{"id":1339,"date":"2016-02-02T21:48:05","date_gmt":"2016-02-02T21:48:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/mitchell\/?page_id=1339"},"modified":"2016-02-02T21:48:16","modified_gmt":"2016-02-02T21:48:16","slug":"jobs-in-field-biology","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/mitchell\/other-academic-information\/jobs-in-field-biology\/","title":{"rendered":"Jobs in Field Biology"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the 1997-98 school year our department tried to contact potential employers of students with interests in some aspect of Organismal, Ecological, or Evolutionary Biology. Almost every potential employer we spoke with mentioned the following two pieces of advice:<\/p>\n

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  1. EXPERIENCE<\/u>! <\/b>To land a job, you must have some relevant experience. Do anything you can to get that experience. Some possibilities include internships (see below), part-time employment, volunteering, working on a faculty research project or senior honors thesis, and many more. Many of the employers we talked to themselves “fell” into their first few jobs by being interns, lawn-mowers, gofers, and other “low-level” employees, then moving up the ladder through lucky turns of event. Note that experience (even at “low level” jobs) helps you make contacts, and your contacts may find more uses for you if they like your performance (remember that reliability counts for a lot with employers).<\/li>\n
  2. People and communication skills are important<\/u><\/b>. The ability to cooperate, collaborate, follow directions, read, and write is important in most jobs (yes, even in science!). In many ways, the specific classes you take as a student are much less important to potential employers than whether you learned to apply these people and communication skills during the classes. You must be able to get along with others, and be able express yourself clearly on paper and in person.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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    Many of our contacts mentioned the following as well:<\/strong><\/p>\n