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:

• Learn to develop a hypothesis-driven research project, collect and analyze data, and write up the experimental results;

• Present at least one poster or oral presentation on their experimental results at a scientific meeting;

• Attend a national multi-society scientific meeting and interact with fellow undergraduate awardees;

• Express a strengthened commitment to a research career as a result of the summer program; and

• 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:

• 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;

• developed and distributed a new career poster for undergraduate biology departments, highlighting the new APS Career Web;

• 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 draft versions of PowerPoint presentations on careers in physiology and physiology research topics for talks to K-12 and undergraduate students; and

• 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

• Council accepted the report of the Career Opportunities in Physiology Committee.

• Council approved the Careers in Physiology sponsored symposium at the 2005 IUPS Congress.

• Council approved the necessary funding for 12 Summer Undergraduate Research Program Fellowships for summer 2005.

• Council authorized the necessary funding to reprint the careers poster for mailings for the next two years.

• Council approved the necessary funding to support a meeting of the Career Opportunities Committee in Bethesda in fall 2005.