2004 Career Opportunities in Physiology Committee Report
Careers Symposium, Experimental Biology 2005
This annual EB Careers session is intended to address
the specific objective in the 2000 APS Strategic Plan, “to promote interest
in and understanding of careers in the physiological sciences” and the
related action item, “to provide information on career options and training
in professional skills for both research and teaching via meetings and
electronic communications. In recent years, the Careers session focused on
the diversity of career opportunities in physiology, particularly those in
non-traditional areas.
For the 2003 session, we chose to compliment the Women
in Physiology and Pharmacology Mentoring Workshop on “Life After the PhD:
Finding a Postdoctoral Fellowship” by focusing the Careers Symposium on
“Planning A Successful Postdoctoral Experience: A Proactive Approach.” In
the symposium, we highlighted how to successfully plan a postdoctoral
experience and how to interview for a postdoctoral position and following up
the interview, as well as discussing job opportunities available in the drug
discovery process and in the government and military. The workshop focus and
information highlighted the skills development endorsed by the APS and ACDP
in the List of Professional Skills for Physiologists and Trainees. The
Committee has established 1) strong session attendance by students at the
undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels; and 2) positive feedback
from attendees as appropriate indicators of success for this activity. The
sessions are constantly well attended, attracting 150-200 participants
annually. Audience exit surveys indicate attendance primarily by graduate
students, but also significant numbers of post-doctoral fellows and
undergraduate students. Participant feedback indicates that the sessions
have been generally well received.
The plan for the 2005 session was developed last year
and submitted to the IUPS Programming Committee. The theme will be on
international collaborations at the postdoctoral and new investigator
stages, focusing on both US scientists going overseas and non-US scientists
coming to the US.
APS Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program
This program was designed to help achieve one element
of the 2000 APS Strategic Plan, Awards and Grants—“to attract the next
generation of physiologists and foster their early career development.”
This program has gotten off to a very successful
start. Because of the overwhelming number of applications, funding was
increased from the original four fellowships to 12 in the program’s first
year (summer of 2000). Applications were lower in number this year,
although still very competitive in this fifth year of the program’s
existence. Twenty-eight were received, a decrease of 49% from last year.
Although the quality of almost all the applications was sufficient to merit
funding, the Committee chose the 12 “best” for awards. Thus, 43% of the
applications were funded, which did not allow for high selectivity on our
part. Over the four-year history of the program, we have received 221
applications for the 60 awards granted, yielding an overall “selectivity”
ratio of about 1:4.
When the Committee looked for reasons for the decrease
in the number of applications received for the award, it saw no difference
in the ways the award was promoted. However, when the APS program was
compared with those of other societies, government agencies, and
universities, important differences were apparent. As can be seen in the
table below, APS ranks at the bottom of the list in terms of amount of
stipend given. When the other benefits (host laboratory and travel funds)
are factored in, then APS moves toward the middle of the list, although the
data on additional benefits were not available for some of the components of
the other programs; therefore, the APS program total benefits may rank lower
than shown in Table 1.
The APS Undergraduate Summer Research Program seeks to
attract the best undergraduate students to physiology; this will not happen
if the program benefits are not competitive with other programs.
We will follow the same process and use essentially the
same criteria for next year. We have decided to ask Committee members to
rank their applications in addition to giving scores. A ranking would help
the Committee know how each member saw a specific application with respect
to the others he/she reviewed.
The goal of the APS Undergraduate Summer Research
Fellowship program is to excite and encourage undergraduate students
worldwide to pursue a career as a basic research scientist. We have adopted
the following measurable objectives for this program:
Students participating in the APS Undergraduate Summer
Research Fellowship Program will:
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Learn to develop a hypothesis-driven research
project, collect and analyze data, and write up the experimental results;
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Present at least one poster or oral presentation on
their experimental results at a scientific meeting;
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Attend a national multi-society scientific meeting
and interact with fellow undergraduate awardees;
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Express a strengthened commitment to a research
career as a result of the summer program; and
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Enroll in a graduate or combined
graduate/professional program to pursue a career in basic biomedical
research.
This year, all 12 fellows attended EB 2004, bringing
the four-year total to 46 of 48 total awardees (96%) who attended EB, an APS
national conference, or a comparable national meeting. At EB 2004, all 12
of the fellows presented abstracts; in addition, one of the fellows had an
oral presentation and another fellow had a second abstract. Thus, the
initial 48 awards (first four years) have fostered research experiences
sufficiently successful to produce 41 abstracts (85%) at national
meetings.
We have finished an online follow-up survey of the
first two “classes” of UGSRF fellows to ascertain what impact the UGSRF
experience had on their career choice to-date. The large majority of
fellows (85%) continued working in research as undergraduates, either in
their fellowship research mentor’s lab (60%) or another lab (25%). Of those
who continued research work, 75% received a stipend or pay for their work.
Nearly 40% of the students responding had published a
paper or report on their APS-funded research.
More than three-quarters (76%) of the responding
students had graduated from their undergraduate institutions. Of these, 83%
had applied to graduate school (PhD or Master’s programs) and 67% had been
accepted. A total of 67% had applied to a science-related professional
school (e.g., MD, DVM, DDS) and of those half were accepted into a program.
In total, 100% of those participating in our program who had already
graduated from college have been accepted to graduate or professional
school. At the time of the survey, most of the graduates (75%) were already
enrolled in a graduate or professional degree program. Nearly half were
enrolled in graduate programs leading to the doctoral or Masters degrees and
an additional quarter were in dual-degree programs. The large majority of
students in graduate school or in dual-degree programs were studying in
physiology (50%) or neuroscience (38%).
Careers Poster
A new careers poster was designed in 2002 for annual
distribution to all US and Canadian undergraduate colleges and life sciences
departments. The new design coordinates with the new APS Career Web and
includes animals. The poster prominently displays the URL for the APS Web
site, which is how most undergraduates seek information. Posters must be
re-distributed every year, because their undergraduate departments clean off
their bulletin boards each autumn. As a cost-saving measure, posters were
printed in numbers sufficient to mail for two consecutive years (2003-2004).
While our overall goal in the annual distribution of
the career poster is to attract more students to physiology careers, it
would be difficult to measure its direct impact on that outcome. An interim
objective is to use the poster to get students to come to the new APS
Careers Web to explore physiology career options further.
Career Outreach Slide Presentation Package
The Committee made significant progress this year on
its plan to provide downloadable PowerPoint slides for outreach
presentations to middle school, high school, and undergraduate students. The
current concept is to assemble a wide variety of graphic, pictorial and word
slides that illustrate the nature of physiology and the diversity of career
opportunities in physiology. The individual “slides” will be appropriate
for different age groups, so that APS members could pick and choose a
selection of slides appropriate for their individual use. The package will
include two major sections: a section on career opportunities in physiology,
and a section on “physiology in action.” The latter section will consist of
modules organized around a physiological topic or disease. Each section
will include some slides on background material for the topic and additional
slides showing how a physiological study has contributed to our
understanding on some specific issue related to that topic.
APS Careers Web Site
Last year the Careers Committee developed a new APS
Careers Web site. This website provides extensive resources for two major
purposes: 1) to assist students and new and experienced physiologists in the
development of their careers; and 2) to help the general public gain a
better understanding of the work that physiologists do. The site includes
separate sections and resources for elementary, middle/high school,
undergraduate, graduate/professional, postdoctoral, new investigators,
established investigators, and the general public. Within each section, the
user finds resource categories customized to their needs and the specific
resources (such as biographies, hands-on experiments, career resources,
etc.) are written at the appropriate educational level.
In the past year, over 50 new resources (or links to
new resources) have been added to the Careers web site. These include new
information at all of the levels, but primarily undergraduate,
graduate/professional, postdoctoral, and new investigator levels.
Fall Committee Meeting
In 2001, the Committee launched the new Undergraduate
Summer Research Fellowship (UGSRF) program and held the first of three
two-day fall meetings (2001-2003). As a result of those meetings, the
Committee has in three years, completed the following projects:
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continued organizing the annual Careers Symposium at
EB and, as of 2004, began coordinating the Careers Symposium with the
Women in Physiology Committee Skills workshop and focusing the Careers
Symposium on skills listed in the APS-ACDP Listing of Professional Skills;
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developed and distributed a new career poster for
undergraduate biology departments, highlighting the new APS Career Web;
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developed a Career Web that includes more than 700
web pages and nearly 5,000 links to external web resources for physiology
and scientific career development;
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developed and disseminated more than 15,000 copies of
a new career brochure designed to stimulate pre-college students’
understanding of and interest in physiology careers. This brochure
replaced the previous version, an expensive and outdated brochure
developed more than 10 years ago that was distributed in only limited
quantities due to cost. The new brochure costs less than a sixth of the
cost of the old brochure and directs students to the new APS Career Web
for more information;
-
launched and expanded the new UGSRF program,
including conducting both formative and summative evaluations of impacts
in the first three years of the program;
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developed draft versions of PowerPoint presentations
on careers in physiology and physiology research topics for talks to K-12
and undergraduate students; and
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participated in the development of the APS/ACDP
Listing of Professional Skills.
At a time when careers in science are becoming more
diverse and when career issues are critical not only for the newly minted
scientist but for mid- and late-career scientists as well, it is important
for the APS to have a Committee proactively working to support the career
development of the physiology community. In the coming years, the Committee
anticipates: planning an international symposium for IUPS 2005; completing
and disseminating the PowerPoint presentations on careers in physiology and
physiology research topics for talks to K-12 and undergraduate students;
developing a new career poster for distribution to undergraduate
departments; overseeing the annual survey of doctoral recipients in
physiology, conducted by the Education Office, including preparation of a
five-year report on the survey results; overseeing the proposed new project,
“Professional Skills for Minority Students in Biomedicine,” which involves
the development of online professional skills courses based on the APS-ACDP
Listing of Professional Skills; and continuing to improve and evaluate the
Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowships program.
APS Staff
Over the past several years, the Career Committee’s
activities have been expanded, with the various projects going well beyond
just putting together a session for the EB meeting. The Committee would
like to acknowledge the continued support and assistance that has been
required and received during the past year from Marsha Matyas (APS Education
Coordinator), Melinda Lowy (Higher Education Projects Coordinator), and
other Education Office staff, as well as Martin Frank (Executive
Director).
William R. Galey, Chair
Council Actions
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Council accepted the report of the Career
Opportunities in Physiology Committee.
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Council approved the Careers in Physiology sponsored
symposium at the 2005 IUPS Congress.
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Council approved the necessary funding for 12 Summer
Undergraduate Research Program Fellowships for summer 2005.
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Council authorized the necessary funding to reprint
the careers poster for mailings for the next two years.
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Council approved the necessary funding to support a
meeting of the Career Opportunities Committee in Bethesda in fall 2005.
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