Sunday, June 7, 2020
By:
Hello everyone! I am grateful to be the APS Careers Area Intern this summer working under the mentorship of Dr. Midhat Farooq. I will be working with her on a variety of projects, mostly focusing on tailoring our content towards specific audiences (undergraduate students, graduate students, early-career scientists, mid-career scientists in industry, etc) through specialized email and outreach initiatives along with revamping the careers website and reorganizing the physicist profiles page and adding new content.
I applied to this internship because I wanted to help the physics community, especially those just at the beginning stages of becoming physicists, learn about the plethora of opportunities a physicist can pursue when it comes to careers. But more importantly, I wanted to help teach them how to gain the skills needed to pursue that career, such as networking, resume building, and finding effective mentors.
Once the national quarantine started and I had to return home from UMass Amherst, I saw an opportunity to try to help the physics community cope and endure during this difficult time. Dr. Farooq was able to get me in contact with Dr. David Voss, the editor for APS News, and I was able to write an Op-Ed for the ‘Back Page’ article in the June edition of APS News which was published on June 1, 2020. My hope is that the article will be able to help inspire fellow students to keep moving forward and working towards their professional goals during this challenging time. I also saw this as a good opportunity to prepare for this internship and begin thinking about what a particular audience may need in terms of career advising. The article can be found here: https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/202006/backpage.cfm
Beyond the Op-Ed, I have been able to meet with Dr. Farooq to go over the specifics of our projects for the summer. For example, we have met with the marketing team at APS to begin coming up with different audiences and specialized content for them that would be distributed through a series of emails that offer tailored content and career advice. I was also able to moderate a Q&A session following a career panel at this week’s DAMOP (Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics) meeting for Dr. Brian Patton, which was a lot of fun! Beyond that, I began working on categorizing the current physicist profiles (https://www.aps.org/careers/physicists/profiles/) for the upcoming reorganization of the page and met with Dr. Crystal Bailey, Head of Careers at APS, about beginning outreach to new physicists to begin writing profiles about careers that are not currently represented within the physicist profiles.
Outside of work, I have been enjoying spending time outside as the weather is getting warmer here in southern Rhode Island, and attending the zoom sessions the fellow SPS interns have been having to get to know each other better.
Overall, I loved my first week and can’t wait for week two!
Jack Moody