Challenges in Chemistry Graduate Education A Workshop Summary (2012) / Chapter Skim
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4 Skills Taught in Chemistry Graduate Education
4 Skills Taught in Chemistry Graduate Education
Pages 29-46
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From page 29... ...
It also considers the skills that will be in greater demand as the jobs in the chemistry field diversify and evolve. This chapter divides the speakers who offered perspectives on skills into five broad groupings: new faculty members, industry representatives, new industrial chemists, chemists in nontraditional careers, and a venture capitalist.
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In particu lar, as preparation to teach calculus, she took a course in which a faculty member taught teaching assistants how to teach math. A similar course in teaching chemistry would be an extremely valuable addition to graduate school, she said.
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You need to let them come up with their own ideas even if you don't think they are good ideas. They need to work through this process." As a graduate student, she learned how to distill her ideas into a single central theme.
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She encourages her students to learn things that she does not know herself. "I don't want them to be clones of myself." Rotating through several different laboratories as a first year graduate student can help students select an appropriate research advisor and allows them to explore different areas.
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From page 33... ...
an idea of what some of the challenges and constraints are when it comes to federal funding." Also, as a graduate student he knew virtually nothing about the organizational structure of funding agencies. "How to interact with those funding agencies would be great lessons that wouldn't take a huge amount of intellectual capital or time from depart ments and faculty and would be a useful endeavor." Mentoring Workshop Later in the workshop, Robert Lees, a program director at NIGMS, described a mentoring workshop for new faculty supported by the insti tute.
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The interview process at the company focuses on critical thinking, creativity, communication skills, and work ethic -- the qualities that go above and beyond technical proficiency and mark a standout candidate. "Identifying the best of the best requires that companies spend a lot of time working with the universities," he pointed out.
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Some PhDs spend their time working on a project their profes sor devised rather than developing their own ideas. Finally, Beaulieu pointed out that academia has recently placed more of an emphasis on safety regulations, which are a major area of focus in the chemical industry.
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Merck prioritizes problem-solving and experience, but soft skills will always give candidates an advantage in the industrial environment. Bristol-Myers Squibb David Kronenthal, vice president of chemical development at BristolMyers Squibb, echoed many of the previous panelists in listing desirable characteristics for new hires.
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From page 37... ...
People are generally hired with a project in mind, he said, but at Corning, a 160-year-old company with a centralized research approach, those who advance are the ones who spend time considering new angles and ideas. Lahiri also talked about emerging skills for chemistry graduates, touching on the role of "value networks," a concept introduced by Clayton Christensen.
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From page 38... ...
Scientists at the company focus on increasing food production, decreasing fossil fuel dependence, protecting lives and the environment and growth in emerging markets. New hires need strong technical skills as well as other assets, and those other assets -- creativity, communication skills, and a willingness to collaborate -- are the ones that differentiate standout candidates.
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That means working with both the upstream parts of a program and the downstream parts. Communication skills include the ability to recommend actions in a succinct manner.
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Because of their different backgrounds, the people in the group break the problem down in different ways. "When you reconstruct that problem as a collective, you end up coming up with a very unique solution." Similarly, understanding where one fits on a team helps in writing proposals involving people in different departments, which is "where the problems of tomorrow lie." Shenoy reminded the participants that the term "doctor" in Latin means teacher, and graduate students need to learn how to teach.
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I think that would be very helpful." Scientific Publishing Jake Yeston said that graduate school was excellent preparation for his job as senior editor at Science magazine, though he ended up in publishing through an "accident." One day, when he was finishing a postdoc, he was looking at the classified job ads in C&E News and saw that Science was looking for a chemistry editor. "That really wasn't a job that had been on my radar at all.
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Flagship Ventures, which invests mainly in life sciences and sustainability companies and currently has about 70 companies in its portfolio, runs its own laboratories in which it can develop technologies to address big problems, such as energy security, food security, and a cure for cancer. The Flagship team iterates the ideation, innovation, intellectual property generation, and implementation phases until a protocompany is ready to launch.
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"I can't afford to spend six months training people to break old habits when companies are growing that fast." Master's Degrees Along the continuum from bachelor's degrees to PhDs, Flagship Ventures has hired the most people from the master's level. These students have spent more time learning broad subject matter.
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Many new companies take insights from multiple disciplines to meet a challenge. For example, a Flagship Ventures company working on global nutrition challenges combines mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, biology, physics, chemistry, and other disciplines.
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From page 45... ...
Putting students to work on problems, even if broadly based, could help them learn to find out things for them selves. Having students write their own research proposals also helps them learn to think independently, he said.
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