Month: September 2018

What’s Your Story? The Power of a Career Narrative

by Sharon Fleshman

You may have career goals which seem clearly aligned with your background or you may be seeking a career transition.  Either way, you will want to develop a compelling career narrative which would include the following:

— An experience that exposed you to a given career and served as a catalyst for you to pursue that career.

— An experience in which you were energized and made a positive impact, confirming for you that a particular career or job is a good fit for you.

With these kinds of defining moments and accomplishments, you can connect the dots between your work history and the next step on your career path.  Consider the following scenarios and career narrative examples:

A student completing a BSN degree and planning to apply to Registered Nurse positions.  
“I became drawn to nursing in high school when volunteering at a pediatric hospital and shadowing a nurse.  I continue to enjoy community service work which allows me to mentor and empower children. In my recent clinical rotation in pediatrics, I was able to bring comfort and clarity to the anxious parent of a patient, which was noted by the parent and my supervisor. This affirmed my desire and ability to offer patient care that has a positive impact not only on children at the hospital but on their families as well.”

An alum who has worked as a teacher, returned to school to study policy, and plans to apply to policy research positions.
“As I worked as a teacher in public school, I began to ponder the best ways to assess student achievement in the classroom. As I did this, I also saw connections to broader and more systemic issues. This discovery led me to attend a graduate program which allowed me to cultivate skills in policy analysis and data analysis to complement my teaching background. I found that in my internship, my track record as an educator paved the way for me to build rapport with teachers and administrators whose participation was vital to my research.   I hope to leverage my mix of experiences and skills to conduct policy research and analysis that promotes increased equity and access in education.”

There are a number of contexts in which you can apply your career narrative:

Cover letters:  Cover letters allow you to address a specific employer about a specific job.  Therefore, you do not want to merely repeat what is on your resume. Instead, adapt and build upon your career narrative to highlight experiences that demonstrate why you are interested in and qualified for the job, and a good fit for the employer.

Career Fairs: Career fairs allow you to engage representatives from various employers, usually in brief conversations.   The career narrative, adapted to a particular employer, can offer a great way to introduce yourself and pave the way to ask a thoughtful question or two.

Networking: Whether you converse with your networking contact at a reception or an informational interview, your career narrative is a great tool to offer a bit about your background and career interests before you ask for perspective or advice.

Interviewing:  Many interviews open with the “Tell me about yourself” question, which can be a bit daunting.  Having a career narrative that connects your key experiences and career goals to the employer and the job will help you begin the interview with enthusiasm and confidence.

Feel free to make an appointment with a career advisor to discuss how to craft your career narrative. In the meantime, take a look at the following articles for more insight:

What’s Your Story? – by Herminia Ibarra and Kent Lineback, Harvard Business Review, January 2005

Younger Workers Need a Career Narrative by Heidi Gardner and Adam Zalisk, Harvard Business Review, February 15, 2013

 

Organized Networking with CareerShift

Natty Leach, Associate Director

As of just last week, Penn students have a new resource for their networking toolkit—CareerShift. With ways to search for companies, contacts, and keep everything organized, CareerShift can be a useful way to keep track of the networking side of your job search. Since it’s a new tool, I wanted to highlight just one key part of the system that can be particularly useful.

Whether you’re in the midst of applying to positions now or gearing up for positions that will open later in the Spring semester, having an informational interview with a Penn alum can be a great way to learn more about the company culture, job function, and overall industry you might be interested in. In addition to LinkedIn and QuakerNet, our alumni database, CareerShift has a great contact search that let’s you look at contacts within the organization by school attended, position, or location:

This can be useful for discovering new contacts or following up from a conversation you had at a career fair or information session. You can also organize all of your contacts by company or job to help keep track of who you’ve contacted so far.

If interested in informational interviews, take a look at the guide on our website with sample questions to ask or ways to craft an email to request a meeting.

The Connectome Project

This is the next in a series of posts by recipients of the 2018 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they’ve been spending their summer. You can read the entire series here.

This entry is by Natalia Parjane, COL’20

At the University of Pennsylvania, I am a Cognitive Science major, concentrating in Neuroscience. During this past summer, I worked in the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine in the Ophthalmology department under Dr. Jessica Morgan. She is an Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology and the Director of Advanced Retinal Imaging. Every day, I went to work on the “Connectome Project.” The Connectome Project is like the Genome Project, but for the eyes and the brain. It is still in its early years and is very significant to the field, so I was honored to have the chance to work under Dr. Morgan’s guidance.

The department has an interesting imaging device called the Adaptive Optics Scanning Light Ophthalmoscope, of which there are only a dozen in the world. Its built is based upon the method of Adaptive Optics in astronomy, which rids the data of aberrations. The machine measures the eye’s optical aberrations, compensates for them, and then enables high resolution retinal imaging. In the end, the device gives a beautiful look into the eye of a subject, presenting numerous rods and cones.


I assisted in imaging and processing data of the retina for the department. I took notes as each subject was being imaged and was able to participate in recording the subjects’ retina in vivo. After imaging, my work consisted of transforming the videos taken by the Adaptive Optics Scanning Light Ophthalmoscope into images to create a final montage of the part of the eye that was imaged. Usually, we imaged in four directions resulting in a cross-like montage.

The subjects imaged consisted of those with normal eyes and those with retinal diseases. The main disease assessed was Choroideremia, a condition that leads to progressive blindness, specifically tunnel vision. Choroideremia has 5000 cases in the U.S. and is caused by a genetic mutation. There are two objectives of the research: to gain insight to the disease mechanism and to assess the progression of the disease and treatment efficacy. The montages I assisted in creating are important in determining the difference in photoreceptors between normal controls and subjects with Choroideremia. Cone density is smaller for subjects with the disease than normal controls. Doing this will allow the department to fulfill its objectives.

Another amazing aspect of my internship is the lab meetings that took place every Monday. Two other labs work closely together with that of Dr. Morgan’s. They are led by Dr. Geoffrey Aguirre, an Associate Professor of Neurology and Dr. David Brainard, a Professor of Psychology. All three labs contribute different information to the study of vision and organization of the visual cortex. These meetings were often two hours long consisting of presentations and discussions. This aspect of my internship gave me more insight to the field that I wouldn’t have been able to achieve with just studying. Ultimately, the Connectome Project is a project that will take many years, but one that has great significance in the field of Ophthalmology and I can’t wait to see the outcomes.

Email Signatures for Students Searching for Internships or Jobs

By: S. David Ross, Senior Associate Director

As you think about communicating via email with potential employers, alumni and other networking contacts, consider creating a personalized email signature to showcase your professionalism and attributes that differentiate you as a candidate.

What information should you include at the bottom of your email in your email signature?  Here are some ideas:

Begin with your name.  This may seem very obvious, but for those who are more comfortable using a different name than their legal name, you can signal that here.

List your institution and school (if relevant).  While including the university name is a given, you may want to specify which school within the university – especially if that aligns with the type of job or internship you want to pursue.

Adding degree information may be helpful.  Particularly in fields where your specific degree is a requirement for the jobs or internships you want to pursue.  Similarly, majors or concentrations may be worth noting here.

Involvement in specific academic, research or honors program.  Some examples at Penn include Huntsman, M&T, VIPER, LSM, Ben Franklin Scholars, Joseph Wharton Scholars.

LinkedIn and/or website URLs.  For quick access to information on your background, you may want to include your LinkedIn URL.  If you have examples of project or other work that is relevant for the positions you want, you can also add a link to your website.  Other options can include social media links depending on the content and relevance – as long as they are professional!

Contact information.  The best phone number to reach you can be helpful to include – although you may prefer to simply restate your school email address as an alternative

Other considerations:
– Keep in mind that some emails may be viewed in plain text – so you may want to avoid using icons or images that will not display properly in plain text emails
– If you have several things to include in your email signature, including a divider between entries may help utilize space more efficiently across the email

Finally, don’t feel compelled to include all of these examples – pick the options that are best for you given your experiences, interests and pursuits.

A DICEy Summer

This is the next in a series of posts by recipients of the 2018 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they’ve been spending their summer. You can read the entire series here.

This entry is by Ayrton Kessel, SEAS ’20

This summer I conducted research on the links between climate change and the economy with Professor Irina Marinov. Currently, there is limited literature exploring said links. However, the implications of anthropogenic climate change and its effects on the global economy are becoming more important for policy implementation.

There are models within this field that are frequently used, called Integrated Assessment Models (also known as IAM’s). This summer, I collected multiple IAM’s and examined each in detail. The Dynamic Integrated Climate – Economy Model (DICE) was selected as the best IAM to begin our research with. DICE was developed by Dr. William Nordhaus, an economics professor at Yale University. The DICE model optimizes a social welfare function, which is the discounted sum of the population-weighted utility of per capita consumption. The climate model is represented by two temperature boxes, with the temperature split between that of the atmosphere and that of the lower ocean. Radiative forcing is a function of atmospheric carbon concentration, emissions, and exogenous forcing. In turn, the radiative forcing is added to the atmospheric temperature. The carbon model is three boxed, split between the atmosphere, upper ocean, and lower ocean. Emissions are sent into just the atmosphere. There are certain parameters that influence the flow rate within both the climate and carbon model.

The damage function is the link between the climate/carbon models and the economic model within DICE. The damage function is composed of atmospheric temperature, and influences the net economic output. The gross economic output is a Cobb – Douglas equation, and the discount rate is a Ramsey equation.

There are several outputs of DICE. For example, there are industrial emissions, population, net economic output, etc. over the duration of the simulation that can be examined as an output. The temperature and carbon changes are also included in the yield.

The most important output of DICE is the social cost of carbon (SCC). The SCC assesses the total discounted damage to social welfare caused by an emission of CO2 occurring in a particular year. It is expressed as the dollar value of the total damages from emitting one ton of CO2 into the atmosphere.

After finding a version of DICE available in MATLAB, I began to conduct parameter analysis. In total, there are around thirty parameters that can be varied. And each variable has a different effect on different outputs. Within DICE, I found that climate sensitivity effects the social cost of carbon the most. Climate sensitivity is the equilibrium temperature change in response to changes of the radiative forcing. This is finding is important because climate sensitivity is uncertain and has a normal probability distribution, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This can drastically affect policy planning.

Finally, I began to replicate research papers that used DICE in some format. For example, I replicated a Nordhaus paper from 2017 that examined the social cost of carbon in depth. Sea ice loss was a scenario that I examined from another paper. Permafrost feedback was the most recent scenario I replicated.

In the future, I will continue my research into the school year. The next step is to conceive our own scenarios or introduce probability. This research was a worthwhile experience, especially since IAMs are an emerging field in climate science. I would like to thank VPUL and everybody involved for helping me financially this summer. Without the grant, this would not have been possible!