Our third Career Paths for PostDocs Seminar (CaPS) covered the topic of Scientific Management. As the jobs within this field can vary quite a bit, we changed the format of the seminar a little bit this time – instead of one expert, we had a round-table discussion with 4 speakers covering various aspects of scientific management. We were very excited to welcome: Anne Honsel, who is a Communications Officer at Umeå Plant Science Centre (UPSC) and Chemical Biological Centre (KBC). Nora Lehotai, a Project Coordinator at MIMS here in Umeå. From Chalmers University in Gothenburg, we heard Rickard Frost, who is a research advisor at Chalmers Grants office. To cover the aspects of international collaborations and EU projects, Sylvia Walter from Utrecht University completed the round.
The most striking was how happy and satisfied all of them were with their transition from the lab bench to their respective positions. They were enthusiastic to share their experience with changing from academia to science management. Interestingly, all of them knew their university before as they have worked or studied there. But jobs in this field are also regularly advertised by many universities and one does not need to have a prior connection, although it might help.
All of them have made a comparison of their workload to the time as postdocs. Even though they still have deadlines and big events coming up in their current positions, the (mental) workload is less and it is easier to disconnect after work. However, long days might still be needed just before deadlines, but it is much easier to compensate for the overtime later. For their everyday work now certain skills from their PhD and postdoc experience are still very useful like project management, working towards deadlines, and communicating (new) scientific and complex texts to different audiences. For the latter, Anne also did a specialization during her postdoc, which came in handy as one often competes with trained journalists for research communication positions at universities.
Another experience they all shared was that it is okay to make mistakes, and no one expects you to be perfect in this job right from the beginning. Often one must grow into the new role, especially directly after the postdoc. Thus, from their experience the best thing to do is to ask your colleagues for advice and learn from them. In general, the jobs offer diversified tasks and different days can vary a lot, but they all contain a lot of emails, hence one should be good at communicating with diverse groups.
We want to thank Anne, Nora, Rickard, and Sylvia again for their time, insights, and advice. It was really encouraging and refreshing to see how much they like their jobs!
For those who missed it: a recording of the seminar can be accessed here until October 31st.
During November CaPS will be on a break as we have the KBC days and the Leadership workshop coming up. Do not forget to check out both events!
