{"id":2908,"date":"2019-07-29T21:51:58","date_gmt":"2019-07-29T21:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/?p=2908"},"modified":"2019-07-29T21:52:03","modified_gmt":"2019-07-29T21:52:03","slug":"is-there-life-after-graduate-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/2019\/07\/29\/is-there-life-after-graduate-school\/","title":{"rendered":"Is there life after graduate school?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Amanda Holdman, MS, GEMM Lab Alumni 2016<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I graduated in March 2017 from the GEMM lab at Oregon State, with a Master\u2019s of Science in Wildlife Management. Graduate school was finally over! No more constant coffee refills, popcorn dinners and overnight library stays; I had submitted my final thesis and I was done! Graduate school was no walk in the park for me, and finishing a master\u2019s or a doctorate degree for anyone is no easy feat! It takes years of hard work, commitment, long hours, and a dedication to learning. I remember feeling both excited and a bit disoriented to be done with this phase of much stress and growth. After submitting my thesis, I took a much-needed month off to unknot the muscles in my back and get myself reacquainted with sunlight. The breath of fresh air was exactly what I needed to recover, but it took no time at all for a new type of challenge to emerge: the arduous task of finding a job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did what most job seekers do, I sat behind my computer\napplying for opportunities, hit as many roles as I could, and hoped for the\nbest. Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. I was getting\ndesperate, I resorted to applying for a whole spectrum of roles \u2013 consulting,\nproject management, administration, youth team leader \u2013 hoping that something\nwould land. Soon enough, almost 3 months had passed and I was still in the same\nspot as before. I was ready to throw in the towel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In theory, landing a job after graduation sounds like it should be technically easy because more education should mean you are more qualified for the job, but anyone who has been out of grad school for more than an hour can tell you that landing a job after graduate school can be a long and frustrating process. I did not enter this field and its job prospects blindly \u2013 that is, I had a working idea of what type of research career I wanted when I completed my education and how much education I would need to get there. I was aware that navigating the job market in a competitive field could be tricky and time-consuming, especially as a green-job seeker. I knew it would be an added difficulty to land a position near the ocean but also close enough to family (I\u2019m from the Midwest). Or at least, I thought I knew how hard it would be to secure a job. The process turned out to be much harder. Mental preparation alone was not enough and months and months of rejection and feeling stuck within the hamster wheel of the job search cycle was becoming my normal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, when I was stuck in the depths of a seemingly fruitless\njob search, and trying as hard as I possibly could, it was hard for me to do\nanything but roll my eyes, sigh, and give up. But I had to find a way to work\nthrough an apparently endless string of rejection by figuring out some way to\naccept, address and navigate my emotions. I needed to take charge of my own\npersonal development. I started reflecting on what areas of my work on my\nmaster\u2019s thesis that I found most difficult and wanted to improve, and would be\n an important component of the job I\nwanted. Identifying my own \u201cknowledge gaps\u201d led me to seek out courses,\nworkshops, job-shadowing and online courses that could fill those holes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first thing at the top of my list was to be more\nefficient at coding<\/a>.\nEvery job description that made me excited to apply had some description of a\ncoding program: R, Python, MATLAB.  I was\nlucky enough to attend courses and workshops during my time at the GEMM lab\nthat provided me much of the code I would need to create my habitat models with\nminimal tweaking. On top of that I was surrounded by supervisors and a lab full\nof coding geniuses that had an almost, if not completely, open door policy.\nWhen I was stuck and a deadline was quickly approaching, it was great to have\nan army of people to help me get through my obstacles. However, I knew if I\nwanted to be successful, I needed to become like them: experts and not a\nbeginner. I purchased a subscription to DataCamp<\/a>, and started\nsearching out courses that could help keep my skills fresh and learn new\nthings. I was over the moon to discover the course “Where are the Fishes?”<\/a>.\nIt checked all my boxes: geospatial analysis, R, marine related, acoustics\u2026.\nperfect. Within this course, there were plenty of DataCamp prerequisites, like\nworking with data in the tidyverse and working with dates and times in R, so I\nhad plenty to keep me busy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also started looking for in-person, hands-on courses I could enroll in. Since the majority of my marine experience took place on the west coast but I was searching for jobs on the east coast, I enrolled in the Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle Observer Certification Course<\/a> for the US Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico Oceans in order to learn a little more about identifying species I did not commonly see in nearshore, northern Pacific waters. In this course, I learned about regulations surrounding protected species monitoring, proper camera settings for photographing marine life, and gained the certification needed to work as an observer during seismic surveys for Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) in coordination with the National Marine Fisheries Service. Most of these topics were familiar to me, other than identifying new species, but it was nice to have the refresher and the renewed certification. Heads up this course is coming to Newport<\/a> in October and I highly recommend it! During this observer course in Charleston, I was able to network with others in the field taking the course, the Charleston aquarium, and the South Carolina DNR. By introducing myself and providing a little bit of my background, I was invited by the South Carolina DNR to watch a satellite tag and release of a sea turtle that the aquarium had been rehabilitating. From the sea turtle release I learned of the International Sea Turtle Symposium<\/a> that would take place in February in Myrtle Beach, North Carolina and was invited to attend and network by one of the conference chairs, which lead me to my current position. See below\u2026 <\/p>\n\n\n\n