2016 Annual Meeting - San Francisco

  • 1.  Meet the Faculty Candidates Poster Session

    Posted 10-05-2016 16:51

    Hello all,

    We are excited to hold the largest ever Meet the Faculty Candidates Poster Session at this year’s Annual Meeting.

    For those of you participating, who are you looking forward to meeting--any specific recruiters or department chairs? What is your strategy for getting noticed? Do you have any concerns?

    I would love to know how else we can help you and how to improve the session for you.

    Thanks so much for your input.

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    Roman Voronov MS, PhD
    Assistant Professor
    New Jersey Institute of Technology
    Newark NJ
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  • 2.  RE: Meet the Faculty Candidates Poster Session

    Posted 10-11-2016 15:18
    Edited by Kairat Sabyrov 10-11-2016 15:25

    Hello everyone,

    I am attending for the first time and I am really excited to meet people. I have couple questions. What should be the primary focus of our poster, our past work/PhD, present work/postdoc, or future work/proposal? What the recruiters are looking for, mostly? And who will be our audience, industry people or academic?

    Thanks much,

    Kairat

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    Kairat Sabyrov
    UC Berkeley & LBNL



  • 3.  RE: Meet the Faculty Candidates Poster Session

    Posted 10-20-2016 18:13

    Hi Kairat,

    Welcome to the Academic Job Search!  The employers are predominantly from academia, since the poster session is intended for Faculty Candidates.  I would like to refer you to the section of the ChE Faculty Candidates Resource Center dedicated to helping candidates with poster and abstract content:  Creating a Good Abstract & Poster

    If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to post them!  And good luck!

    Aiche remove preview
    Creating a Good Abstract & Poster
    How to Write a Good Abstract Don't include much scientific text. Break things down into categories that employers can sift through easily. The word limit is of 1,500 words. Note that the guidelines have changed since the example abstract was submitted in 2013, so please make sure that you have these two new sections (separated by headers) in your abstract: Research Interests
    View this on Aiche >

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    Roman Voronov MS, PhD
    Assistant Professor
    New Jersey Institute of Technology
    Newark NJ



  • 4.  RE: Meet the Faculty Candidates Poster Session

    Posted 10-13-2016 11:54

    Roman,

    There are three suggestions I would like to offer for the Meet the Candidate Session:

    1) Role Break Down

    Possibly identify teaching vs. researcher roles respectively with two different stickers on posters or on a master sheet. It could help identify the variability in roles/responsibilities and match interests. Along with this, I suggest honest discussion about the breakdown of responsibilities that recruiters are representing. This could help save quite a bit of time on the seeker and recruiter sides.

    2) Specialization

    It seemed from sessions past, that candidates are broken out into one specific area of specialization during the session. However, several candidates could work in more than one area. During my training, it was communicated that the post doc role is often taken on to gain expertise in areas out side of thesis research. How about creating a succinct master list with this type of information, combined with teaching research interests? Advertising and improving communication of this type, appears to still need to be improved or enhanced.

    3) Candidate Mentorship

    AIChE offers a candidate mentoring program. However, the education Division recognizes that there is a severe lack of faculty mentors. A candidate that I talked applied to the program on three occasions because the ChE community identified that mentorship was required. However, this candidate was denied critical mentorship. This suggests the process is selective - possibly biased. As I have studied the job-career process of ChEs and within the CEOC, there is the potential that an excellent candidate as one mentor put it to me, can "fall between the cracks". The "meet the candidate session" could be a vehicle to bridge this gap and potentially match mentors. Obviously this would take some commitment from departments, possibly in an informal means. However, it seems like an appropriate role since so many faculty I have talked to often complain about having to be part of committees when sometimes they view their roles as questionable. It seems that focusing on our profession and improving the internal body of knowledge so to speak, would be beneficial in many ways.

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    Cory Jensen, BS, MS, ABD, PE, EMIT, STEP
    Chemical Engineer



  • 5.  RE: Meet the Faculty Candidates Poster Session

    Posted 10-20-2016 19:18

    Hi Cory,

    Thanks for your suggestions.  My responses and clarifications are below:  

    -This year is the first time we are attempting to break down candidates by Specialization, so we are yet to see how it turns out. And you can now see a list of candidates under each Specialization: http://www.aiche.org/conferences/aiche-annual-meeting/2016/events/meet-faculty-candidate-poster-session .  

    -I expect that this clustering will also address your first comment about Teacher vs Researcher, because one of the specializations is "Education".  So candidates interested in primary teaching will be clustered into that category.

    -I understand your point about having a secondary Specialization, however, that presents some logistical challenges.  If you notice, the primary Specialization (which took us some work) is done by AICHE divisions.  The reason behind that is because it makes integration with the AICHE website/conference easier.   So, for now, we have achieved a compromise; and we have to see how it works out, before complicating it further.

    -I am a little bit unclear about your comment regarding "breakdown of responsibilities that recruiters are representing".  If I you are talking about making recruiters stand out from the crowd, I encourage them to wear their University gear or some kind of badge.  However, in the end, we have no control over what they do.  If I misunderstood your comment, please clarify.

    -Regarding your third comment, I am not involved in the Candidate Mentorship program, but I will pass on your comment to AICHE.  Moreover, this is one of the reasons why I started my blogs, such as the ChE Faculty Candidates Resource Center.  This way, the "mentoring" can be done virtually, and with minimal faculty involvement.

    Hope this helps.  Thanks!

    ------------------------------
    Roman Voronov MS, PhD
    Assistant Professor
    New Jersey Institute of Technology
    Newark NJ



  • 6.  RE: Meet the Faculty Candidates Poster Session

    Posted 10-21-2016 12:29

    Roman,

    Thanks for the response. Most of the posters to me seem to pose a specific research project. However, I don't think this illustrates all areas of exposure a candidate maintains. Could it be that difficult to create a form with check boxes where candidates that decide to select a poster could check off experiences online as part of the session? Simply back check it with a CV. Last year it appeared that the same type of master sheet for each area was available in the session, as is online now. This doesn't really do justice for someone, e.g., with ChE-EnvE field work, Depart of Energy research experience, and even publications on the topic of Education.

    Maybe CACHE could require that postings include assignment %'s for appointments. It just seems there is minimal discussion on the topic of appointment and types, your online materials are informative. I am trying to prompt candidates to think about this too.

    From my understanding there are very few roles that don't require teaching, and funding agencies often require some sort of out reach teaching component. Teaching seems inherent and I would suggest that candidates could elect to be a part of the Education Divisions poster session not the faculty candidate session. Then, there could be presentation of a candidates experiences in both research and teaching that do not overlap. Further, I don't know of a ChE program that prepares Ed. Ph.D. workers. Education is a separate field really, to have a Ed. Ph.D. is different from being a ChE that would like to take on Chemical Engineering Education roles.

    Even with your materials online (that I highly recommend that others make use of - Thanks BTW, that took some time I know), in my experience as part of the CEOC, it is not fair to have a mentoring program that is discriminatory. Gains and value of a one-on-one program are not even in the same ball park as reading up on line about being a faculty member. This could be a bad analogy but the discipline and focus of running and being a ChE are similar. The New York marathon allows you to sign up twice as part of the lottery system. If you don't make it in by the numbers game the first two years, then the third year you are put in the marathon.

    Cory

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    Cory Jensen, BS, MS, ABD, PE, EMIT, STEP
    Chemical Engineer