Catalyzing Undergraduates’ Careers

A CONVERSATION

Marie-Pierre Hasne in conversation with Christine Gronowski and Dylan Dyer

As part of CBC’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion activities for 2020-2021, academic advisor Christine Gronowski and graduate student Dylan Dyer organized two seminar series for undergraduate students.

These seminars were open to all undergraduates but were intended to reach and support students from underrepresented groups in STEM and discuss career options. The first seminar series was a career-panel discussion, while the second seminar series was designed to demystify the path to graduate school. The seminars were for the most part conversational.

What was the motivation behind these seminars?

Undergraduate students tend to be anxious about career options available to them, especially when they are approaching graduation. They also have a strong need to understand the expectations that employers have and are worried about being competitive applicants. Having professionals take time to speak about their positions and how they reached them was really important.

For the graduate seminar series, the intent was to guide undergrads on the path to becoming graduate students. Questions that a graduate-student-to-be lives with before graduate school such as: how to write a personal statement, and how to find a lab that is a good match, were addressed. Who volunteered to participate in these conversations?

The career seminars gathered a diverse panel of guests from various scientific professions. It included scientists from industry such as Roche and AstraZeneca, a surgeon, and an MD-PhD student for medicine as well as individuals working as scientific liaisons, forensic scientists, etc. Most guest panelists were CBC alumni who generously volunteered their time to talk to and connect with our students. For the graduate student seminar series, our own CBC graduate students stepped up and ran it. They interacted with undergraduate students and presented on topics specific to graduate school applications and general navigation recommendations.

Photo credit: Olivia Mendoza Photo credit: Rachel Marie Christine Gronowski Dylan Dyer Marie-Pierre Hasne Guests were open and shared their email contacts with attendees; this created an additional networking quality to these seminars. What was the overall reception and feedback?

Was it difficult to enroll participants?

Very positive, students were appreciative of the efforts and enjoyed the variety of speakers. Guest panelists were thrilled to reflect and share about their own path and to connect and inspire students to think of the diversity of their career choices.

No, the list of volunteers to be a panelist was longer than the number of opportunities available. Using Zoom as an interactive platform created scheduling ease as panelists could attend from work and did not have to physically be on campus. The timing was impeccable because of the extra level of anxiety and uncertainty that the COVID-19 pandemic brought around the future of jobs and careers. If you are reading this and are inspired to join as a guest panelist for the academic year 2021-2022, please contact: Christine Gronowski christineg@arizona.edu or Dylan Dyer dmdyer@email.arizona.edu