Tag: Twitter

A Day in the Life: Postdoctoral Scholar

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.

A Day in the Life: Advertising

On September 22nd, we welcomed Suresh Nair from Grey Group to discuss careers in advertising.  To continue to learn about this path and the range of opportunities available, we will feature Justin Ching, SAS ’11, to @PennCareerDay on Twitter on Wednesday, September 28th. Justin has been with Google since July 2011 and  will discuss what his day is like working in advertising with this leader in technology. Read more about Justin below, and remember to follow him on the 28th!

Justin Ching graduated from the College of Arts & Sciences in 2011 as an Urban Studies Major.  During his time on campus, he was Director of The Excelano Project, Penn’s premier spoken word poetry collective. In between school years, he interned in Integrating Marketing and TV Research for Disney|ABC Television Group. Justin now works for Google Inc. as an Agency Strategist for their Global Advertising division.  Most recently, Justin has also taken a role as a Project Lead for Google TV Marketing.

A Day in the Life: Environmental Engineer

We had another successful year at our annual Engineering Career Day on September 15th.  As a follow-up to the career fair, we’re excited to have our next alumni contributor on Twitter’s @PennCareerDay highlight one of many possible paths for our students and alumni with engineering backgrounds.  Rakesh Shah will post on Wednesday, September 21st on his career as an environmental engineer in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan, which began in 1978. Read about Rakesh’s background below, and remember to follow him on @PennCareerDay on the 21st!  *Please note, he will be posting from India, so please consider the time difference.

Rakesh started in the field of environmental engineering in 1975 while he was  earning  his Master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania.  His interest  in this area began thanks to a research study trying to establish a method for removal of Sulphur Di Oxide from flue gases.   Fortunately, after completing his degree, he had an opportunity to work with a US based company dealing with removal of “Hexavalent Chromium” from their wastewater stream.

Rakesh’s experiences helped him recognize the importance of environment related issues and happenings that were likely to surface in the future.   Subsequently, when he returned to India  he decided to gain and develop expertise in the field.   This in turn led to establishing a company to provide environmental engineering and related services to organizations, industries and institutes in India.  Developing the company in a new field of activity (which was not generally even heard of then) required a lot of convincing and presentation to industry as well as regulatory authorities.  At the same time, developing staff / personnel to an adequate level of expertise and delegation of work required immense managerial input.  His training and experiences in the USA and specifically at the University of Pennsylvania allowed him to have a successful career.

A Day in the Life: Technology Analyst/Software Engineer

@PennCareerDay on Twitter, our day in the life feed, is back!   As we kick off OCR and Career Fair season, we hope that you’ll tune into @PennCareerDay to learn about the potential paths available to you – and keep coming back as we’ll feature a variety of careers all semester long.  On Thursday, September 15th we welcome Luke Kopakowksi (C ’09).  Luke will highlight one of the many paths  available in investment banking – technology. To learn more about Luke, please read below and don’t forget to follow on Twitter!

Luke Kopakowski is a technology analyst at Barclays Capital in New York City.  He started at Barclays with a summer internship in 2008 and then joined fulltime after graduating from Penn in 2009 with a B.A. in Physics.   He went through the year and a half grad program at Barclays Capital, rotating through 3 divisions for 6 months each.  Now, after 2 years at Barclays, he is a software engineer for the cash equities division and works mostly with java, web development, unix/linux, excel and databases/SQL.   His team manages, develops and improves a complex software system that calculates fees associated with Barclays Capital’s equities trades.

A Day in the Life: Healthcare Venture Capitalist

Next Tuesday, April 19th follow @PennCareerDay on Twitter to learn about another path in the wide world of venture capital – healthcare.  Ambar Bhattacharyya (SAS ’03) will contribute and talk about his career at Bessemer Venture Partners.   If you’re interested in healthcare or venture capital – follow Ambar next week! Read more about Ambar below.

Ambar Bhattacharyya is a senior associate in BVP’s Cambridge, MA office. He focuses on investments in early- and growth-stage healthcare companies and has been involved in Bessemer’s investments in Verastem and On-Q-ity.

Prior to joining Bessemer, Ambar worked as an associate at Bain Capital Ventures. There, he helped make investments in companies such as Ameritox, Accelecare, LinkedIn, iPay Technologies (acq. by Jack Henry), TargetSpot, and VMLogix (acq. by Citrix). He also served as a board observer for VMLogix, TargetSpot and EyeTel Imaging (acq. by Neurometrix).  Before Bain Capital, Ambar was the assistant to the CEO at MinuteClinic, a company that runs health clinics staffed by nurse practitioners inside retail settings and was acquired by CVS.  He began his career at Bain & Co. where he worked on projects across various industries, including healthcare, business services and technology, as well as for non-profit clients at The Bridgespan Group.  After attending business school, Ambar interned with the City of Fremont, CA, where he helped the city develop its clean-tech strategy.

Ambar holds an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in economics and a B.A. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated magna cum laude.  While at Penn, Ambar co-founded the Philadelphia chapter of Asha for Education, a non-profit focused on improving education in India.  Ambar is on Twitter at @AmbarBh and regularly blogs on his own site and at The Healthcare Breakfast Club.