Let me share a scenario that I’ve been in a lot, and I want you to think about if you’ve had a similar experience. I’m listening to an explanation of someone who is “above” me in their academic career. This tends to be a professor, researcher, or maybe even my supervisor. They are explaining some technical detail of an idea. Every so often, they look my way and end their sentence in a way that…

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You’re giving a presentation. Mindful that you should ease people into your topic, you start gentle. Things are going great, and then you go to your first example. When planning your talk, you had an easy example, but then you figured that people would think it was too easy. So you added a more complex one, closer to something you were studying in your work. The result? Blank faces from everyone. (more…)

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This, I think, is the next big thing in marketing ourselves. I’m a scientist. My current status is as a PhD student in theoretical physics, studying quantum computation. Most of my output consists of code and papers talking about my scientific work. And while that’s good, I would argue it’s not enough. Sure, it shows that you did some good things, but if I was hiring someone, I would ask two questions. What have you…

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