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>> I'm the Director of Scientific Affairs
for the American Society of Radiation Oncology
and in this role I help support cancer researchers
and help them maintain their careers,
so I do that by providing grant opportunities
and grant funding, as well as supporting their science
and doing science communication
to disseminate information about their work.
(bright music)
I have moved around quite a bit,
I obviously worked in Academia for a number of years,
I also worked in non-profits and a cell bio-repository,
I worked for government
and now I work for a medical association.
So I've had a variety of different experiences,
they're all very different,
they're different for a variety of reasons.
Some are very bureaucratic,
government is a very big bureaucracy,
whereas non-profits can be very small and very nimble
and things change very quickly
and Academia is a very different area
with a very different focus.
So what I like, is that I've been able to
have a lot of different experiences
and work in a lot of different industries,
which I think really pays off now,
because I can draw on the different experiences
I had in those.
What is good, is it provides you a lot
of different opportunities
and allows you to think differently
and gives you a broader perspective.
There's ups and downs to every position
and every type of industry that you're in
and not being afraid to try different industries
and to move around, I think has really benefited me.
(bright music)
I think overall,
my training provided really good skills for me,
I understand how to find out answers if I don't know them.
The whole technical aspect of what I learned
while I was here at Hopkins was really, really valuable.
Some of the other skills of how to work on teams differently
and how to do a lot more science communications,
especially for non-scientists
or things I learned on the job,
but it was really building on the resources
and the foundation that I learned here,
on how to navigate doing my own projects
and how to navigate being in the lab.
These resources are very translatable
and are things that I rely on all the time.
(bright music)
So Association Worker non-academic jobs
are pretty different from academic ones.
While you're focused on an individual project
and you're focused on your own work in Academia,
when you get into an industry job or association work,
you're really focused more on an overall goal.
Everybody on the team is focused on the same product.
So for example, when I was at the bio-repository,
our goal was to produce high quality cell lines
and really high quality data.
Now in association work, my goal is to promote the careers
and promote the science of the cancer researchers.
So as you move from
an academic job and lab-based job
into one where you're more of supportive science,
I think after you get used to the changes in your schedule
and how job now is more nine-to-five type of world,
you kind of fall into working on a team
and being able to promote an entire product
together as a team.
(bright music)
I would say;
Don't be afraid of trying something new
and trying something you think you might be interested in.
If you get in there and you decide you don't like it,
then you can change tracks and obviously that's easier
when you're younger in your career
than as you get more established, but it could be something
that you end up enjoying quite a lot
or you're enjoying something
that is a little tangential to that,
that you didn't experience before.
To get experience in that,
I would take advantage of opportunities
that you have available,
they don't necessarily need to be courses,
but if you can get some experience...
Say you're interested in communications,
you can start writing blogs,
you can start writing for a newsletter,
you can somehow build up your resume
that has these different experiences that you can then sell,
even if it's not a full-time or part-time job that you have.
In terms of courses,
think about taking courses in business,
maybe taking courses or looking for opportunities
to develop leadership skills
and developing your networking skills,
all these are very important as you move on,
you're building up your network
and keeping that strong and viable
and having good leadership skills and management skills
are very critical as you move on in your career.
So I would look for opportunities,
even if they are informal opportunities
to be able to try something new,
try something you think you might like
and then look for courses that would help
get you to that point.
(bright music)
I think I'm open for opportunities
and looking for something that's gonna allow me to grow.
Every time I've moved from a different sector,
so when I've moved from non-profits into government
and then back into association work,
it's because of an opportunity that's presented itself
and the opportunity to grow and to be able
to do something different.
I think the biggest thing is to not be afraid
to take on a challenge and to do something that maybe
is a little bit outside of what you have been doing,
so that you can continue to grow.
So my next step will be something
that will allow me to have a new opportunity
or to be able to grow somehow professionally,
so that I'm constantly learning and doing something new.
(bright music)
So I wouldn't be afraid to try something new,
if you think that you're going to enjoy it
and it sounds something that's exciting to you,
I would try it.
You shouldn't be afraid to start a position,
but you also shouldn't be afraid to leave that position
if it's not working out for you.
I think every opportunity that you have allows you to grow
and allows you to have a different perspective
and as you move down along your career,
that's very valuable to you,
even if it's a job that really wasn't
what you thought it was gonna be
and it didn't really work out
the way that you thought it was gonna be.
The experience that you have there and what you learned
you will always take with you.
So I moved around from a lot of different sectors
and at times,
I felt like I was kind of ping-ponging a little bit
and moving just from job to job,
but now, having all those different experiences
is really helpful, because it allows me to think about
how different sectors approach the same problem
and that's really helpful if you're trying to come up
and brainstorm answers and work with my team
to be able to come up with ways
of moving forward in our own association.
(bright music)