Career Advice Episodes

Finding jobs after graduate school is a huge transition period that isn’t talked about nearly enough. So I’m so grateful that my friend Dr. Afshan Khaleghi was willing to come onto the podcast to talk about her recent experiences - and successes! - in finding a non-academic job after graduate school. We talk about how she navigated how the “real world” views PhDs and how she engineered her way into quickly and easily getting recommended even by strangers for positions. And! If you feel like you...

My guest today is the kind of woman in STEM that I infinitely appreciate and want to spend my time with. Dr. Sarah Shaw is an engineer, a mentor, a parent, until recently a student, and so many other roles. In short, she has excelled at doing a little bit of everything! She currently works as a Senior Engineer at the Aerospace Corporation and just wrapped up her PhD in Systems Engineering in Spring 2026. She additionally has a MS in Astronautical Engineering a BS in Mechanical Engineering, spent...

Robert Frost said “The best way out is always through”, but that doesn’t mean that we need to do anything alone. STEM is a team sport and so is learning to work with your particular skills and strengths, not against them. That feels especially true when moving from fighting nay form of neurodivergence to embracing its superpowers while navigating its challenges. This is why I’m so honored that there are people like Dr. Kimberely Corwin in the world! Dr. Corwin has a late-in life ADHD diagnosis (...

Ok spoiler alert: if you have a super satisfying, rich social life and you get to hang out with people in all walks of your life - work, hobbies, and anything else that lights you up - this episode might not be the one for you! Don’t worry, I’ll be back next week! And for the rest of us.... I see you. I am you. It’s never been easy for me to just “fit in” with the people I work or go to school with and it’s taken me some time to find my people in my STEM parts of my life. But I have, and I’m so...

You know what’s absolutely wild to me?! People who have full time jobs and go to school at the same time. I was a full time student for all of my higher education (undergraduate and graduate school) and I barely survived being a full-time cat mom for only half of that. But! I am really fortunate enough to get to work with a ton of amazing people and students who are balancing both with such grace. Francisco Cordova is one of those amazing people and I can’t wait for you to meet him! Song of the...

Making any progress at all on the things that challenge us in our STEM jobs - and our lives - is AWESOME. Celebrate the hell out of these wins! And: sometimes you need a little extra oomph to get over hurdles that are more stressful. That’s where this episode comes in…It just takes next courageous steps! Want to hang out and do a social media challenge sharing your courageous steps? Tag me on Instagram @STEMdentity so I can celebrate the hell out of you!! Check out the companion episode on nex...

STEM is a team sport. Our scientific endeavors and engineering marvels are too complex to be handled by the same person. Today, I’m excited to talk to one of the people who are on the “front-lines” of science and engineering: Dr. Theresa Barosh, a professional science communicator for Colorado State University! Dr. Barosh got a PhD in Ecology and moved to science communication immediately after graduate school. She writes amazing articles for Colorado State University and manages the beautiful c...

My favorite part of going to conferences is making new, unique connections that I could never have predicted. Paul Jenkins is one of those instant connections of someone who is the embodiment of someone who has figured out how to live a life well lived, with so much more to come! Paul is the CEO of two highly successful engineering firms and still spends a great deal of focus and energy on challenging and growing himself through many degrees - the latest being a PhD in Systems Engineering. We ta...

Applying for a new job is a part of growing in your STEM career! ... and yet most of us do it so rarely that each application can feel overwhelming and stressful. I’ve had the opportunity to review many applications for several different job postings both at a large institution and at small businesses. Today’s episode is all about how to connect your job posting to the human on the other side of your application packet, from following the 1” margin rule (seriously! it's not worth shoving in a co...

It’s graduation season! And graduating means transitions and transitions means people giving you advice, whether you asked for it or not. That being said, some advice is truly excellent and I’m excited to bring you advice from three STEM professionals who all graduated from the Colorado State University Systems Engineering program: Dr. Sarah Shaw, Dr. Art Villanueva, and Brian Johnston. They were recently challenged on an alumni panel that I had the pleasure to attend to provide 3-word advice to...

No matter where you are in your STEM career stage, chances are very high that you are someone’s mentee and you are also someone’s mentor, or you’re about to start mentoring. These relationships can go extremely well - and it’s also really common for them to run into bumps or roadblocks. What can you do when these challenges arise? I’m excited to welcome Dr. Jeff Pierce back onto STEMdentiy for part 2 of our conversation, this time on mentor-mentee relationships. Even though we mostly focus on t...

Mental health: we all know we should be doing “something” to take care of it, but it’s often easy to put mental on the back burner amidst our busy lives until we’ve forgotten about it for too long and realize that the kitchen is starting to burn down. Someone I really admire for realizing that his kitchen was in full flames, taking accountability and action, and coming out the other side stronger is my graduate advisor, Dr. Jeff Pierce. Jeff has had challenges on and off with mental health but ...

You’ve probably heard the advice, “You should be reading a peer-reviewed journal article every day of your life!”...and if you’re like me, you’re thinking things like, “Every day? Like even weekends? And my whole life? That’s a lot of really boring reading!” So I explored reading a journal article (almost) every single day for 30 days (yes, even weekends), but I added in the secret sauce that most people don’t add to their advice: it can be a paper on…anything. I learned about beavers. I learne...

Grad school: other than being short for graduate school, what is it like anyways for STEM fields? It’s actually surprisingly common for people to go to grad school without much idea of what it will entail. I was definitely one of those people - all I knew is that it was probably school-like and that it seemed like the thing to do when I looked around and didn’t like the job options that I could see with my undergraduate degree. Even though each experience will be unique, there are some commonal...

Graduate school can be a murky path with either no clear exit ramp or too many exit possibilities (aka Jobs!) after graduation. Sometimes those options are clearly discussed within your degree program formally or informally and sometimes they’re not. A common option for graduate students getting a PhD is to get a postdoctoral position afterwards, especially if they want to stay in research. What’s less talked about are some of the challenges of moving from school to a postdoc that can happen to ...

Curiosity. It seems like a hallmark of being a STEM professional and yet it feels like more than ever, curiosity has to take the backburner to emails, meetings, AI summaries, deliverables, reports, due dates, and on and on… So I did it: I intentionally chose to be curious about whatever I wanted for 15 minutes a day for 30 minutes. How did it go? Would I recommend it to the scientists and engineers in my life? (Spoiler alert: I would!) In fact, if anything, I feel like an even better scientist-...

Emails. They probably had a brief moment in the sun as a useful communication tool before they exploded into endless-headed Hydras with no end in sight. Does it need to be this way? In this episode, we figure out your relationship with email and steps towards not letting your inbox run your days. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, and I sure don’t want my life to be a reply-all email chain! BTW - I talk about the nervous system briefly in this episode. To really get an awesome dis...

It’s easy to romanticize science as a series of lightning bolts: researchers have brilliant research questions and hypotheses suddenly come to them out of the blue! So if this doesn’t happen to you, you’re bad at research right? Right? No! There are simple, easy to apply frameworks for every major part of the research process form coming up with research questions to writing up results. Today, let’s dig into how to come up with research questions. Developing research questions is not a mystery:...

Having fun in your STEM job is something that probably seems like a good idea but can get completely lost in the rush of the day-to-day. Even more subversive, much of our time might be spent thinking about when we will be happy: We’ll be happy when we get the job, graduate with the degree, go on the vacation, get the paper published, get the successful experimental result… Instead of “I’ll be happy when”ing ourselves, can we shift towards “I am happy now” throughout our days? Take a listen! So...

I’m dropping this quick minisode to invite us all to jump joy first into a creativity challenge: 15 minutes a day. 30 days. Just…explore the thing you’re curious about. Maybe you take an intentional break at work. Maybe you write the things that pop into mind on a sticky note and you do a deep dive at the end of your day. Curiosity and creativity are STEM super powers for us scientists and engineers, but the busyness of our days can stifle those sparks. It doesn’t matter when you find this episo...

Dr. Zitely Tzompa Sosa is the bright light we need in science policy. Trained as an atmospheric chemist, Zitely has navigated several international moves for school and work. Along the way, she found that working in policy is her guiding light for showing up to work as her most authentic self. Song of the week: The Wild Rover by Lankum More about Ravi, a true hero of atmospheric chemistry! Navigating finding yourself in your career doesn’t have to be a solo sport. Would you like to have me in y...

Groundhog Day: it’s a holiday AND a movie! (Movie spoiler alert ahead FYI - it’s been out for >30 years so I don’t apologize.) For those of us who know the 1993 movie classic starring Bill Murray as grumpy TV weather forecaster Phil Conners, we’ll remember that poor Phil got himself stuck in a time loop, forced to relive Groundhog Day over and over and over and over again. And ultimately, only through growth and change did he find his way out of the time loop. And….I can almost guarantee that e...

I’m so excited to bring you this conversation with my very good friends, Taylor Christenson and Tim Remkes! Taylor and Tim met during their bachelor’s degree program in Botany at Weber State University and married shortly after school. They’ve successfully explored several career paths and keep finding themselves back doing what they love with being outside and teaching. Tim has built his own amazing environmental services company for native landscapes - https://remkesenvironmental.com/. He wor...

Five jobs in five years was a whole lot and a complete life-changer all in one. In this episode I walk through how each job came about and highlight some of the key lessons I took away from each one. This episode is all about putting sampling and ikigai (episode 1!!) into practice. Want to work with me one-on-one? I’d love to do a free, 30-minute intro Work Audit call with you to discuss your top blockers at work and start to come up with actionable steps towards your most STEMtastic STEMdentit...