From Dr. Joerg Schlatterer, Manager, Graduate & Postdoctoral Scholars Office:
For more than a decade, the American Chemical Society has successfully helped senior graduate students and postdoctoral scholars connect with university recruiters searching for qualified faculty candidates via the Academic Employment Initiative (AEI).
The availability of different employment opportunities in academia, and feedback from AEI participants, prompted ACS to suspend the existing AEI program to test alternative professional development models that promised to be more effective and impactful.
These models will be offered during ACS National Meetings in order to connect senior graduate students and postdoctoral scholars with research and teaching institutions that are looking for new employees in all areas of academic employment, including, but not limited to, postdoctoral researcher, staff scientist, faculty (tenure track, non-tenure track, adjunct, R1, PUI), and administrator levels.
The American Chemical Society looks forward to continuing its support of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars career development of with the updated approach with the goal of achieving higher levels of success for job seekers.The chatter in the open thread seems to indicate that people had mixed feelings about it - will be interesting to know if the replacement programs (like the "Postdoc to PUI Professor Workshop") fare better.
I was an attendee of the 2017 Postdoc to PUI Workshop, and I found it immensely helpful. I had already been through the interview cycle once with the result of several on-site interviews but no offers. This year, I received seven offers. And I credit the Postdoc to PUI Workshop for that success. The programming was very helpful - from informative panels and workshop sessions, to useful one-on-one feedback about application materials, to personal advice from the panelists who were not just well-informed but also really cared.
ReplyDeleteP2F, before P2PUI was a thing, was far more valuable to me than AEI.
ReplyDeleteHopefully the new academic professional development models at ACS meetings are not simply 1 hour workshops and mock interviews absent adequate interview opportunities. I also understand that non-faculty jobs exist in academia such as staff scientists and lab managers, but they are limited too and not all require a PhD. The current model used for developing careers in industry at ACS meetings is not much better in terms of job placements compared to the supply of chemists on the job market.
ReplyDeleteSince these schools seem to be more interested in teaching than research, how about a post-bachelor's teaching stint instead of post-doc. You could cut out the whole research thing in grad school since it does not seem to be of value to PUI's.
ReplyDeleteA Gross oversimplifcation. A *Huge* spectrum of PUI research activity exists at these institutions.
ReplyDeleteTell Harvey Mudd, Haverford, Hope or Franklin & Marshall or that research is "not valuable"....
The AEI is just a poster session anyways. I participated at the AEI in Fall 2016, and couldn't find a bigger waste of time. Half the visitors (holding their free beers) at the large SciMix poster session didnt know that this wasn't a normal scientific poster session, but one related to academic employment and they were wasting our time asking us questions etc. The ones that came there knowing this didn't have enough time to chat about the job opening and were definitely not interested in the scientific poster we were standing next to. If the ACS wants to make it useful just introduce a networking event like a dinner or something.
ReplyDeleteThe AEI was completely useless back in 2006 as well. Didn't get a single lead.
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