PhD Career Exploration Fellow Spotlight: Maria Vogel

Hosted by Penn Libraries – Academic Engagement 

This fall, we will be featuring blog posts written by PhD students who participated in Career Services’ Career Exploration Fellowship (CEF), a program that helps doctoral candidates explore their career interests through networking opportunities with advanced degree professionals. Click here to learn more about CEF.

I am very grateful and fortunate to have been paired with Rebecca Stuhr for the Penn Libraries Academic Engagement fellowship. When I read the summary statements for each host, the opportunity to learn more about library work stood out. This opportunity offered the chance to learn how librarians support research in varied ways.  

Like many graduate students in this fellowship, I am not convinced that a traditional research career would be the best fit for me. However, I sincerely enjoy the intellectual aspect of research and want a career path that focuses on acquiring, synthesizing, and communicating scientific knowledge. When I applied to the CEF, I did not consider a career in library work, but I was fascinated with how librarians serve as a bridge between the research world and a broader public. My aim for this fellowship was to learn how a PhD can service a global need for science accessibility and literacy within an academic space. I was pleased to learn that many of the skills that we consider “soft skills” as graduate students have immense utility outside research.   

Throughout my fellowship, I got the opportunity to speak with multiple librarians about their career paths and their work. Through conversations with Rebecca, I learned about the publishing process, systemic barriers to publishing, and how this process influences the culture and perceived value of scientific research. I learned how librarians support universities to assess research productivity and help students navigate resources that will assist them in their own work. To get a better idea of how a science background was useful in library work, Rebecca put me in touch with the librarians at the Holman Biotech Commons. I had more eye-opening conversations on how the totality of the skills acquired in my PhD — including project development, experimental design, storytelling, and publishing — can be harnessed to help others. For example, knowing how to use the software, databases, and tools to synthesize and analyze data is itself a sought-after skill that can be taught to benefit other scientists and science enthusiasts.  

I am immensely grateful to Dr. de la Cruz Guiterrez, director of the Holman Biotech Commons, for his time and enthusiastic support for my fellowship project. Inspired by our conversations on science accessibility, I proposed to lead a workshop series on how to use an illustration software, Adobe Illustrator, to make graphics for research communication. The goal of this series was to teach attendees the basics of this software to enable them to draw their own work or research. The ability to execute this project was a highlight of my fellowship: it provided real experience on how to identify and lower some barriers in visual research communication. 

I would also like to take the space here to acknowledge and thank Lexi Voss and Dr. Neetu Rajpal for graciously giving me their time to learn about their work in assisting researchers. Conversations with them about their work were beneficial for my own research in the lab! 

At the start of this fellowship, I had big ideas on science accessibility and academic culture. As a result of my conversations with multiple librarians, I am even more inspired to continue being curious about these topics in a professional capacity. I can now also envision a career path in library work.  

To those who are considering applying to the CEF, I highly recommend it! Everyone that I met through this opportunity has encouraged me to explore my career options, and I will continue to learn from them. Importantly, it is necessary to have connections with professionals outside the research bubble. Being surrounded by scientists can make it difficult to learn about the myriad of paths that use the skills acquired in a PhD to make positive change.  

By Alison Howard
Alison Howard Associate Director, Graduate Students & Postdocs