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  • Careers and Recruitment
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Building a career planning course for STEM PhDs

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Incorporating career development into PhD course offerings can help biomedical students better understand themselves, as well as the job market, and to adopt a 'can-do' attitude in developing their own paths.

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Figure 1
Figure 2: Effectiveness of achieving learning outcomes suggested by pre- and post-course evaluations (winter quarter 2017 course, N = 12).

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of former Scripps Research Career and Postdoctoral Services Office staff members B. Konnick and M. Matrone in designing and administering the course. Additionally, we thank D. Eastmond and P. Dawson in Scripps Research's Skaggs Graduate School for their support. Finally, we acknowledge our University of California, San Diego colleagues who lead the university's Questioning Career Transition Group, which helped inspire the Scripps Research course.

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Correspondence to Ryan Wheeler.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Branan, J., Li, X. & Wheeler, R. Building a career planning course for STEM PhDs. Nat Biotechnol 36, 1217–1219 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4312

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