A simple fact drives the movement to prepare doctoral students for diverse careers: Most of them won’t become professors. Given that reality, when should departments and professors start offering graduate students practical advice on their career options?

The answer is: very early.

Despite more than a decade of news coverage and social-media warnings about too few tenure-track positions and too many job candidates, most people who apply to graduate school still do so because they hope to teach at the college level. They usually have some idea that the academic job...

Read more about Start Career Advising for Ph.D. Students in Year 1 (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

The 2018 National MD-PhD Program Outcomes Study highlighted the critical need to increase MD-PhD trainee diversity and close the gender gap in MD-PhD enrollment. This Association of American Medical Colleges imperative prompted us to evaluate trends in female matriculation from our institutional MD-PhD program compared with national data. Based on a 10-year review of Harvard/MIT Medical Scientist Training Program admissions, we observed a sharp and sustained increase in female matriculants for the past 5 years that is well above the national average. We report our experience with achieving... Read more about Mind the gap: Expediting gender parity in MD-PhD admissions (JCI Insight) -- A Harvard publication

I had just received a private tour of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and seen treasures like B.F. Skinner’s famous Teaching Machine, but as I sat in a curator’s office and looked out over the National Mall, all I could think about was my dissertation.

With a big deadline looming, I was angry at myself for taking a whole three hours away from my writing. I had asked to meet with the curator because I had applied for a postdoctoral fellowship at the museum, but the...

Read more about Why Every Doctoral Student Should Volunteer Off Campus (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Early-career researchers worldwide are availing themselves of an important but formerly obscure resource: three downloadable databases of hundreds of global funding opportunities and fellowships.

The databases — one for graduate students, one for ...

Read more about Free lists of grants and fellowships around the world available online (Nature)

The biggest choke point in an academic career is going from postdoc to principal investigator (PI): moving from doing someone else’s research to getting other people to do yours. Being a PI is a fundamentally different job to being a postdoc; they just happen to be in the same envi- ronment. It is not an easy transition. It draws on few of the skills you learn at the bench, and the odds are clearly not ever in your favor. So, calling this article Ten Simple Rules is obviously a simplification. It is more accurate to call them ten tricky steps.

In this article, we use PI to...

Read more about Ten Simple Rules to becoming a principal investigator (PLoS Computational Biology)