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Allison McClure is a postdoctoral training fellow studying DNA replication in John Diffley’s Chromosome Replication Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London.
After I finished my PhD in 2014 at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, I stayed for an extra year to finish a paper and look for a postdoc position. The first step of my process was to decide what I wanted to do with my career, so I could find a laboratory that would help me to achieve that. It can be hard to answer this question because you really need to know yourself and reflect on what you want. I was a bit apprehensive about making such a strong statement about my career — a feeling that I think is shared by many graduating students. But, I decided that I wanted to try to stay on the academic track, so I needed to find a postdoc position that would support and help me to prepare for eventually becoming a group leader.
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Nature607, 623-624 (2022)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01728-6
This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged.