The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science: A Toolkit for Students and Postdocs

Choice

Paul Harnik

“Careers in scientific research require a wide array of tools and it is during one’s graduate and postdoctoral training that these are typically first developed. It is also during this time that rapid and efficient assimilation and application of these approaches is most critical. With The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science, Bloomfield and El-Fakahany provide a comprehensive guide to various approaches that will assist readers in excelling within this early stage of their scientific careers.”­—Paul G. Harnik, graduate student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago

Dov F. Sax

“The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science is a roadmap to the beginning stages of a scientific career. I will encourage my own students to purchase it.”

Karen Klomparens

“The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science pulls together a wide variety of resources to assist scientists from their doctoral experience through postdoctoral to faculty member or industrial career researcher. There are many excellent and thorough books on various segments of the scientific career, but none that cover the span of years and experiences described in this text. The selection of topics is appropriately broad, yet the focus remains on the elements of success. It is a mentor in print.”

Eva J. Pell

“The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science is a comprehensive toolkit for aspiring scientists trying to decide whether to go to graduate school, what degree to seek, what institution to choose, how to select a mentor, how to navigate through graduate school and a postdoc, and finally how to secure a position—and what career path to choose. This book is also an excellent handbook for advisors. While face-to-face dialogue between students and advisors is critical when mentoring students, it is very useful to have a well thought-out essay to underscore the issues conveyed verbally. Each chapter, furthermore, concludes with a list of suggestions that form an effective set of takeaways. Being able to point to a chapter and suggest to a student ‘Read this and then let’s discuss the points that are relevant to you,’ could be valuable for faculty and students in a whole range of circumstances.”

Norma Allewell

“Step-by-step, Victor Bloomfield and Esam El-Fakahany provide sound, thorough, yet succinct advice on every issue a scientist in training is likely to encounter. Young readers will welcome the authors’ advice on choosing a graduate school, for example, while senior scientists will probably wish that a book like this had been around when they were starting out. With down-to-earth and occasionally humorous advice, The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science belongs on the bookshelf of every graduate student and advisor.”