Postdoc – Page 13 – Penn & Beyond

by Shannon C. Kelly

Last week, my colleague Michael highlighted the importance of linking in here on Penn & Beyond. I’m here to support his post, but stress how critical it is to connect in the coming weeks when you’re home for Thanksgiving. High school reunions, spending time with cousins/aunts/uncles and visiting with old friends is the PERFECT opportunity to build your network. Utilizing LinkedIn is a very handy tool to keep track of these connections and stay in touch. So, what’s the deal with all this LinkedIn attention lately?

Well, I’m excited to announce that LinkedIn is coming to Penn after the Thanksgiving break. John Hill is LinkedIn’s Higher Education Evangelist (yes, that’s his real title), and he’ll be here to speak to you – undergraduate and graduate students – on Tuesday, November 29^th at 12noon in the Ben Franklin Room at Houston Hall. Why should you come? Here are two really important reasons:

First and foremost, college students and recent graduates in the job market are joining LinkedIn at twice the rate of its overall membership, according to a recent interview with LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner on ABC (Weiner is a Penn alum). This means a lot of your peers are on the network, and you should be too. This will help you compete in today’s job market, but also stay in touch with them.

Secondly, what better way to understand how to maximize this tool than from someone who works at LinkedIn? This is a rare and unique opportunity to get your questions answered straight from the source. Hill has been traveling all over the country and world to listen to feedback and share best practices when it comes to using LinkedIn. There is only one of him at LinkedIn and hundreds of universities out there – we are very lucky to have him!

Hill’s talk on November 29th is about helping you understand this tool because it is powerful. I hope that you join us and John Hill. If you would like to come, just give us some notice and RSVP here.

Starting the week of September 26th, the Grad & Postdoc team kicked off their annual event, the Academic Career Conference, for the graduate students and postdocs here at Penn. The whole week, we have been highlighting resources through our social media channels on the academic job market. To shed additional light on life in academia, we’re excited to have alum Stephen Schueller, Ph.D, contribute to @PennCareerDay on Twitter on Thursday, October 6th. To learn more about Stephen, please read his bio below, and remember to follow him on the 6th!

Stephen Schueller (Ph.D. in Psychology, Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences ’11) is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Psychiatry. He started his graduate work at Penn in 2005 after receiving his bachelor’s in psychology from the University of California, Riverside. During his undergraduate, he worked as a research assistant studying happiness from a psychological perspective. At Penn, he trained as a researcher and clinician while working towards a doctorate in clinical psychology.

Through his research and clinical experiences, he became convinced that psychological treatments reach far too few and that expanding the reach of psychology would involve not just training more psychologists but creating innovative interventions. These interests brought him to UCSF Medical School. As a clinical researcher at UCSF, he has the opportunity to conduct research in an applied setting. He provides individual and group therapy in the public sector at San Francisco General Hospital. His current research studies the use of the Internet and health information technology to provide interventions that promote psychological health and behavior change.