Professional Development for Early Career DBER Scholars through In-Person and Virtual Career Panel Workshops

Miranda M Chen Musgrove; Elizabeth Genné-Bacon; Kelsey Gray; Ashley B Heim; Anupriya Karippadath; Rita Margarida Magalhães; Brie Tripp; Anna J Zelaya

doi:10.1128/jmbe.00190-21

Professional Development for Early Career DBER Scholars through In-Person and Virtual Career Panel Workshops

J Microbiol Biol Educ. 2022 Feb 21;23(1):e00190-21. doi: 10.1128/jmbe.00190-21. eCollection 2022 Apr.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, USA.
² Department of Medical Education, Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
³ Grand Challenges Initiative, Chapman University, Orange, California, USA.
⁴ Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.
⁵ Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA.
⁶ Center for the Advancement of STEM Teaching, Learning, and Evaluation, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, USA.
⁷ Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, & Behavior, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, USA.
⁸ Department of Biology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

In discipline-based education research (DBER), early career scholars, such as graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, observe a slew of possible career pathways. Yet, there is a lack of opportunities to learn about such pathways, particularly when transitioning from traditional science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) disciplinary training into a DBER position. Thus, the DBER Scholars-in-Training Professional Development subcommittee was created within the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) community to develop a collection of workshops that would serve the greatest professional development needs of early career scholars entering DBER. Through a series of surveys disseminated over multiple years, early career scholars expressed interest in better navigating their career options, which led to the development of the career panel workshop, held during the 2019 and 2020 SABER Annual National Conferences. In this report, we explore the development, implementation, and results of two career panel workshops and compare and contrast the 2019 in-person workshop with the 2020 virtual workshop. We also offer our insights on the value of the career workshop, discuss the next steps, and explore valuable resources for those planning on organizing similar events.

Keywords: careers; conference workshop; graduate students; postdoctoral researchers; professional development.