Here is a compilation of useful resources to help:
0) Scholarships for undergraduates
1) Finding a summer internship while an undergraduate
2) Searching for a career after a B.S./B.A.
3) Applying to graduate school
4) Surviving and thriving in graduate school
(For Cornell students: Find a place to live!)
5) Giving a successful professional talk
6) Writing letters of recommendation that avoid bias
7) Finding a career after a Ph.D.
8) Succeeding as a professor; starting a lab & mentoring students
9) When you are part of a dual career academic couple
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0) Scholarships available to Cornell geoscience undergraduates:
* Shell: http://www.shell.us/careers/students-and-graduates/scholarships/bachelors-degree-students.html
* SEG: http://www.seg.org/education/student-and-early-career/scholarship
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1) Finding a summer internship while an undergraduate
For Cornell students, the first place to look are the following department pages which has a lot of career information,
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/studentorg/SESSA/Internships.html
Also the following document with lots of links to summer programs:
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/eas/PeoplePlaces/Faculty/mahowald/women/REUideas.doc
Some internships in planetary science are listed at the Lunar and Planetary Institute
A searchable database of over 1200 programs: https://pathwaystoscience.org/Programs.aspx
A searchable database of 300 National Science Foundation programs and a common application: https://etap.nsf.gov/
Also see: http://www.iris.edu/internship
http://www.scec.org/internships
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2) Searching for a career after a B.S./B.A.
Great new resource in 2023: GROW (Geoscience Resources on Opportunities in the Workforce) is a new collection of career resources for geoscience undergraduate and graduate students wondering, “What job opportunities do I have outside of academia?”
Here is some info on Cornell Science of Earth Systems majors from a 2011 survey
New resource in learning about career skills and careers in the geosciences:
https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/workforceskills/index.html
Complementary information is available also at:
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/studentorg/SESSA/Careers.html
This page is supposed to be for Climate Science, but is relevant for others too:
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3) Applying to graduate school
Here is a nice overview of the steps in applying to graduate school and making a decision: https://sarah-cooley.com/applying-to-graduate-school
Lots of students do not understand how to write a Statement of Purpose. Here is some good advice on how to do this correctly by mommyscientist.
This article is written for potential graduate students in ecology, evolution, and natural resources, but many of the lessons are broadly applicable.
Another good article from ecology that has good, broadly applicable advice
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4) Surviving and thriving in Graduate School
If you are eligible to apply to for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, here are some useful resources (that have some tips that can be useful for other fellowship proposals too):
https://www.alexhunterlang.com/nsf-fellowship
http://www.malloryladd.com/nsf-grfp-advice.html
https://sarah-cooley.com/applying-for-the-nsf-grfp
There are lots of great blog posts about graduate school, here are 3 favorites from mommyscientist,and Ecology at Yale
Conflicts with your PhD advisor can happen and Peter Fiske (author of the book Put your Science to work) has some advice in Science magazine. More good advice about planning for a successful graduate career is compiled here by the Cornell Grad School.
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Cornell students; Find a place to live:
https://www.veryapt.com/guides/housing/255-cornell-engineering/
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5) Giving a successful professional presentation:
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2018/0206-speak-your-science.html
I also recommend the books by Randy Olson on giving a presentation, writing an abstract and scientific paper: Don’t be such a scientist, and Houston, we have a narrative
It is often difficult to write a good conference or paper abstract, but here are some helpful links:
http://breathe.ersjournals.com/content/breathe/10/3/265.full.pdf
Here is a great video on how to make your conference poster capture attention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RwJbhkCA58
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6) Writing letters of recommendation that avoid bias
https://eswnonline.org/guide-to-avoid-racial-bias-in-reference-letter-writing/
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7) Finding a career after a Ph.D.
If you want to run a research group, here are some good suggestions.
Advice for applying to be a postdoc.
There is an annual compilation of job listings in the Earth and Environmental Sciences (faculty, postdocs, grad student positions)
This page is called “Careers outside of academia with a PhD in Volcanology” but it is applicable to any PhD in geosciences: https://volcanologistsoutsideacademia.wordpress.com/
GROW (Geoscience Resources on Opportunities in the Workforce) is a new collection of career resources for geoscience undergraduate and graduate students wondering, “What job opportunities do I have outside of academia?”
Great resources from Prof. Jillian Goldfarb on how to write teaching and research statements for faculty positions in STEM fields: https://blogs.cornell.edu/goldfarb/lab-resources/
For academic careers, the AGU Biogeosciences section ran a series of webinars that are useful for almost everyone:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCJhZtcLW2Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvijasoOR9o
Comprehensive site focused on academic/postdoc job search advice (from Astronomy, but also applicable to geosciences): https://aibhleog.github.io/job-cycle
I wrote a short article for the Women in Planetary Science blog compiling and interpreting online statistics about what Ph.D. graduates in the Earth and Planetary Sciences are doing from Caltech and 3 other schools. Our compilation of Caltech alumni can be found here.
My main advice is:
1) If you seek a tenure track faculty job, be aware of the low number of these positions, but do not get discouraged. There are jobs out there and there are several things that you can do to increase your competitiveness. I suggest the following resources. I hope readers will suggest more!
* A Ph.D. is Not Enough! A Guide to Survival in Science by Peter J. Feibelman (1993, 109pp);
* Tomorrow’s Professor: Preparing For Academic Careers in Science and Engineering by Richard M. Reis (1997, 416pp.); see also the online listserv: http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/tomprof/postings.php;
* Numerous advice columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education; and
* My favorite academic blog: Female Science Professor.
2) No matter what your career aspirations, you should spend time learning about careers outside of academia. These careers are challenging, important, and fun, and your best bet for employment. Even if you become a tenure track faculty member, you’ll be better able to give advice to your our students someday if you know something about these careers. There are lots of good resources, here are a few:
* Look over the list of alumni job titles and employers;
* Profiles of the 51 Women in Planetary Science;
* Put Your Science to Work. The Take-Charge Career Guide of Scientists by Peter S. Fiske (2nd Ed. 2001, 179pp.);
* Alternative Careers in Science, ed. Cynthia Robbins-Roth, 1998; and
* Rethinking science as a career: perceptions and realities in the physical sciences, S. Tobias, D. Chubin, K. Aylesworth, Tucson: Research Corp, 1995.
3) Begin thinking about career prospects as a prospective student, not when you are about the graduate. Ask questions of graduate schools that you are applying to about what their alumni do. Talk to potential graduate advisors about the career prospects in that subfield and where graduates from that particular lab are employed. In any case, be proactive – it is your career!
•Prof. Natalie Mahowald of Cornell conducted a survey of female MS/PhD's in non-academic careers with the names removed, but including what they like or don't like about their jobs
•A fantastic resource for career development (how to interview, career profiles, dual career couples, etc.), and more is available from the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College
A good blog is Tenure, she wrote and here is one excellent post:
https://tenureshewrote.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/how-to-fail-better-and-even-succeed-in-the-academic-job-market/
Another good blog is: http://theprofessorisin.com/pearlsofwisdom/
Here are some examples
http://theprofessorisin.com/2012/04/05/dont-ask-career-services-for-help-with-your-cv/
•Some resources for writing a cover letter:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Basics-of-Cover-Letter/46259/
***this one is shorter and I think the most useful**--it's a good anatomical description and breakdown
http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Write-Appealing-Cove/46284/
https://theprofessorisin.com/2014/08/29/how-to-tailor-a-job-letter-without-flattering-pandering-or-begging/
Anthro geared but not useless:
https://theprofessorisin.com/2016/08/26/why-your-job-cover-letter-sucks/
WILDLY USEFUL SITE but slightly teaching geared:
https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/careerprep/jobsearch/application.html
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8) Succeeding as a professor; starting a lab & mentoring students
As a new faculty member, here are some useful blog posts about things current faculty wished they had known and how to establish a positive lab culture:
https://ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-things-we-wished-we-had-known.html
https://ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.com/2019/03/how-do-you-create-lab-culture-social.html
Resources for mentoring students:
https://faculty-inclusive-mentoring.cornell.edu/faculty-advancing-inclusive-mentoring/
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9) Finding academic careers as part of a dual career couple
Resources for dual career couples in the geosciences
Some great links and helpful statistics were posted here by geochemom. Here are my condensed comments on this post:
A great essay filled with good advice. There is a lack of good data to use when planning a dual career search strategy.
For what it is worth, I will relay my own dual career job search experiences, but I am not sure the numeric data will be that useful. The initial and boundary conditions are often very different between couples and job searches. I have anecdotal evidence that job hunting success can depend on the following: Are both members of the couple in the same field (planetary/geoscience), the same subfied (geophysics), or totally different fields (planetary and economics)? Does the department already have expertise in the field of the partner or are they interested in this field of study? Are both members of the couple at the same stage in their career? Do both parties in the couple have equal credentials (institutions of study, number and quality of postdoctoral appointments and publications)? Are the members of the couple applying to wide-open searches (e.g., any area of earth/planetary science) or relatively narrow searches that are focused on a subfield. Sometimes these narrow searches are known to the search committee, but the job ad has been written more broadly and can ensnare unsuspecting applicants.
We found that there is also a lot of variation in institutional policies or traditions — some places will reject consideration of dual career couples out of hand, with predictable results for the existence of women scientists in those departments. For example, my wife was offered a job in a department a number of years ago that had about 25 male faculty and zero females. Although the department made at least 4 offers to different female scientists at that time, they have had a hard time recruiting female faculty, in part because they did not offer tenure track positions to the spouses of these women.
I know some lucky dual career couples that only had to interview once or twice to be hired somewhere as a team, while others settled for non ideal conditions for 10 to 20 years before finding 2 tenure track positions.
In our experience, we were much more successful at receiving interviews when applying as individuals than as a team.
We chose to apply as a team in our 4th year, because we wanted to be up front with institutions that we needed 2 tenure-track positions and we didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. I suspect that we received fewer interviews as a team because not all institutions had 2 positions to offer and those that did thought that the research that my spouse and I do is too similar. We often use the same types of data in our research, but use it to study different problems in different ways. The similarity argument is easier to counter now than it was earlier in our career. For example, we now have a combined 30 successful research proposals under our belts and have only collaborated on 2 of these. While there are many discussions on the web about the relative merits of when to reveal your partner to a search committee, in retrospect, I think we should have continued to apply to jobs individually — at least on the cover letter. The purpose of this letter is to make the short list and get an interview — not to negotiate the final terms of your contract. In the interview, the institution can get to better know one of our research activities and decide whether it is a good match. At that point we could bring up the topic of our spouse and what their research is all about. We could also have a more detailed discussion in person rather than having a committee that is evaluating 100-200 applications try to make sense of what we have written on paper.
For 10 years, my wife and I split a single tenure-track position — we were both officially half-time and were evaluated separately for tenure. Lots of people have emotional reactions to the idea of split-positions — I remember that my first reaction when I learned about these positions as a graduate student was horror. These positions are not for everyone and are not economically viable where the cost of living is high and the pay is low. I came to appreciate these positions through example: There are two other couples in my department that have split positions for 30 years and all have had successful careers. In most things, the university treats us as full time faculty: we have the same office/lab space as other members of the department, we each have a full vote in faculty meetings, we receive full health care benefits, etc. You can compare these split positions to the partial “soft-money” and partial “hard-money” research positions that exist at many of the country’s oceanography institutions. In both you have a guaranteed salary (in exchange for teaching and service for the department) but also have more time to do research than regular full-time faculty. The advantage of a split academic position is flexibility — unlike at an oceanographic institution, there is no downside if you don’t raise your salary in a given year via grants. Another advantage is that there is more time available for family and other activities. We were promised that we would be offered 2 full-time positions and we were.