This episode will continue from episode 79 to continue to focus on advice on questions Jim and Lauren get often about career readiness, self-advocacy, and how to mentor up. Both episodes 79 and this one, are Inspired by a recent Q&A session Jim had at BCH. We hope you find the advice in this episode helpful and hope you enjoy listening.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
Jim and Lauren both get questions about career readiness, self-advocacy, and how to mentor up. Inspired by a recent Q&A session Jim had at Boston Children’s Hospital, in this episode, we answer the questions from the audience, and other advice to help our listeners. We hope you find the advice in this episode helpful and hope you enjoy listening.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In the last episode, no 77, Jim and I talked about the 2 body problem and reasons why this might occur, and in this episode, we thought we would continue the discussion to talk about how to negotiate if you find yourself in a two body situation. We cover points such as these below. We hope you find the advice in this episode helpful and hope you enjoy listening.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
Lauren was in Chicago and Ohio a few weeks ago and the question of the two body problem came up a few times. Jim and I decided to do this episode to provide insight on the two body problem. We also cover insights on the academic nomad situation. of career planning also since this can relate to the two body problem. We hope you find the advice in this episode helpful as you plan for your career and life and hope you enjoy listening.
What do we mean by the academic nomad?
What is the two body problem
Why does the academic nomad situation happen…
Aspects to consider in planning for your career
Advice to navigate the academic nomad situation
Advice to navigate the two body problem
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listenersnavigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
Jim and Lauren both had busy weeks last week as part of national postdoc appreciation week (NAPW) which is the third week in September. In this episode, 76, we will cover topics below including what we talked about, questions from the audience, and other advice to help our audience. We hope you find the advice in this episode helpful and hope you enjoy listening.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In this episode, Jim and Lauren cover advice for how to assess opportunities and evaluate job descriptions in terms of how to understand and interpret some of the language in them. Wording in job descriptions are not there just to fill space. Wording is often carefully chosen to provide information about the organization and role. This can include information about the company stage, growth, culture, etc
We also add insights about what you might want to highlight in your application materials and to inquire about as you interview, based upon what you see in the job description. We hope you find the advice in this episode helpful and hope you enjoy listening.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In our last episode, we talked about the steps in the job search process (26…). To follow up this episode, Jim and I decided to focus on advice for how to structure your time when you are in a job search in this episode. We provide advice for people who are currently working and job searching as well as those who are fulltime job searching due to a RIF or other reason. We will provide tips for how to organize your schedule to help you be more efficient as you do the many things that you should be doing as part of the job search process. We hope you find the advice in this episode helpful and hope you enjoy listening.
Before we dive in, it’s important to mention that for many people, when they are working, their schedule is prettystructured. It can be a shock when you find yourself suddenly not working, since the unstructured and unpredictable nature of your day can be really hard to deal with. This is why Jim and I are a big proponent of puttingin some sort of structure if you are job searching, otherwise, things may seem super haphazard, and nothing might get done…
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In this episode, Jim and Lauren outline all of the steps involved in a job search process. There are so many things you need to do if you are job searching and it can beoverwhelming to keep on top of everything. In the next episode we will talk about ways to help organize your schedule to help you be more efficient during the job search process. We hope you find this advice in this episode andthe next one helpful and we hope you enjoy listening.
Steps in the job search process (generally in this order)
Top 10 most important steps
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
With so many people impacted by RIF’s (reduction in force, layoffs, etc) we thought we would do this episode to provide advice specifically for people who have been impacted by this. RIF’s can apply to everyone - people in academia, industry, on-profits, government, etc. We will focus on a few topics in this episode focused on helping plan your job search if you have been impacted by a RIF. We hope you find this advice helpful and we hope you enjoylistening.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
This episode continues from the last one, episode 70, to add a little more reflection on the last 69 episodes. In the spirit of reflection, we will also share a few thoughts around reflecting on your job search and why this is important to do. We hope you enjoy listening.
Our reflection of the podcast:
Job search reflection
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
This episode is more of a retrospective of the last 69 episodes. A few weeks ago, we had our 5,000th play and this got us thinking about doing a retrospective episode, since we have so much content. In this episode, we reflect on a few topic areas of the podcast to help for our listeners as they navigate the many episodes. In addition to reflecting on the episodes, we also reflect on the themes, lessons learned and a few other points below. We hope you enjoy listening.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In this episode , Jim and Lauren cover a range of advice focused on job applications, applicant screening, timing for filing roles, and a few other topics we have been asked recently. We hope you find this discussion helpful covering these points below and we hope you enjoy listening.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
This episode continues from episode 67 and covers a few more pieces of advice relating to interviewing including presentations as well as how to assess culture fit and also how to follow up from interviews. These are really important topics and many of you listening may have similar questions to these points we cover below. We hope you find this helpful and we hope you enjoy listening.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In this episode, Jim and Lauren cover advice for interviewing. This is the first of two episodes focusing on interview advice. Lauren recently gave a talk to postdocs and grad students at Harvard Medical School on interviewing in early June and this episode covers questions received during this talk as well as questions that Jim and Lauren have received during coaching discussions. We cover these questions below in this episode. We hope you find this episode helpful and we hope you enjoy listening.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In this episode, we cover Jim’s recent trip to Louisville Kentucky. He travelled there to give a few career focusedtalks to grad students and postdocs at University of Louisville as part of their CRAFT (Career Research Advancement Focused Training) series for professional and career development. We cover a number of pieces of advice that Jim covered, such as these below. We hope all of you enjoy listening.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In this episode, Jim and Lauren talk about a few conferences that Lauren attended / spoke at between June 10th and 23rd 2025 covering these points below. Lauren was at the Graduate Career Consortium (GCC) conference in Minneapolis MN from June 10-13, The BIO conference in Boston from June 15-18 and the American Society of Microbiology Microbe (ASM) conference in Los Angeles from June 19-23.
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listenersnavigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In this episode, Jim and Lauren discuss universal pieces of advice, including these below, that apply to everyone,regardless of career focus, functional department, or industry sector. We hope you find this helpful as you navigate your career and search and we hope you enjoy listening!
You should keep an updated resume even if you are not looking for a role since you might need it for other types ofopportunities - such as volunteer opportunities or board opportunities.
People cannot read your minds - be careful with jargon and being so specific with details that people cannotunderstand what you do / what your impact was
Your resume is built for someone else to read – remember this
Tailor your resume for each role that you apply to
Don’t just cultivate your network when you need a role - you should be cultivating it all the time.
Find ways to reachout to and follow up with people in your network
Keep your LinkedIn profile updated to enable others to know what you might be up to
Share updates on LinkedIn to let your network know what you are up to and amplify others
Have your elevator pitch ready in case you need to use it - at the baseball game, conference, networking event, etc
Self-reflect - understand/remind yourself that you have blindspots, biases, strengths, value, and areas to improve
Periodically check in with yourself to see where you are in your career
Show gratitude, say thank you, show appreciation
Realize that others face similar challenges and may be struggling as well - it’s not always about you
Give yourself grace
Be organized
Be intentional
Be realistic
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In this episode, Jim and Lauren discuss myths that we have heard from people regarding the job application process, application review process, and interview process. Wedispel these myths, including points below, and share insights about why these myths are not accurate. We hope you find this helpful as you navigate your career and search and we hope you enjoy listening!
Myth: The best-qualified candidate with the best technical skills always gets the job
Myth: You should apply to as many jobs as possible
Myth: If you don’t hear back quickly, you didn’t get the job
Myth: AI/ATS controls the whole application process
Myth: You can only get hired if you know someone
Myth: The more resumes you send, the more interviews you will receive
Myth: You only need to have 1 resume
Myth: Your resume needs to be one page.
Myth: Resumes are only work related
Myth: You can only apply if you meet 100% of the job requirements
Myth: You should hide employment gaps at all costs
Myth: Industry doesn’t care about your publications
Myth: If a job is only asking for a BS and you have a Ph.D, then you are overqualified and should not apply
Myth: No one reads your cover letter
Myth: Interviewers are trying to trip you up
Myth: Do not follow up after the interview. If you do, it will be viewed as nagging and will be annoying
Myth: If you don’t get this job, it means you failed or you’re not hirable
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listenersnavigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In this episode, Jim and Lauren share insights about career options we are seeing people looking to pursue now giventhe current job landscape and flux in the US job market. We thought this could be helpful to share in case it helps others as they are considering their career choices. We dive into these points below. We hope you enjoy listening!
We are seeing people considering new roles they had not previously considered due to the need to cast a wider net in the current environment
We cover what a few of these roles are
We are seeing more people consider career opportunities outside of the US
~50% of graduate students and 60-70 % of postdocs are international so it makes sense to consider careeropportunities outside of the US. Many come to the US to do their Ph.D. or postdoc and want to stay here, but if we don’t make it possible for them to stay here, they will seek employment elsewhere
We provide advice for how people can start to think about what other options might be a good fit for them
We highlight transferrable skills for a few of the roles we are seeing a lot of interest in such as research, patent law, medical writing, scientific communication, data science, consulting, medical science liaison
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School,launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice weprovide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!
In this episode, Jim and Lauren cover questions about LinkedIn that we have gotten in the last few weeks. These questions focus mostly on job’s posted on Linkedin, job search features, applicant numbers, and other questions regarding using LinkedIn for a job search. We thought these topics, including these points below, would make a useful podcast episode since many of you listening may have the same questions. We hope you enjoy listening.
How to interpret LinkedIn job numbers, if a role has 1,000 people who have applied, should you still apply?
Are all of the people applying to a role on LinkedIn qualified?
Should I be wary of postings that only have a few applicants after a certain timeframe?
If a role has been posted on LinkedIn for a month or more, is it still active?
How does LinkedIn suggest roles for you?
How do organizations review applications on LinkedIn
Advice for reaching out to people on LinkedIn about a job posting that you see on LinkedIn
Is the “Indicate Interest” tab useful to use on LinkedIn. Do recruiters look at this?
Is LinkedIn Premium worth it?
How far back should you list information on your LinkedIn profile?
Lauren Celano, CEO of Propel Careers and Jim Gould, the Director for Postdoctoral Affairs at Harvard Medical School, launched this podcast as a way for us to share our advice, insights, and reflections to help others navigate their careers.
As we develop new episodes, this podcast will provide insights regarding career advice to help listeners navigate career choices and become more confident in their decisions. We look forward to busting myths and providing real life, timely, and accurate advice. Jim and Lauren work heavily with Ph.D. trained scientists, but the advice we provide can be applicable to other audiences. We hope you enjoy listening!