasting our LIVES! --Eric Hoffer - Original Message - From: malcolm McCallum malcolm.mccallum@HERPCONBIO.**ORG malcolm.mccal...@herpconbio.org To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2013 8:03 PM Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] A Graduate Student's Guide to Neces sary Skills for Landing a Job Clara, I agree. To be marketable in the workplace you must have skills that are in demand in the workplace. Its that simple. Too many students graduate without marketable skills. Marketability for grad school does not equal marketability for a job out of the BS. You want to get a job in ecological field? Here are the skills I recommend: 1. GIS 2. statistics 3. public administration 4. env/wildlife/fisheries policy law 5. Any and all instrumentation involving chemistry, molecular biology and micro. Why? Everything uses GIS today. Statistics are just plain required. If you are working in the public sector, PA will prepare you for what you actually do most of the time...paperwork. policy and law is mostly what you will be doing paperwork on (permits
Re: [ECOLOG-L] Ecology Jobs and Living Re: [ECOLOG-L] A Graduate S tudent's Guide to Neces sary Skills for Landing a Job
My read of the original paper by Brickney is that technical/analytical skills are very important. Looking at their PCA, most of the variation lies on a spectrum of technical/analytical/field experience to project management/interpersonal. Despite comments on this listserv, both hard and soft skills seem to be important. Also, the analysis only explains 60% of the variation, which is a vast amount in a job-market that has a lot of highly specialized duties and highly diverse workplaces. Ecology-related job places are astounding in how different they are. Lots of banter about GIS. I'd like to throw in my two-cents: everything in ecology has a space-time context, and colleagues without basic GIS facilities are frustratingly difficult to work or communicate with. Second, if you are serious about working with large ecological data or serious about taking up GIS, beware of courses that amount to little more than ESRI tutorials and set you up with a platform of limitation and disappointment. Even at the highest echelons of ArcMastery (and expensive licenses), you'll inevitably end up having to tell your superiors that you couldn't complete such-and-such a task because 'ArcGIS doesn't do that.' (But hey, that's a good looking map!) Getting really good at ArcGIS is like becoming a master of Macromedia right before Flash came out: they jump from Avenue, to VB, to Python, to ? Instead, if you use R for GIS, there is always a way to do what you want. It may be difficult, but mastering R for a difficult GIS task yields transferable skills in a host of disciplines. It used to be a huge pain, but recent libraries like 'rgeos' (mixed with 'rgdal' and 'raster') give users most of the cookie-cutter facilities familiar to ESRI users. And its free. Rob On Feb 17, 2013 6:04 PM, Wayne Tyson landr...@cox.net wrote: Ecolog: It's just interesting that the number-one skill required for ecology is GIS. Now I know why I was such a failure! Well, on second thought, I guess I shouldn't place all the blame on the absence of GIS skills (and the absence of GIS at the time). I sucked at statistics too--but what the hell, statisticians need jobs too, no? So after I got out of the military, I took Business Administration and a few courses of Public Administration, but the latter I had to learn mostly on-the-job--no college can prepare one for the absurdities of administration and management in bureaucracies, government and private. I took business law. 'Nuff said. I was no chemist, molecular biologist, or microbiologist either, so I hired them when I needed them. The smidgen of those subjects I knew about was often enough to get by without them, but I sure do wish that I had had more of them, and WAY more geology. Margaret Mead once said that the most important thing to know is what you don't know. That concept took off any pressure to be an APC (all-purpose capsule), to know EVERYTHING, and worse, to BELIEVE it. Ever notice how many people DO know everything? But SHOULD your objective be focused entirely upon getting a job and fighting your way up the pyramid? Well, you'll need a job, of course, but if that's all you're focused on, that's all you'll ever have. Academic training can be a valuable thing, but it's only a START--even at the Ph.D. level. (Howls and screams.) You have to get to the point where everything seems to fall into place, and you come to UNDERSTAND how things work. (See Breaking Through, The Ed Ricketts biography by Katherine A. Rodger, and The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman. The Log From the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck (and Ricketts) is also a great read, as is the entire book, The Sea of Cortez by the same author(s).) Read widely. Experience widely. Don't waste your life; do what you're passionate about. Have expectations of yourself if you want, but don't waste your life having expectations of others. If you're not passionate, get an MBA and get rich. WT The worst kinda ignerance ain't so much not knowin', a 'tis knowin' so much that ain't so? --Josh Billings They tell us we are wasting time--but we are wasting our LIVES! --Eric Hoffer - Original Message - From: malcolm McCallum malcolm.mccallum@HERPCONBIO.**ORG malcolm.mccal...@herpconbio.org To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2013 8:03 PM Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] A Graduate Student's Guide to Neces sary Skills for Landing a Job Clara, I agree. To be marketable in the workplace you must have skills that are in demand in the workplace. Its that simple. Too many students graduate without marketable skills. Marketability for grad school does not equal marketability for a job out of the BS. You want to get a job in ecological field? Here are the skills I recommend: 1. GIS 2. statistics 3. public administration 4. env/wildlife/fisheries policy law 5. Any and all instrumentation involving chemistry, molecular biology and micro.
[ECOLOG-L] Ecology Jobs and Living Re: [ECOLOG-L] A Graduate S tudent's Guide to Neces sary Skills for Landing a Job
Ecolog: It's just interesting that the number-one skill required for ecology is GIS. Now I know why I was such a failure! Well, on second thought, I guess I shouldn't place all the blame on the absence of GIS skills (and the absence of GIS at the time). I sucked at statistics too--but what the hell, statisticians need jobs too, no? So after I got out of the military, I took Business Administration and a few courses of Public Administration, but the latter I had to learn mostly on-the-job--no college can prepare one for the absurdities of administration and management in bureaucracies, government and private. I took business law. 'Nuff said. I was no chemist, molecular biologist, or microbiologist either, so I hired them when I needed them. The smidgen of those subjects I knew about was often enough to get by without them, but I sure do wish that I had had more of them, and WAY more geology. Margaret Mead once said that the most important thing to know is what you don't know. That concept took off any pressure to be an APC (all-purpose capsule), to know EVERYTHING, and worse, to BELIEVE it. Ever notice how many people DO know everything? But SHOULD your objective be focused entirely upon getting a job and fighting your way up the pyramid? Well, you'll need a job, of course, but if that's all you're focused on, that's all you'll ever have. Academic training can be a valuable thing, but it's only a START--even at the Ph.D. level. (Howls and screams.) You have to get to the point where everything seems to fall into place, and you come to UNDERSTAND how things work. (See Breaking Through, The Ed Ricketts biography by Katherine A. Rodger, and The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman. The Log From the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck (and Ricketts) is also a great read, as is the entire book, The Sea of Cortez by the same author(s).) Read widely. Experience widely. Don't waste your life; do what you're passionate about. Have expectations of yourself if you want, but don't waste your life having expectations of others. If you're not passionate, get an MBA and get rich. WT The worst kinda ignerance ain't so much not knowin', a 'tis knowin' so much that ain't so? --Josh Billings They tell us we are wasting time--but we are wasting our LIVES! --Eric Hoffer - Original Message - From: malcolm McCallum malcolm.mccal...@herpconbio.org To: ECOLOG-L@LISTSERV.UMD.EDU Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2013 8:03 PM Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] A Graduate Student's Guide to Neces sary Skills for Landing a Job Clara, I agree. To be marketable in the workplace you must have skills that are in demand in the workplace. Its that simple. Too many students graduate without marketable skills. Marketability for grad school does not equal marketability for a job out of the BS. You want to get a job in ecological field? Here are the skills I recommend: 1. GIS 2. statistics 3. public administration 4. env/wildlife/fisheries policy law 5. Any and all instrumentation involving chemistry, molecular biology and micro. Why? Everything uses GIS today. Statistics are just plain required. If you are working in the public sector, PA will prepare you for what you actually do most of the time...paperwork. policy and law is mostly what you will be doing paperwork on (permits and permitting issues!) instrumentation may pick you up a research tech post. Also, if you go into the private sector, every one of those areas is highly marketable. If you have none of them, you are going to have a rougher time. Again, this is coming out of a BS. Ideally, you better have Wildlife + Wildlife Techniques if going into a wildlife field or Fisheries + fisheries techniques if going into a fish field. You might check the respective certification programs. Anything ecotox will help too. Malcolm On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Clara B. Jones foucaul...@gmail.com wrote: 1. ...assuming that your summary is an accurate reflection of the *CB*article... 2. ...i am shocked that there is no mention of actual skills...most of the traits you mention might be categorized as intangible...you need these skills to be a car salesman...not to impugn car sales-persons... 3. ...IMO, an applicant has a better edge if s/he brings something transferrable [marketable!] to the table that no-one else brings to the table... 4. ...often this something is one or more quantitative skill... 5. ...or, skill in a fundamental or hot area of research w long-term potential... 6. ...or, a grant... 7. ...i am somewhat exercised by your post because, IMO, too many young, especially, female, applicants don't bring much to the table that others don't already know or that cannot be readily duplicated or that is mostly generalist-oriented... 8. ...early-career applicants need to bring something with legs...as my Grandmother Jackson used to say...in other words, bring something to the table that can go somewhere [that the
