Welcome to “What’s Up, Doc?”

Описание: The hosts of the “What’s Up, Doc?” podcast, Maurinne Bonnet and Anne-Sophie Bohrer, walk you through the genesis of this initiative and their intentions behind creating a podcast to support the professional and career development of U-M Postdoctoral Fellows.

Transcript Anne-Sophie Bohrer

My name is Anne-Sophie Bohrer and I am the Program Manager for Professional Development in the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs at the University of Michigan.

Maurinne Bonnet

Hello, everyone. My name is Maurinne Bonnet, and I’m currently wrapping up my postdoc journey at the U of M in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the College of Pharmacy.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

So welcome everyone to ‘What’s Up, Doc?’, which is a new initiative that Maurinne is going to talk to us about.

Maurinne Bonnet

Yeah, sure. So ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ is actually a professional development interview series created by Anne-Sophie and I to support the career exploration efforts and professional development needs of current U of M postdocs. So we actually created that as an alternative and low commitment way for postdocs to engage in professional development activities. And so maybe Anne-Sophie, you can talk to us a little bit of where the idea came from.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Yeah, absolutely. So for this, a little bit of background about me. So I was a postdoc myself, and realizing that I didn’t want to go into a faculty career, I had to go through this whole existential crisis of figuring out what my career was going to look like. And I realized that by doing this, I realized that first of all, I was very much not informed about what was available to me to participate in professional development activities in my campus. But I also realized that it was going to take me a lot of time and a lot of effort to pivot and transition into a new career.

And so from the bench, it took me about three solid years to really figure out what career I wanted to go into, which is the career that I am in right now. And so really, the idea of ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ was to help postdocs at U of M, essentially start their career exploration journey and specifically understand the importance of informational interviews in the process of career exploration and career transition. And so for this, Maurinne, you too have a bit of a specific journey you’re in right now that’s also contributed to creating this initiative.

Maurinne Bonnet

Yeah, absolutely. So actually I’m wrapping up almost my third year of postdoc and I started realizing probably like a year ago that I didn’t want to stay at the bench. I didn’t want to become a PI for so many reasons. And the same, I was like, what is out there? What type of career can I pursue? How can I use my PhD and my postdoc experience? How do I compete with people that are already in the job market? And just like when you open LinkedIn and you’re like, okay, let’s find a job. What is the keyword you’re gonna look for, you know? So same, I started doing some IDP, so personal development plan, trying to look for other alternative career. And like you said, it just takes time and effort.

And then you start connecting with somebody who is, you know, has this type of job and you’re like, oh, that sounds cool. Okay, you dig more and you’re like, oh, actually I don’t like that. Okay, go back to the starting point. Let’s find somebody else in another type of career. So you contact them, try to discuss with them. And you’re like, that sounds cool, but actually not for me. And so all of these, on top of your like full-time job at the bench mentoring student, when you’re inexperienced, it takes time and effort. And like when you go home, after all of that, you just don’t want to spend more time digging on the internet and like what is out there. So I was like, if I could just put something in my ears, listening to people talking about their career, their journey, just to give me an idea of like what they’re doing and so later on I can contact them for a follow-up question, but I would have like the first idea without me doing anything. It’s just the podcast talks to me basically. So that’s how, like my background and how I thought like, we might need this like initiative and who’s better than you to do that set up the podcast with. So that’s how we started.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

And it was really serendipitous that you reached out to me to schedule an advising session with me. And turns out we’re both from France.

Maurinne Bonnet

Yay!

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

So we could connect, right? We had that shared experience of coming to the US to do a postdoc, realizing we wanted to stay in the US and having to figure out what we wanted to do. And so I think it was really, right, the right time, perfect storm for us to meet and essentially have the same idea, but just meeting someone else to help us get this off the...