On October 5th, 2018 ICONS was hosting Alaina Levine, a SPIE travel lecturer for a full day of events on professional career development for early-stage researcher at ICFO. Alaina Levine describes herself as an award-winning entrepreneur, STEM career consultant, science journalist, professional speaker and corporate comedian. However, from the instant you meet her you realize that she is foremost an open-hearted woman without any fear to talk to “Doctor God” nor to address the waiter in Spanish, one of the foreign languages she is not afraid to use.
Our idea of offering a workshop on career development for direction-seeking students started taking shape after the first Skype meeting with Alaina last February and became finally reality at the beginning of October 2018. The high interest and active participation during the day and the positive feedback showed that the whole effort was more than worth it. The day was filled with two keynote lectures, two workshops and networking events over lunch, a Social Friday and dinner in Barcelona.
In the first keynote talk “Networking for Nerds: How to Create your Dream Career” the audience learned, spiked with unconventional stories, that networking needs to be seen as a “give and take” rather than a need of one person. This perspective lowers considerably the barrier to approach and talk to anyone especially to “Doctor God” (aka THE highly respected PI of the research field).
In the subsequent workshop eager participants got an insight into 10 things you can do NOW to get a job and move your career forward. This workshop was a breakdown of the points to consider and to do in order to tame the monster-task to figure out and to find the career you want. In particular, we discussed the steps and key parts of networking at it is an integral point in the job search. It must be kept in mind that you should never exclude to create your own job based on your assets since nowadays the job market is changing so rapidly.
After continuing discussion over lunch and coffee, Alaina identified in her second keynote “Exploring your Passions and recognizing your Potential” the unique skillset of STEM professionals and how to effectively communicate those strengths. This talk was very eye-opening for us, PhD students and Postdocs at ICFO, an international research institute, to consider our problem-solving, decision making and other “soft” skills and abilities as an added value and not something which everyone has anyways.
In the last workshop of this intense day we discussed how to successfully navigate the international job search which was highly interesting for many of us since it matches our reality. Again, Alaina stressed the importance of building a professional network as soon as possible, way before you actually move to another country. She also raised the awareness of legal issues to be considered before moving on to the next place. After our typical Social Friday networking event a small group of brave survivors of the whole day took Alaina out for dinner in Barcelona.
Overall, the density of information to process and active networking were really worth it! Hosting Alaina at ICFO was not only a value learning experience but foremost on a personal level a wonderful enrichment of getting to know a bit better a charismatic person.
