Introducing MySciCareer

This entry is mirrored from the new site, MySciCareer. 

by Lou Woodley

Today, my friend Eva Amsen and I launched a project we’ve been working on in our spare time: MySciCareer.

MySciCareer is a new site that collects first person stories about science careers.

What’s MySciCareer for?

There have been numerous conversations in recent years about how what is often assumed to be the traditional science career path (PhD –> a post doc or two –> tenure track or group leader position) is not in fact typical for many people with a science background. Instead, science graduates can follow many different routes and end up in roles in publishing, technology, industry, communications and more.

Sharing first person stories can be a helpful way to consider career choices, but there aren’t many places where you can find out more about a wide range of science careers in the form of personal narratives. So we decided to create a site that brings together new and existing science careers content in one place!

Where’s the content from?

We’ve started off by including excerpts from content from all over the Web, but we will also be including some original content too. Where we’ve used content from elsewhere, we’ve contacted the original publishers of the post for permission, excerpted a key paragraph or two, and then linked back to the original content.

We hope aggregating information in this easy to search and explore way will be useful to anyone looking for inspiration about what might be possible with a science background.

Can I contribute something?

Yes, please! We’re keen to host original content as well as to link to more content from elsewhere. If you’ve got a science careers story that you’d like to share, please get in touch. You can reply to this email or fill in the contact form on the website. Feel free to pass this on to anyone else you think might find the site useful too.

If you see content elsewhere that you think we should include, do let us know about that too. And if possible, loop us in with whom to ask for permission to reproduce it.

We’d love to see the site grow with your help!

How do I find stuff that’s relevant to me?

There are various ways you to search the content on MySciCareer:

• Take a lucky dip with the carousel on the homepage, where we flag up quotes from the blog posts. If you’re intrigued by a quote, just click through to read the whole post.
• You might want to search the site by the type of job that posts focus on – whether it’s careers in research, publishing, policy, education or more. On the archives page you can browse the different job types.
• Finally, you might want to know what the last academic science position held by an author of a post was. “Search by training” on the archives page lets you browse the site this way.

How do I keep up to date with MySciCareer news and conversations?

We’re on Twitter and Facebook, where we’ll post details about new content on the site as it is added, as well as resharing other relevant science careers discussions and letting you know if we give talks about science careers.

If you post content elsewhere that you’d like to be part of the science careers conversations, please add the #myscicareer hashtag – this will work on all major social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Storify, Instagram and Flickr.

So, please take a look at the site, send us your feedback, spread the word and let us know what stories we’re missing. We’re intending this to be a growing collection of resources so if you’d like to contribute we’d love to hear from you.