Participant Checklist

What to do in preparation for the workshop on Preparing for an Academic Career in the Geosciences

To help you get the most out of the workshop on Preparing for an Academic Career in the Geosciences, we ask that you do several things in advance. Here's a list of those preparatory activities and their deadlines:

By June 19:

• Make your travel plans, allowing attendance of optional sessions if possible. (See workshop program for session descriptions and choices.) For information on travel options, see the travel and logistics page.
• Register for the workshop (includes choosing concurrent sessions; see workshop program for choices).

By July 10:

• Upload your elevator talk (more information below).
• Complete the index of learning styles questionnaire and report your results.
• OPTIONAL, but STRONGLY encouraged: Upload your teaching and/or research statement(s). Participants who submit these statements in advance will participate in small group review sessions of their statements, each group working with one of the workshop leaders. Leaders will also offer their (constructive) feedback.

Prior to the workshop:

• Download the Medical Emergency Information Form, complete it, and bring it with you to the workshop in a sealed envelope.
• If you submitted a teaching statement, a research statement, or both, print out 5 copies of each and bring them with you to the workshop.

Elevator Talk

In the job search and interview process you will have very brief, yet critical, opportunities to convey your work to departmental faculty, institutional administrators, and students. In preparation for that, we are asking you to draft a BRIEF introduction to yourself and your research. The goal is to convey the nature and significance of your work to a scientist (but not necessarily a geoscientist). Consider how you might answer the following questions in approximately four to six sentences: What is the field you work in? What is the research that you do? Why is it important? This is the beginning of a conversation, so you want to keep your description sufficiently brief; it may help you to think about what you could say in the time of an elevator ride.

The Stanford University I-RITE/I-SPEAK program teaches graduate students and post-docs to write similar (but longer) descriptions of their research; we've posted a number of examples from the geosciences. The examples on this page are extended versions of what we're asking you to write; in most cases, what we're looking for from you is in the first paragraph of the example. (In a few cases, the examples take a while to explain the significance of the author's research; we advocate putting that information right up front.)

We encourage you to compose your description in a word processor, then read it out loud, making sure the text reflects how you would talk in a conversation. Also, please make sure your name is included at the top of your statement before you upload it. It should be no more than one paragraph.