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2005 Career Opportunities in Physiology Committee Report
Careers Symposium
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 2004 session, the Committee chose
to compliment the international focus of the IUPS meeting by focusing the
Careers Symposium on “International Collaboration: Science Knows No
Boundaries.” The symposium highlighted how to have a successful research
experience overseas and in the US, how to do both teaching and research
overseas and in the US, international research cooperation, and
international opportunities in biomedical research training. 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.
Over a number of years, 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 2005
session was not as well attended this year as in past years. Participation
in the symposium was primarily by graduate students, but also significant
numbers of postdoctoral fellows and undergraduate students. Participant
feedback indicates that the sessions have been generally well received. The
2005 program received an overall rating of 4.7 on a 5-point scale (5 = “Very
Useful” and 1 = “Not Useful”), and the individual speakers received ratings
between 4.2 and 4.6 on the same 5-point scale.
The plan for the 2006 session is currently being
developed. The Committee decided to complement the theme selected by the
Trainee Advisory Committee (TAC) for its first symposium, “Transitioning
from Post Doc to Career.” A topic will be developed in conjunction with the
representatives from the TAC.
APS Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program
This program was designed to help achieve one element
of the 2000 APS Strategic Plan Awards and Grants Plan, “to attract the next
generation of physiologists and foster their early career development.” This
program continues to be very successful. For the sixth year of funding, 42
applications were received, an increase of 150 percent from last year. The
Committee saw this as a direct response to the increase in stipend level the
Council approved last year. Although the quality of most of the applications
was sufficient to merit funding, the Committee chose the 12 “best” for
awards. Thus, 29 percent of the applications were funded, which did allow
for high selectivity on our part. Over the six-year history of the program,
we have received 263 applications for the 72 awards granted, yielding an
overall “selectivity” ratio of about 1:4.
We will follow the same process and use essentially the
same criteria for next year, except for some minor technical adjustments.
The Committee members ranked the applications, as well as scored them, for
the first time this year, and that worked very well, allowing us to reach
our decision on the 12 awardees much faster during the conference call.
Short term impacts: Evidence suggests that the
program is meeting the “short-term” goals of the program. This year, all 11
fellows (one fellow dropped out of the program during the summer) attended
the IUPS/EB 2005 meeting, bringing the five-year total to 57 of 59 total
awardees (97 percent) who attended EB, an APS national conference, or a
comparable national meeting. At IUPS/EB 2005, nine of the fellows presented
abstracts; in addition, four of the fellows had two posters each and a fifth
fellow had both a poster and an oral presentation. The initial 59 awards
(first five years) have fostered research experiences sufficiently
successful to produce 55 abstracts at national meetings.
Long-term impacts: We have finished an online
follow-up survey of the first three “classes” of Undergraduate Summer
Research Fellows now to ascertain what impact the UGSRF experience had on
their career choice to-date. The large majority of fellows (88 percent)
continued working in research as undergraduates, either in their fellowship
research mentor’s lab (53 percent) or another lab (34 percent). Of those who
continued research work, 75 percent received a stipend or pay for their
work. Nearly 33 percent of the students responding had published a paper or
report on their APS-funded research.
A vast majority (82 percent) of the responding students
had graduated from their undergraduate institutions. Of these, 52 percent
had applied to graduate school (PhD or Master’s programs) and 46 percent had
been accepted. A total of 59 percent had applied to a science-related
professional school (e.g., MD, DVM, DDS) and of those 46 percent were
accepted into a program. In total, 96 percent of those participating in our
program that had already graduated from college have been accepted to
graduate or professional school. At the time of the survey, most of the
graduates (81 percent) were already enrolled in a graduate or professional
degree program. Nearly one-third was enrolled in graduate programs leading
to the doctoral or Master’s 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 percent) or
neuroscience (38 percent).
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 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).
Outcome Measures: 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. Therefore, the
Careers Committee is monitoring the web usage statistics for the Careers Web
to determine increased usage, especially following the posting of the
careers posters at undergraduate life sciences departments in the fall.
Outreach Power Point Presentation Package
This program was designed to help achieve four
objectives in the 2000 APS Strategic Plan. First, in the Awards and Grants
Plan section, the objective is “to attract the next generation of
physiologists and foster their early career development.” In the Education
section, the objective is “to promote interest in and understanding of
careers in the physiological sciences.” Finally, in the Advocacy and Public
Affairs, the Plan includes objectives “to educate the public about the
central role of physiology in health and disease” and “to increased
opportunities for participation by APS members in public education, in
advocacy for research funding, and in support of animal research.
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.
Five different versions of the PowerPoints are in
preparation for use with 1) elementary school, 2) middle, 3)
high school, 4) lower undergraduate; and 5) upper
undergraduate students. These will be uploaded for use by the APS
membership on the web site. Draft versions of the remaining three
presentations are currently being reviewed for appropriateness of content
and language for each age group by Committee members. In addition, teachers
who have participated in the APS-Baylor College of Medicine My Health, My
World elementary science program will review materials for elementary
students while former APS Summer Research Teachers (Frontiers in Physiology
program) will review materials for middle and high school students. The
Committee plans to have those final versions ready for Council approval this
fall.
APS Careers Web Site
As noted earlier, the 2000 APS Strategic Plan includes
an Education Objective “to promote interest in and understanding of careers
in the physiological sciences” and an Awards and Grants Objective “to
attract the next generation of physiologists and foster their early career
development.” The action item associated with the Education objective was to
“provide information on career options and training in professional skills
for both research and teaching via meetings and electronic communications.”
Toward that goal, the Careers Committee developed a new
APS Careers Web site in 2002. 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 the levels, but primarily undergraduate,
graduate/professional, postdoctoral, and new investigator levels.
Outcome Measures: The website launched in March 2003.
While it was expected that use would have increased significantly this past
fall when the new physiology careers posters are displayed at colleges and
universities around the nation, this increase was not evident. New efforts
at advertising are being planned to promote the web site to students and
physiologists at all levels. This fall, ads for the Careers web site were
included among the APS Positions Available ads. This did lead to a
substantial increase in the number of hits to the site. The ads will be
changed every 6-8 weeks to maintain interest.
Figure1:
2003-2004 Career Web Site Statistics
Fall Committee Meeting
Prior to 2001, the Career Opportunities in Physiology
Committee held a single one-to-two-hour meeting annually during EB. At that
time, the committee’s major activities consisted of: 1) organizing an
annual Careers Symposium at EB; and 2) developing and distributing a
career poster to undergraduate biology departments.
In 2001, the Committee, with support from Council,
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 four years, completed the following
projects:
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continued organizing the annual Careers Symposium at
EB and began coordinating the Careers Symposium with both the Women in
Physiology Committee Mentoring workshop (2004) and the Trainee Advisory
Committee workshop (2005) 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.
-
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;
-
developed 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. The fall committee meeting has
allowed this committee to complete important tasks—such as the Career Web
development—quickly and effectively. In the coming years, the committee
anticipates:
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planning an international symposium for EB 2006;
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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; and
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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 Director of
Education Programs), 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 EB 2006.
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Council approved the two
undergraduate PowerPoint slide packages for dissemination via the APS
website.
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Council approved the necessary funding to support a
meeting of the Career Opportunities Committee in Bethesda in fall 2006.
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